Just a few weeks after it was announced that Hank Williams Jr. would finally be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame a good decade or more after he should have already been, it was announced this week Bocephus has been booted once again out of his high-profile Monday Night Football theme song spot.
It wasn’t just that it was bad country. It’s that it was just bad music, and the assessment of this was almost universal. There stands Brantley Gilbert with his stupid brass knuckles microphone and cheesy Affliction T-shirt machismo attitude, and his bandmates with their mohawks and dreadheads miming to a backing track
Announced Monday morning (6-5), ESPN, the broadcast rights holder to the NFL’s long-running Monday Night Football franchise, has decided the winds of controversy have died down enough that they’re willing to bring back Hank Williams Jr. to sing the introduction to the weekly event on a regular basis.
That’s the real problem, not Jr.’s statements or ESPN’s whiplash decision, it is the fact that mass pop media is perpetually letting us all down, and giving in to the least common denominator. Hank should be happy. His career had been reduced to a weekly punch line. And ESPN should be happy they’re lighter a 200-pound blowhard who hasn’t had anything substantive to offer for 20 years.