It’s almost eerie how when it comes to the death of certain country legends, circumstances and premonitions align in a way that makes it seem like they knew something way before the rest of us did. It’s because so much of country music is about addressing mortality.
The strange saga of what was once one of country music’s most promising trios and family bands continues. After parting ways with Nashville-based record label Big Machine in early March after the colossal failure of their latest single “Live Forever,” it has been announced that The Band Perry has signed with Interscope Records and is going full pop.
By all accounts, it was the song’s dismal performance on the country music charts and The Band Perry’s hard-headed insistence on sticking with their new pop direction that had the family trio and preeminent country music label Big Machine parting ways earlier this year. To put it bluntly, “Live Forever” killed The Band Perry’s country music career.
The strange saga of the Big Machine-signed The Band Perry and their curious new direction continues. The latest shoe to fall is their official, big production video for the failed single “Live Forever” has been pulled from YouTube, pulled from their social network pages, and no trace of the video can be found anywhere.
The Band Perry situation is no longer one of simply being “bad” or in “poor taste,” or about making career decisions that are easy to second guess. I’m trying to think of another time that a country act tried to cross over, and it went so colossally bad. And I keep coming up empty.
The color yellow was picked to be the primary backdrop for the relaunch. The image of a diamond shaped like a heart was selected as a logo (even though that’s not the way a true heart-shaped diamond is cut), and everyone had visions of a blockbuster #1 single and sold out arena tours dancing in their heads. . . . and since then, “Live Forever” has flopped.
Goodness, can we just kill off mainstream country music with one final shotgun blast to the noggin instead of watching this long, suffering, painful smothering at the hands of the proprietors of pop who have positively no idea what country music is supposed to be, and are willing to slowly strew its disemboweled innards all across the public sidewalks in victory? Don’t these bastards have any compassion?