I love tearing down B.S., like how people think Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground, Oasis, Radiohead, KISS or The Ramones are great. KISS has a few gems, but they’re essentially good club musicians at best.  Although The Beatles were great composers of the ultimate Pop music of our lifetimes & created a number of different genres, they weren’t incredibly proficient virtuoso musicians or singers; just mainly pioneers of an artform & basically musical content creators, so to speak. Speaking of overrated . . . 

Kris Kristofferson was an overrated songwriter. He wrote about a half-dozen hits, but so have plenty of other songwriters, and there are hundreds of songwriters who have more hits than that. His only real lasting contributions were introducing what was then known as hillbilly vulgarity to his songs & the long hair/beard outlaw image to Country, which he stole from The Beatles like everyone else did, and Kris was the 1st Outlaw Country singer – he grew his beard & hair out in 1971, then Waylon in 72, Willie in 73 & Tompall in 74 – Merle waited until 82.

He patronized the hillbilly core of Country fans & used his good looks, ingenious guile & 6′-0″ frame to trick the Nashville music industry into liking him, as he knew better to do otherwise due to his excellent education as a Rhodes Scholar & teacher at the Army’s West Point Military Academy, as Southerners typically don’t like smart people.  He was a fraternity brother & an exception athlete, fer crissakes! When you realize the guy singing those shitkicking songs has this type of background, it’s impossible to take him seriously as a hillbilly singer. He was that era’s Larry the Cable Guy – a smart guy acting dumb to be accepted by the ignorant masses. He did such a good job at fooling everyone that they even let him sing when he couldn’t sing well at all. Autotune, had it been around at that time, would have said “I give up” & frozen up. He was actually a better actor than anything because that’s essentially what he was doing from the beginning.

He was also very good at making friends & social networking as he had a lot of influential friends in the Country music business and eventually Hollywood, and when you get down to it, that’s what counts in our society — being liked & respected, not what you know or your talent level or how nice/compassionate you are towards others in our society. I have a whole other article on this I’m working on.

But what I do recognize and respect him for is that he always stood up for the underdog in many different fights and didn’t take the mainstream side of socio politics in Nashville, which was way more right-wing than it is now.