Another bullet has been fired.
This time, the shooter is Aaron Lewis – the lead singer of the band Staind.
If you haven’t heard about the war within country music, then you may not be addicted to country music. This is another battle in that war.
Lewis, now a country singer, recently released a single called “That Ain’t Country.” While performing on stage in Colorado, he let the shots ring out…
“I’d like to thank Sam Hunt — oh, I know, he’s so pretty to look at,” Lewis said. “I’d like to thank Luke Bryan for most of his stuff. He surprises me every once in a while. I would like to thank Dan and Shay. I’d like to thank Cole Swindell. And every other motherf***** that is just choking all the life out of country music.”
That’s when social media blew up with responses from the fans of those “motherf******.”
Lewis told Nash Country Daily that he’s sorry “that I might have offended you, but I don’t apologize for what I said.”
“It’s all taken out of context,” he explained. “I was playing at a motorcycle rally. I was playing to a whole bunch of people that appreciate the old country music.”
“It certainly is no sort of personal attack on any of the artists that I may have, in a moment of playing to the crowd that I was playing to, called out by name. It’s nothing personal. I’m not saying that they’re not good people. I’m not saying that the songs aren’t catchy songs—that if I hear them on the radio I’m not stuck singing myself. I’m just questioning where the connection is to what defined the genre. That’s all.
“It certainly is no sort of personal attack on any of the artists that I may have, in a moment of playing to the crowd that I was playing to, called out by name. It’s nothing personal. I’m not saying that they’re not good people. I’m not saying that the songs aren’t catchy songs—that if I hear them on the radio I’m not stuck singing myself. I’m just questioning where the connection is to what defined the genre. That’s all.”
Hence, the birth of “That Ain’t Country.”
“I grew up on my grandfather’s country,” Lewis said. “That’s the country music that is kind of embedded into my soul. It was the soundtrack to my childhood and is the soundtrack to so many memories that I hold onto dearly. I wrote the song because the landscape of country music these days is a little bit unrecognizable.”
So, because Lewis grew up on country, Michael Sweet may not be mad at him for jumping genres. Lewis actually had no choice in what type of music he grew up on.
“I was force-fed [country] as a kid,” Lewis said. “Then when I was old enough to choose my own path of music listening, as most adolescent boys do, I rebelled against what was being force-fed to me prior. The first albums I ever owned, as my albums that I could go and listen to on my own, were given to me by my babysitter. It was Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, it was Kiss’s Alive 2 and Destroyer, AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds and TNT.”
