The announcement of the main stage lineup at the Houston Rodeo is an annual head scratcher for many across the Lone Star State and beyond who actually pay attention to the music native to Texas and Houston, and wonder why one of the biggest events in Texas all year chooses to import most of its talent from out of the state.
Garth Brooks, take your free tickets to the Auditorium Shores stage and your Frito bags with your damn brand on them, and go back to Oklahoma and roll around naked in your massive, massive piles of money. You don’t belong at South By Southwest.
Call it cautious or guarded optimism, but after the abomination that was the 2016 Houston Rodeo musical lineup led by folks such as Luke Bryan, Pitbull, and Florida Georgia Line, and where only one artist with Texas ties and only one female performer were booked (and both were Miranda Lambert), they couldn’t go any lower, that’s for sure.
On Monday, the official lineup for the 2016 Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo was “announced” by astronaut Scott Kelly from the International Space Station. Perhaps the aeronautical histrionics were a bid to distract everyone back on Earth from the fact that this year’s lineup is the most mundane, most mainstream-centric and generic pop tart Kellogg’s cereal assemblage of plastic talent ever accrued on this beautiful blue planet.
The delineating terms that help describe country music and its subsidiaries, including the term “country” itself, are all getting lost to lackadaisical filings by marketeers looking for flashy selling points, and apparently when it comes to the term “Outlaw,” Eric Church agrees. In an interview posted with AZCentral from late last week, Eric Church distanced from the term.