billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 4, 2017 (VIDEO)

Well, this sucked. Amazingly Garth Brooks somehow has not flagged the video for copyright, but we'll see if that lasts...

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 4, 2017

So I'm not saying this week was crazy busy or anything - it really wasn't, and outside of some notable shifts, most of our new arrivals feel pretty minor. But for the first time in some time I have the feeling that the charts are actively starting to shift in response to major releases, and I expect with weeks to come we'll probably see even more of it...

video review: 'man against machine' by garth brooks

Can't believe I forgot to post this last night... ah well, it's a comeback that for the most part most people outside of the country music sphere will completely miss, and while that is a shame, it's not like Brooks was helping himself in the right direction here.

Okay, next up, I want to talk about Kingfisher Sky, because I still need more time with Pink Floyd and Big K.R.I.T.. Stay tuned!

album review: 'man against machine' by garth brooks

It's a name that hangs over modern country music and will probably never be forgotten. An artist who is one of the great selling music acts of all time and who was probably most responsible for leading the popular resurgence of country music in 90s. For me, it's music that I didn't just grow up with, but material I'd consider formative in shaping some of my deep-seated love of country music. I grew up with his CDs in the car pretty much since I was born, and I can look back on many of his records as having some absolutely stellar songs.

Yeah, you all know who I'm talking about - and yet as a music critic now, Garth Brooks is one of the more complicated acts to talk about. His most famous and iconic songs - 'Friends In Low Places', 'The Dance', and especially one of my favourites 'The Thunder Rolls' show up on his earliest albums, but throughout the early 90s he maintained a damn impressive level of quality, but as the decade wore on, things started to get shakier. Everyone looks at the fascinatingly disastrous Chris Gaines project as the breaking point, but to me the wheels were starting to come off as early as Sevens. He made a modest comeback of sorts on Scarecrow, but at that point he stopped making albums and after a few years 'retired', he went back to performing and has been consistently making a fortune doing so.

See, here's the thing about Garth Brooks - many have put forward the point that he's less of the 'artist' than the professional businessman entertainer, a little analogous to Jay-Z if he had actually retired after The Black Album. Because let's be fair here, Brooks is still a pretty damn good songwriter and a powerful presence behind the microphone, and while the Chris Gaines experiment is dated and embarrassing, it's not hard to theorize that it was Garth Brooks taking a chance artistically that the public rejected en masse in favour of his material packaged through lucrative deals signed with Wal-Mart. The public didn't seem to want Garth Brooks the artist, and that bugs me - granted, it's not like he hasn't embraced the businessman mold to the point where his army of lawyers have ripped every single music video of his off of YouTube, a move where even Prince has backed off. It's gotten to the point where Brooks launched his own music distribution system rather than work with iTunes - and to me, all of this strikes me as monumentally short-sighted. Sure, I remember Garth Brooks and his older fans will remember him, but YouTube is how most of the youth across the world disseminates and remembers culture, and purposefully fighting against it is an easy way to lose a younger audience, especially when Billboard counts YouTube streams these days for chart positioning.

What this means is that, for the first time in a long time, I'm not including backing music from the album, half because his lawyers would use YouTube's broken Content ID system to prosecute a case they'd lose under Section 29.1 of the Canadian Copyright Act but would still make my life hell simply because they can, and half because I want to make a point. But that's asinine business practices, we're here to talk about the actual music of this album - and I'll admit I was excited. I grew up with Garth Brooks, he made some of my favourite country songs of all time, and now he's back with his new album Man Against Machine - how is it?