Well, Country is the only genre generally devoid of words like �oh� or �yeah� repeated 20 times in a row. Sorry everyone else, but if you say it in the song, it�s counted as a �lyric.�
But it�s also about the syllables. Country music is full of words like Hallelujah, cigarettes, hillbilly, and tacklebox. Add to that long place names like Cincinnati, Louisville, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and Country has a serious advantage over the competition....
In 2007, Rock and R&B/Hip-Hop both plunged with the help of songs like �Buy U a Drank� by T-Pain (which just made it above a 1st grade reading level) and �I Don�t Wanna Stop� by Ozzy Osbourne (a more respectable 1.6 average grade level).
ADDED: Pride in long sentences is idiotic. From Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals":
But Hemingway had had the advantage of an excellent training on the Kansas City Star. Its successive editors had compiled a house-style book of 110 rules designed to force reporters to use plain, simple, direct and clich�-free English, and these rules were strictly enforced. Hemingway later called them �the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.'...
On this journalistic basis, Hemingway built his own method, which was both theory and practice.... He once defined the art of fiction... as �find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too.� All had to be done with brevity, economy, simplicity, strong verbs, short sentences, nothing superfluous or for effect. �Prose is architecture,� he wrote, �not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
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