[Coda]

I'm not a big fan of country, either. I used to despise it, but I've kinda mellowed out as I've gotten older to realize that it's not so much the style I don't like as it is the fairly low standards for what passes as country music. When I was growing up, half the stations on the radio were country music, and you apparently didn't have to be a very good musician or a very good singer to sell country music albums. The stereotypical subject matter didn't help, either; so much of it was just uninspired whining about everything going wrong or -- as you said -- nationalistic stuff that's just kind of embarrassingly on-the-nose. And of course, the kind of people who aggressively like country music and never listen to anything else just get annoying and the music gets tired and overdone.

Thankfully we're not in the 80s anymore.

I still can't really escape country music, but I've heard a few songs here and there that I can appreciate even if I wouldn't go out of my way to choose to listen to them. Toby Keith's "I Wanna Talk About Me" caught me off-guard; I usually avoid his music and that one almost made me tune it out, but then I actually heard what he was singing about... okay, it's amusing. I always have to give credit to poking fun at the stereotypes of the genre.



In a completely different direction: 8-bit music sounds good for a couple of reasons.

First, square waves have incredibly rich harmonics that don't occur in nature. It makes them sound unnatural, but it also means they fill the soundscape with bold, full tones, and the interference between square waves playing in harmony adds some great texture.

Second, limitations breed creativity. The NES only had four sound channels, and one of them was white noise and another one didn't have a volume control. With those kinds of limitations, the only way you can get music to sound good is by being creative with the arrangement. You can't just lean on being carried by your instruments; you have to experiment with the sound to get something that works.