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Embarrassingly bad music for people with embarrassingly bad

Mark Welsh | Mayberry, NC USA | 02/28/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"This is "Carolina Beach Music", music so awful that outside of the the two Carolinas, Georgia, maybe Virginia, no one knows what it is or could stand to listen for long. While in the majority of the known universe, the term "shag" refers to the sex act, the ironic thing is that "shag" refers to something altogether different in the Bible-Belt extremist conservative southeastern US (and thank God, nowhere else), that being a sped-up swing dance done to mostly really bad local R&B music performed by really talentless groups of the region. That is the garbage you will hear in this compilation.



While the word "shag" speaks to the sex act, the shag dance is definitely a mood-killer for any normal human being. You've got to see it done to see what a total sexual turn-off this dance is - it's about as sexy as a Texas two-step, yet an entire culture of mediocrity that only exists in the south Atlantic has grown up around this effeminate, laughable Lindy done at warp-speed. It's definitely more embarrassing to witness when performed by a male of the species, but is still pathetic when done by anything with two legs.



Notwithstanding their on-stage outfits of the period, the Beach Boys music of their golden days in the 1960's had much too much class and sophistication to qualify as beach music (plus, you can't shag dance to it), but those unsuspecting people who move to the southeast from other parts of the US or world always assume that is what is meant by "beach music". Maybe that is true in the universe at large, but not in the southeast. Although the great songs of the Drifters and many classic Motown songs have been unfortunately labeled as "beach music" by those involved in the culture, "Carolina Beach Music", more specifically, is much more often than not simply embarrassingly awful music written and performed by bands from the Carolinas, usually aging white men wearing Sansabelt pants and Hawaiian shirts. The Band of Oz, the Embers, the Breeze Band, the Poor Souls, Billy Scott and the Prophets, the Catalinas, the Fantastic Shakers, are but a few of the local bands that make tons of money in the southeast and that could not get arrested off of their home turf. The popularity of this garbage being confined to the Carolinas says alot about the taste of the residents of those two states."