I am listening to Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette (no links because the youtube tag is broken but also because everyone knows it already come on). It's a really good song! Like okay PATRIARCHY etc but what's interesting is how it goes beyond that stuff, how it takes these kind of skeevy components (women suffering diligently for their husbands, generic country instrumentation etc) and just ploughs into them with so much verve that the details become blurred and you just get caught up in the sweep of what feels like some kind of massive gesture, the sound and lyrics boiled down to their broadest universal form and you just get picked up and carried along by the sheer sweep of the thing. Like it's temporarily speaking not to you but THROUGH you and making you a part of it. I kind of feel the same way about some of Phil Spector's stuff where even in terms of production style the whole sound just gets blurred and layered on top of itself to the extent where you can't even tell the instruments apart, it really is a ""wall of sound"" yes and almost more the idea of pop music than actual pop music itself (this is also why a lot of that phil spector stuff can be so annoying to sit down and listen to all at once). I don't know how to explain this well but I guess it's like in painting where someone boils a tree down to the single visual line that tells your brain: tree and isolates the pure form of it etc. That's what the song does except instead of seeming reductive it opens the whole thing up into something which seems like almost a kind of universal truth, at least while the song lasts. Basically it's a good song I like it.
 
EDIT: whoa that was a bad post. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I kind of think it's impossible to actually listen to the song all the way through and still think it's actually just about WOMEN MAKE YOU MAN HAPPY and that part of this is because of the sound of the song itself, where it kind of just gets louder and louder and loses more and more details as the song progresses until it's just this absurdly moving and weirdly truthful-sounding thing which isn't so much about sad country wives as it is some broader and more powerful idea buried deep in those old country song cliches.

Stand By Your Man by Tommy Wiseau