AIDEN RUEDIGER: Welcome to episode two of three of SPAtify on RubicOnline. In this episode, I, Aiden Ruediger will discuss country music. I will interview the student body on their opinions and thoughts about country music. I hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for listening.

Coming into this episode, I didn’t really have a view on country music, as it wasn’t one of the genres I listened to a lot. So I did some research, learning about country stars of today, such as Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan and Luke Combs. All of their songs were interesting, and I even recognized someone some of them. I then interviewed Henry Kansas, a ninth-grade student who really opened my eyes to a wide variety of country music. Henry entered country music through an unsuspecting path as he found himself lacking a dopamine boost from a game he used to love, and he channeled that want for a dopamine boost into country music.

HENRY KANSAS: To be completely honest with you, I used to be addicted to Red Dead Redemption two I have 50 days in the game. I’ve played it for three years, and I haven’t played in the last year. So if you can do simple math, it means I got 50 days of gameplay in two years. I completed the story five times, 100% once. And the one thing that stood out to me the most was the background music and cut the scene music. I get that. You can guess what theme they were, yes. So then I got bored of the game, but I started lacking one big dopamine boost I would play it. I wouldn’t get the dopamine anymore. It’s because I memorized every single song in the game.

AIDEN RUEDIGER: Oh, wow.

HENRY KANSAS: Like, maybe I should look up some music. The same day I said that I go to this camp, and I heard this guy playing this guy playing the phone. He’s playing the speaker on his phone, and the guy on the phone is rocking the banjo. You want to guess who this guy is. You know me as a friend. You probably guess who this first artist I heard was. It was Marty Robbins. I heard him playing the sweet banjo El Paso. For the first time in my life, I was so happy.

AIDEN RUEDIGER: Country music, originally called hillbilly music as a genre, dates back to the 1920s in southern parts of the United States. It is known for its working class and blue-collar themes about American life. Country music is rooted deeply in folk music as well as Mexican, Irish and Hawaiian music, as well as the blues, which is something most people don’t know about. Bristol, Tennessee, has been officially recognized as the birthplace of country music and has the very first recording of country music, also, James Gideon Connor, a native of Bristol, has also been considered one of the earliest stars of country music. Kansas then talked about a particular dislike in a subsection of country music, something he described as a stadium singer, in particular, Grammy Award-winning artist Zach Bryan.

HENRY KANSAS: I hate him. He’s such a stadium singer, which means, if you don’t know that, he just, it’s like rinsing and repeating the same three notes over and over again with different lyrics. And then he basically touches people to make money. Touches their heart. He’s affecting my dopamine. Because I think every time I hear the new lyric, like, oh, a new song, but then the new music, the old music, comes in, and I’m like, my dopamine is gone. I just thought I was robbing the bank, but I’m actually in prison having a hallucination. You know what I mean.

AIDEN RUEDIGER: After these terrific insights about country music, I dug deeper into some of the artists. He mentioned, learning some interesting facts about some of these artists. For example, I learned that Marty Robbins was a high school dropout. Johnny Cash had some crazy experiences, as well as he was noted by his family to be an avid smoker at the age of 12, a time when I was in sixth grade. He was also hospitalized in an ostrich attack when he was trying to teach attack commands to his pet ostrich, and the ostrich took it the wrong way. Finally, cash could translate Russian Morse code, a skill he picked up while serving in the US Army. Ending the sprig of interesting information on a mildly depressing note, I also found out Willie Nelson was abandoned by his parents as a child, but that his grandparents took him in and raised him, quote, unquote, the right way. Overall, I highly recommend checking out some of these artists as their music broadened my horizons, and I grant a special thank you to Henry Kansas for letting me interview him.

AIDEN RUEDIGER: Thank you for listening to SPAtify. In the next episode, we’ll visit the genre of rap. I hope you enjoyed listening to and learning about some of learning about some interesting music. If you want to check out any of these artists, there are links in the transcript for this episode. If you want to listen to more podcasts, visit RubicOnline to explore the other podcasts we have.