The Race Is On, Another Reason Why George Jones Was A Genius And Why Horror Is A Dead Genre

A mouthful is a brain full but it has to be said.

"The Race Is On" was written by the late and great country star George Jones when country music was about nerve and emotion; when country music and music in general was about the lyric rather than about the look.

The song details that moment in time when a man faces a loss in love and how he copes, badly. It is a pure and honest lyric. Like all great literature, simple and sturdy. The song was written and recorded in the early 1960s and is covered to this day.

George Jones was a genius that is why his music lives on.

The same goes for horror, a genre in decline. Yes, decline. Like all art forms the many kick out their imagination to only to prove Sturgeon's law is as basic as breathing. Some may call it an evolution, as such genres as Bizarro invade coupled with the monthly mad race of publishers to putting to paper and screen blander and blander fare in an industry struggling for funds can only spell out one thing; to paraphrase a genius:

The race is on but there are no winners other than false pride and a sense of 'done'.

My God, in a world obsessed with Bigfoot --- Bigfoot; do I have to say anymore? Yeah, public education demands I do.

Not a lot of this is going to survive meaning not a lot of us will survive either if we continue on this present track. We need to be bolder with our fare and we need to get our swagger back. We need to delve deeper with our lyric and our riff. We need to look beyond pleasing a gimmick in order to satisfy a muse.

The slackening of standards demands that I remind all; a country and culture can be found in decline when its art begins to slip. When the story is quantity over quality; when books are published by blind and illiterate editors whose spell check was chucked for the latest crush game on almost a weekly basis and anything goes you know we have gone.

And then there are those whose promises to publish are as fleeting as the proverbial 'candle in the wind' to quote Elton John.

When professionalism is a dirty word; when editors' cowardice is shrouded in their disdain for writers in shouts of silence; when stories are driven not by plot or idea but by quota; you have what we largely have today.

Not all the work out there is bad but I believe Theodore Sturgeon's law, truer than ever before, tells us that in most cases that the true winners do lose all.