Thursday, January 18, 2007

I'm Choking On Cash. . .Johnny Cash, That Is

Johnny Cash

March 6 denotes the release of yet another Johnny Cash collection. This one is called Cash: Ultimate Gospel and is a collection of JFC's gospel recordings. Bandwagon fans who love the Joaquin Phoenix version of Johnny Cash will probably not like this stuff. However, if you were raised on country music (real country music, not this pop-country Keith Urban, Gretchen Wilson crap), you should like it. If not, I'm pulling your country card. I'll go ahead and say it: country music is cool. If you disagree, leave. That's that. I love me some country music.

With that being said, I am sick of all this Johnny Cash pop culture saturation. Rick Rubin has given us tons of Cash work to love (the American recordings, which is up to, what, American V: A Hundred Highways now?), late in Johnny's life, when his voice was a rickety old crap-box, but still Cash. But with Johnny releasing more posthumous material than Tupac, it's making me wonder if the dude is really dead. Granted, this is not new material, it's a compilation re-releasing already-heard material. I can live with this one.

But it won't stop! Not too long ago, Justin Timberlake conceptualized a new video for Johnny's "God's Gonna Cut You Down" with about eleven-teen celebrities in it.

American V: A Hundred Highways was #1 in the US during its week of release, and it was released 3 years after Cash died.

Last year, Personal File was released, after being "discovered" by his son. Discovered to be worth a ton of loot, so it just had to be released!

And, hey, while we're at it, there are plans for Johnny Cash: THE MUSICAL. Yeah, I'll go see that, right after Mamma Mia! and Wicked.

This wave has got to be crashing soon. In the meantime, I'll be checking out the gospel recordings, for sure. But after that, I'm shelving Johnny for a few years, because he's more overexposed than Britney Spears right now.

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