With his wrinkled, wizened face and ballbag neck, Neil Young is not a young man. In fact, he’s incredibly old. He’s always sung like he’s Methuselah, making Bob Dylan sound like a fresh-faced operatic toddler.

Of course, the older you get, the more you find things bugging you. Automated phone systems, self-service tills and absolutely everything young people do find a way into your bile, erupting out in a volley of complaint.

So what’s up with Neil Young now? Modern music, that’s what. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t like it in the same way his granddad would’ve hated his peers haircuts and music.

Young, a man who made a living out of making new records sound amazingly out-of-date when he released them (Harvest was the sound of ’20s country and the less we say about his electronic album, the better) surprisingly doesn’t find much joy in the current climate.

Neil said, while shouting at next door’s kids for kicking their ball in his garden:

“I’m finding that I have a little bit of trouble with the quality of the sound of music today. I don’t like it. It just makes me angry. Not the quality of the music, but we’re in the 21st century and we have the worst sound that we’ve ever had. It’s worse than a 78 [rpm record]. Where are our geniuses? What happened?”

That’d be the sound of a 78 record that Young was once so keen to ape.

Either way, he’s continued his whining, claiming that MP3s only feature 5 per cent of the data from an original master file, which he sees as a major problem.

“If you’re an artist and you created something and you knew the master was 100 per cent great, but the consumer got 5 per cent, would you be feeling good? I like to point that out to artists. That’s why people listen to music differently today. It’s all about the bottom and the beat driving everything, and that’s because in the resolution of the music, there’s nothing else you can really hear. The warmth and the depth at the high end is gone.”

“It’s like Occupy Music – the 5 per cent, that’s who we are now. We used to be the hundred per cent!”

Actually. That was quite a funny sign-off, which is irritating.

Here at hecklerspray, we know a good pie when we see one and our love of their consumption is legendary the world over. However, our combined level of the consumption of the humble steak and kidney can be rapidly outstripped by human food vacuum Cee Lo Green.

You might remember Cee Lo from that piss awful ‘Forget You’ number that was redone from being ‘F**k You’ in order to get more radio play and completely destroying what little artistic credibility he had based on his time as part of Gnarls Barkley. More recently, you might have heard that he’s not a big fan of the gays.

The famed cake enthusiast has explained his recent comments to music critic Andrea Swensson that were perceived as being homophobic. The rotund Elton John tribute act sent a Twitter message to Swensson on Friday, in response to a negative review of his recent Minneapolis performance, questioning whether she had been offended by his masculinity due to her sexuality. She’s a lesbian you see which means that she’s bound to be terrified of things with penises.

Green has now defended his comments, and insisted that he had simply been trying to have a joke after spending three hours ploughing through pork scratchings in an effort to disguise the pain of a negative review. Let us remember that this is the man who constantly inflicts Gwyneth Paltrow upon the live music scene. If anyone deserves a bad review- it’s Cee Lo Green.

Green says, wiping away Twinkies from his face:

“I was being a little outspoken that night, a little outrageous”

“I always expect people to assume that everything I do is part of my character and my sense of humour. I assumed that whoever it was would assume it was all in good fun. It wasn’t taken so well, apparently.”

Of course, Cee Lo’s comments were all in good fun. Jim Davidson was said to have been creasing himself with laughter. Unfortunately, it was taken as being offensive by his target. How anyone could take an overtly homophobic comment as having homophobic overtones completely escapes us.

While admitting that sending the message had been a mistake, Green asserted that he is in no way homophobic and prides himself on being one of the most liberal artists in the music business by constantly dressing like Rod Hull’s former puppet companion Emu.

“I certainly am not harbouring any sort of negative feeling towards the gay community”

If I could take it all back, I would. I was not being serious. I just wanted to defend our performance”

Unfortunately, what is said cannot be unsaid and he can only spend the rest of his life backtracking through his Narnia-like wardrobe until eventually people forget that he’s a homophobe by completely forgetting that he ever existed in the first place. Cee Lo Green. A dull, compromised footnote in the tome of popular music.

Green is currently appearing as a vocal coach on NBC talent contest The Voice which must be a truly awful experience for the American viewing public.

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Bob Dylan is 70 years old today. That’s quite impressive for a man who has sounded, and looked 70 years old since 1962. Really. He owns a voice that sounds older than coal. He’ll be having his little birthday party today, with his little party hat on and cake shaped like a racing car, surrounded by whooping chums while he sits glumly in the middle of it all.

We wouldn’t want him to enjoy himself too much now, would we?

Of course, Grumpy Bob is just one of the many characters he’s made for himself over the years. He’s been Electric Bob, Folkie Bob, Born Again Christian Bob, Gypsy Bob and, unbelievably, for a brief moment, Rapper Bob. So who is he these days?

We all know that Bobby Zimmerman is one of the most drily sarcastic pop stars we’ve ever had. He’s prone to giving evasive answers in interviews and generally taking the Michael out of anyone who tries to penetrate his psyche, which of course, every simpleton Dylanite tries to do on a daily basis.

His biggest prank is that everyone believed him to be a sincere artist, despite the fact he clearly created characters for himself like Bowie.

“All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”

He started off as a Mini Woodie Guthrie, with his little cap, harmonica and battered guitar. Pretty much everyone bought it, although friends of his note that he was very quick to turn himself into a folk singer, stealing everyone’s records when he went ’round their houses. He passed of the hobo minstrel thing and somehow, quite bafflingly for a man with such an uncommercial voice, became a superstar.

A generation of stoners and wastrels kinda liked what he was saying, despite not being able to work out what it was he was actually getting at, and decided to have him as their king. He was the voice of their generation, even though you suspect that Dylan didn’t exactly know what it was he was saying at all. Lest we forget, he was but a kid and still trying to work himself out at this point.

And of course, he enjoyed the trappings that came with fame and got his fair share of women and drugs – which isn’t exactly the life of a poet minstrel. Not that Dylan would care.

Then, it was obvious that Dylan tired of hanging around with worthy folkies and plugged-in. He decided to play “fuckin’ loud”, which prompted Aran sweater wearing trad.arrseholes to cry all over their socialist pamphlets as Dylan started to make ‘pop music’.

Of course, Dylan wasn’t making pop music. Listen to the frenetic lyrics of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, it isn’t exactly a ‘Boy Meets Girl’ song is it? The charts were still dominated by ballads and paeans to being lovelorn, while Dylan was singing from his nostrils and at times, seemingly reading from a bunch of cryptic crossword clues.

And for those that stuck by Dylan through the electric years, they’d have to hold tight as the singer went about dropping more masks to reveal more characters. Country Gent Bob appeared briefly, completely changing the way he sang for tracks like ‘Lay Lady Lay’ and his duet with Johnny Cash. He somehow mixed Folk Bob, Electric Bob and Country Gent Bob for the Desire LP.

All the while, never revealing himself – something that a supposed protest singer is supposed to do. Dylan may have stuck his neck out creatively, but he always had more creations to fall back on and, perhaps, hide behind.

Eventually, this paved the way for Born Again Dylan and… well… Bad 80s Dylan. That’s right, Bad 80s RAPPING Dylan, who appeared on Kurtis Blow’s LP, providing his nasal twang atop a clunking drum machine. As awful as it sounds, you can’t knock him for trying to push himself in new directions, but this writer suspects that he’s probably did it to annoy his fans.

See, the only constant thing in Dylan’s career is his willingness to grate those that love him. It seems that he’s determined not only to challenge his devotees, but to kill his previous incarnation so comprehensively that followers will actually turn on him.

It’s actually impressive how little regard he has for the people who buy his records. With each Dylan Death comes a rebirth and now, on his 70th birthday, we hope he’s planning on killing Croaky Olde Timey Bob and rebirthing himself all over again.

But to what? Dubstep Bob? Heavy Metal Bob? GaGa Pop Bob? No-one knows. No-one ever successfully second-guessed Dylan because he’s too obtuse. But while his chums chew cake and pop corks around him today, we can only hope that he’s hatching some dastardly scheme where he ends up irritating everyone with a sleight of hand so sneaky that we barely notice that he’s spelled out “I Hate You All” with a skywriter. When he releases a new album, we turn to it, not noticing the huge billboard he’s erected behind us all which features Dylan showing us all his arse.

It’s brilliant.

All that is left to do is to wish a miserable birthday to the biggest liar of them all and to imagine a world where he covers Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’, just to really grind everyone’s gears…

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Shania Twain once told us that ‘the best thing about being a woman is that you get to have a little fun.’ Of course, men have fun too. And when men and women have fun together, everything is just great, right?

Wrong. You see, in this case, ‘a little fun’ happened to be Shania’s husband – Mutt Lange – sticking his member inside Twain’s best friend in the whole world. “That don’t impress me much, uh-uh-uh-ooow“, Shania probably said at the time she found out about it all.

The fallout of this heartbreak left us all tantalisingly close to Shania giving up on music completely, never again subjecting us innocents to the appalling, vomiting country-pop smashes that briefly took over the universe like some kind of sonic herpes.

Apparently, Shania was utterly shattered by her fella’s infidelity. She told Oprah Winfrey that she became

“an emotional mess”

“I figured mentally that I would never sing again.”

See, Twain had not only lost her husband, but also, the man who produced and co-wrote her records.

“I hadn’t written a song without this man in 14 years….How do I even get started?”

Well, what musicians normally do is translate their pain and thoughts into their music. Especially country singers. Failing that, what with you being so famous and all, you could always hire someone new to do it, right? You may not have talent, but at least you have your voice, right?

Twain revealed that she also suffers from dysphonia, an ailment where the muscles squeeze the voice box, leaving you sounding like a rasping housefly doing a Cartman impression while stuck in a moped engine, razzing in first gear.

“My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice. I was losing it slowly and progressively.”

Alas, unable to sing, Twain decided to sit down and write a book which looks at her failing marriage and knackered voice, called From This Moment On, as well as a documentary series called Why Not?

However, the best bit of this tale is still to come.

Brilliantly, Twain decided to find love with a chap called Frederic Thiebaud. Who he? He’s the former husband of the woman who ran off with Shania’s bloke. It’s like ol’ country incest!

Fantastic!

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Samuel Beam has been making records under the Iron & Wine moniker since 2002, specialising in lo-fi, hushed, folksy acoustic storytelling, but 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog’s full band and upbeat tempos opened a new chapter.

It was difficult to categorise (if indeed you desire the ordered world of categorisation) and took sounds from different places musically and geographically. Its skill wasn’t in its courage for plucking ideas from far-flung corners but in the casualness with which it carried it out.

It doesn’t scream its influences in your face, Albarn-like. Instead it found the thread that runs through folk music regardless of its origin. You might spot calypso, west African, or dub if you listened out for it but you’d probably just hear infectious songs sung with a gentle lilt.

Iron & Wine stopped off  in Manchester as part of their tour to support fourth album Kiss Each Other Clean. The bearded Beam was surrounded by seven musicians for an evening of re-arranged songs culled from all four albums and more besides.   .

The arrangements were intricate and songs flowed into each other beautifully. It’s exciting to watch a band make such complex material look so effortless. What isn’t quite so exciting is watching a band having a jam, which is what the performance lapsed into on a few occasions. And then there’s the saxophone. It worked when it was just one part of many, but even then it dominated.

Now it’s difficult for hecklerspray to have perspective on this issue. The evil of saxophone ran rife in the eighties ruining otherwise good ballads left, right and centre, all in the name of injecting ‘class’. Since then we wince when one is blown (‘one’ being a saxophone, not ‘one’ as in the Queen’s English first person singular, although we suppose technique is a contributing factor in both cases).

It’s hard to fault the songs chosen and Beam’s material, when concise, was warm and his voice was ethereal but strong. The band, when they were slightly reined in, added an uplifting quality to the old material and did justice to the new.

Refreshing also for a band to play for so long and then do a simple one-song encore rather than the modern-day standard of manipulatively leaving three of the biggest hits for the end. An enjoyable night, just one where on accasion there was bit of distance between performers and audience.

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Americans seem to love those cowboy country men. You know the ones who politely love the ladies, fondle tractors and sometimes kiss each other while pretending to look after cattle up a mountain, almost as much as they love their slightly mental divas who can run up and down a scale at precisely the same speed as Justin Bieber’s first attempt at intercourse with another person.

So it made TOTAL sense when they decided to get some bloke hecklerspray hasn’t made fun of until now – Blake Shelton and the ever expanding Christina ‘make mine a double please’ Aguilera together in the same room to become part of the coaching panel on a new reality singing show called ‘ The Voice’.

We can hardly wait.

Until approx 7 mins ago we didn’t know or give a rat’s ass who Blake Shelton was but in case you care, he sings country songs, wins awards for singing country songs and probably hasn’t done anything remotely evil in his entire life.

Also on the panel are dress destroying Cee-Lo Green and Adam Lavine from Maroon 5 who makes us even less excited than ‘thingy’ Shelton.

34 year old Blake Carrington joked:

“I’m not sure ‘The Voice’ knows what they signed on for by bringing me on the show”

We’re not entirely sure either. Maybe to make that Maroon 5 bloke look slightly more dangerous or so the country music loving fans don’t bring their pitchforks to the studio and start line dancing in protest.

The show starts on the 26th April and the four judges will select the contestants based on blind auditions.

Yes, that’s right – NO TITS WILL BE USED TO WIN FAVOUR WITH THE MALE JUDGES.

So no doubt we’ll be left watching a group of people who can hold a tune but who all look like Rocky Dennis from Mask.

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The nineties were dominated by the seemingly unstoppable force of dance music. Constantly changing shape with genres and sub genres born every month. Music was trying to permanently sound like the future and guitars were sneered at by the cool kids. But as the noughties wore on, progress slowed.

Then the cyclical nature of alternative culture reared its bearded heads and ideas that would have been unthinkable ten years previously were now in.

Backward became the new forward. Wood the new chrome and revolvers became the new laser guns. Country was cool. Blame Johnny Cash. In the eighties most people came to associate country with middle-aged stars of the past trying to carve out unfortunate pop music careers and in the nineties, most peoples’ idea of country was line dancing, Shania Twain and bloody Garth Brooks.

In the background though, there were bands trying to remind everyone that far from the vacuous greetings card lyrics of Billy Ray Cyrus, country could be a source of authenticity. Not authentic as some kind of dishonest euphemism for a luddite fear of change, but as a byword for convincing and genuine.

Songwriters such as Evan Dando or J Mascis embraced the sounds of Gram Parsons whilst artists like Uncle Tupelo and Will Oldham got saddled with the description of alt country. Still if there was ever a genre to be at ease with saddles. Whilst all of this was only the concern of boys with beards, it took an old master to remind people that lyrics about death and religion were not just some punk-inspired ‘alternative’ country, they were the roots and true voice of country. Johnny Cash’s Rick Rubin assisted American recordings told a mass audience what pioneers such as Oldham had always known, that country was at the heart of the outsider voice of rock n roll whilst being somehow separate to the vacuum-packed rebellion that we’d been sold for so long.

So America has been plundering the imagery, guitar sounds and lyrics of its past, and in doing so has created music as fertile as the desert is barren.

In 2005 Band of Horses released their debut album Everything All the Time. Ben Bridwell’s beautiful high notes being reminiscent of Kentucky’s My Morning Jacket but if you listened carefully, that relaxed sound was actually straight to the point. Equally informed by indie anthemics as it was by country earnestness, its accessibility was rewarded with success.

2007’s Cease to Begin continued the work begun on the previous album, but there were a few songs where they were happy to meander a bit – act a bit less and contemplate a bit more.

hecklerspray were lucky enough to catch them touring last year’s Infinite Arms album in Manchester. Opening with a new song is normally a conceit too far, but if Bats is an indication of album number four it should undo any slight disappointment that came with Infinite Arms. The problem with that album was its tendency towards a seventies AOR sound, a similar path that Kings of Leon made- a path that made them far less interesting, but far more successful and one which I’m sure they regret every time they get their bank statement.

Tonight, a live context breathed new life into those songs, and they sat confidently in a set drawn from their career to date with a bias towards Cease to Begin.

Bridwell’s voice was as strong as it was sweet and the band were devoid of ego. The Funeral’s tranquil build up and explosion of aural atmosphere is tonight’s highlight, but the admirable feat was that they could have chosen any of their songs and made them sound like greatest hits.

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You know what we like in an entertainer? The wild hope that wearing a big hat will cover for an overwhelming lack of charisma.

And we’re not the only ones, because Kenny Chesney – a man with a big hat and hardly any charisma – has just won the CMA Entertainer Of The Year award for the fourth time in five years, making him officially the most entertaining country singer ever born. Except for Garth Brooks. He’s equally entertaining.

This must count as one of Kenny Chesney’s proudest moments. Now he can look back on all the other country singers of the past and know he’s more entertaining than them. He’s more entertaining than Billy Shooter, Old Jeb Clovercleb, Whistlin’ Jimmy McFormaldahide, Redeyes O’Murderer and even, in a controversial twist, Barefoot Bobby And The Pregnant Mistakes. Congratulations, Kenny Chesney. You earnt this.

Being an entertaining country singer is a lot like being a successful plate-spinner – you have to try and make references to farming equipment at the same time as keeping up your quota of lengthy pun-filled song-titles, without forgetting about blind patriotism that regularly veers into racism or the fact that your personal life has to include some form of mild tragedy.

It sounds exhausting, which is why we should all be congratulating Kenny Chesney for being named the most entertaining country performer at last night’s Country Music Awards – something he seems to have been given for being the only country performer who hasn’t punched any of his fans or shot a stranger in the face recently.

More than that, in fact, Kenny Chesney has now won the CMA Entertainer Of The Year award four times in five years, more than anyone else except for Garth Brooks, whose record he has tied. And, to think, all he had to do to get there was marry a skinny actress briefly and constantly deny that he’s gay.

Obviously what makes Kenny Chesney so entertaining is his noble humility, which he displayed last night after winning his award. AP reports:

“Winning entertainer of year for the fourth time in five years is more than this kid ever dreamed of,” Chesney said backstage. While Chesney knows his reign will eventually end, he said, “I’m not going to lay down. I love the heart, commitment and sacrifice it takes to do this.” And to his competitors, he issued a challenge: “Come and get me.”

We think Kenny Chesney is being too modest. He’s never going to stop being the most entertaining country singer on Earth because, like he said, he understands the sacrifice that winning it takes.

For instance, all Kenny Chesney really wants to do is work 20-hour shifts down a mineshaft every day for the rest of his life but, oh no, there’s always someone on his back telling him to earn millions of dollars by endlessly recycling his one already-generic idea into another best-selling album. Now that‘s sacrifice.

But, still, this must be an important award for Kenny Chesney because it’s the first award he’s won for ages where he didn’t act like a turd about it afterwards.

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Now that Jessica Simpson’s much-hyped acting career is lying twitching in the gutter, Jessica can now go back to her first love.

No, wait – Jessica Simpson’s first love is cacky reality TV shows that exploit her personal relationships with others, isn’t it? OK, well in that case Jessica Simpson has gone back to her second love – music.

And not just any music, either – Jessica Simpson has gone country, and she’s marked the occasion with a concert at a festival in Wisconsin. But sadly, Jessica Simpson’s country concert didn’t go down well with the locals, who booed and jeered her for not being country enough. Now, if she’d have smashed her teeth up real bad and had sex with a blood relative beforehand, it would have been a different story altogether.

Country music is a sound that’s easy to imitate but almost impossible to live by. Any old fool can go a bit cross-eyed, write a song about CB radios and score a lucky hit from it, but country fans are a difficult bunch to fool, as Jessica Simpson is only starting to find out.

After her reality TV show died, her acting career was killed stone dead by Blonde Ambition and her sideline as a professional meat eater was derided by Pamela Anderson, Jessica Simpson only had two career options left open to her – pornography and country music.

It was a tricky decision to make – one is a degrading, soul-destroying job that’d leave her health and morale in tatters and shove her down to one of the lowest rungs of society alongside lepers and prostitutes, and the other one is pornography – but Jessica Simpson bit the bullet and chose country music anyway.

But what Jessica Simpson doesn’t know is that country music isn’t a career choice – it’s something you reach only after you’ve lived a life of waitress choking and deep ingrained alcoholism and sexual battery against children.

And that lack of country experience came to the fore on Saturday, when Jessica Simpson road-tested her new country direction at the Country Thunder USA Festival in Randall, Wisconsin.

Not realising that anyone who’d attend something called the Country Thunder USA Festival would be able to sniff out a fake quicker than they could blast a varmint’s face off with their pappy’s six-shooter during a drunken bar brawl, Jessica Simpson debuted her own songs alongside covers of Shania Twain and Willie Nelson and, well, got crucified for it. Access Hollywood reports:

“I just don’t hear the country in her,” said Adam Matos, from Arlington Heights, Ill. “I don’t hear the twang. She’s not good enough to be here.” Mike Rodriguez of Lake Geneva, Wisc., seconded that opinion. “Just because she’s dating Tony Romo it doesn’t make her country,” he said. “She doesn’t fit in with country, and I’ll have to drink a lot of beer to sit through her concert.”

Not that Jessica Simpson should worry too much – her first country single Come On Over has already done inexplicably well in the American music charts, and her single looks set to do the same when it’s released in September – but she probably could have done with a better live debut.

Anyway, even if Jessica Simpson’s country direction fails miserably, it’s not the end of the world. There are still hundreds of musical bandwagons that she can shamelessly jump on – like nu-rave, for example, or sub-Saharan bikutsi folk music. The world’s still her oyster.

Or there’s the pornography option, which admittedly does seem more and more of an inevitability these days.

Country music is scientifically proven to turn people into violent, woman-beating drunks – or is it just that only violent wife-beating drunks like country music?

Maybe we'll never know for sure, but let's forget the history for a moment and just laugh at the fat, allegedly woman-beating rednecks who go to country music concerts. Like the fat, allegedly woman-beating redneck who country star Tim McGraw hauled up onstage and ejected from a show in Washington on Tuesday night.

Best of all, there's video footage of the incident. An obnoxious fat cowboy who's too fat to be lifted off the ground by three other obnoxious cowboys? Sounds perfect, doesn't it? It's not – the video's got a country music soundtrack. Bleugh.

There's a lot to be said for just how unpleasant country music fans are – they're so unpleasant that not even country singers like them very much. It's true, and we have a pre-prepared list of example to demonstrate this point.

1) Kenny Chesney wins an award and is pleased. Wait a minute, who voted for this award? Country music fans? Yeuch, take it back! Take it back!

2) You know what Faith Hill enjoys doing more than singing country songs to country fans? Screaming abuse at country fans.

3) "Hi there, I'm Billy Joe Shaver. You wouldn't happen to be a country fan, would you? You would? Well then, hold still while I shoot you in the cheek. Actually, non-metaphorically shoot you in your genuine cheek with my real loaded gun that I've got here."

And if there's one country singer who dislikes country fans more than anyone else, it's Tim McGraw. Oh, you know, Tim McGraw. He distinguishes himself from all the other country singers by wearing a cowboy hat. His songs include Tears In The Rain, You Don't Love Me Any More and Kill Myself. Happy chap, you must recognise him.

No? Well actually that's not important because you don't need to know Tim McGraw to be able to appreciate Tim McGraw's contribution to the art of angrily ejecting his own fans in the middle of his concerts. You see, in Washington on Tuesday night Tim McGraw apparently spied a man being aggressive in the front row of his concert and held everything up while he threw the varmint out. Here's the video…

Wow, that's a level of fury we rarely see. Notice how when he spots the troublemaker in the audience, Tim McGraw instructs his band to keep playing? He's actually so mad at this one guy that he chooses to punish his entire audience with an extended fiddle-di-dee country music jam? That's badass.

Anyway, Tim McGraw has decided to explain his actions in a statement, and here it is:

"A man rush[ed] to the front of the stage. This overly aggressive fan attacked a female fan, and Tim witnessed this incident. Tim called for security, but when they could not respond quick enough, Tim and several crew members removed the fan from the audience. He was then turned over to the local authorities."

We presume that the statement's actually from Tim McGraw's publicist and not Tim himself, because if you knew you were dealing with a man who constantly referred to himself in the third person, the last thing you'd want to do is to disrupt his concert. That'd signify an imbalance that you just wouldn't want to mess with.

Anyway, let's hope this incident is a timely reminder to others on how to deal with disruptive audience members. Specifically you, Akon. Notice how Tim McGraw just shoved him backstage instead of throwing him into the crowd or manically dry-humping him? Take notes, please.

We've come to realise that it's just a matter of time before Miley Cyrus has us all in the iron grip of a malevolent dictatorship now.

Why? Well, as if having a top-rated TV show, a number one movie and a bunch of chart-topping albums, isn't enough, now it's been revealed that Miley Cyrus is going to host the CMT awards.

You heard correctly – Miley Cyrus is going to host this year's CMT awards. The world's third-biggest country and western-themed awards show. It doesn't get much bigger than that. Apart from the world's second-biggest country and western-themed awards show, or the world's first-biggest country and western-themed awards show. Or any other awards show at all. Is there no stopping this Miley Cyrus woman?

It's fair to say that Miley Cyrus currently has the level of ubiquity that you'd normally expect from a veteran movie star, or at least a Hollywood socialite with a borderline personality disorder and a history of extensive rehab visits. Everything that Miley Cyrus does turns to gold – her TV show, her live concerts, her albums, her movie, her semi-risque pouty mobile phone videos – and what awards show wouldn't want a slice of something that horrifyingly robotic?

Miley Cyrus cut her awards show teeth by becoming a presenter at Sunday's Oscars – although if you tried looking for Oscars clips on YouTube you might be under the impression that the show was basically six hours of nothing but Miley Cyrus grinning earnestly at a lectern – and now she's taking it one step further, by hosting the entire CMT awards in April, as the Associated Press reports:

Billy Ray Cyrus and daughter Miley will host and perform at the 2008 CMT Music Awards. The seventh annual awards show will air live April 14 on CMT from Belmont University's Curb Event Center. Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Sugarland, Taylor Swift and Toby Keith will also be among the performers. "Miley and I are so excited to be hosting the CMT Music Awards," Cyrus said Tuesday in a statement. "We know it will be a fun-filled night with a lot of great music performances."

Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus together? What the the CMT awards organisers thinking? Everyone knows that when Miley Cyrus and Billy Ray Cyrus get together, things are bound to end up with a stupefyingly inane country ballad duet about flying high on the wings of freedom or a charity-angering display of riding around in a car without a seatbelt.

Can the CMT awards live with that kind of knife-edge controversy? Can it? Can it really? Given that the CMT awards is mostly about giving hunks of metal to buck-toothed banjo players, we're not awfully sure it can.

But at least you know what you're getting by allowing Miley Cyrus to host an awards show. Months and months of hearing your children beg and blackmail you into spending more money than you earn on a ticket to a fifth-rate awards show for a style of music that you'd rather cut off your feet than listen to, all just so they can look at an unusually confident teenager say some dull words about cowboys for 30 seconds at a time, that's what.

Read more:

Miley, Billy Ray Cyrus Host CMT Awards – Associated Press