Across America, a new song about female empowerment is starting to gain traction in the most peculiar of places- on Radio Disney.
“Slide over, I’m driving, I ain’t just another cliché riding,” Abi Ann’s song “Truck Candy” commands.
A catchy tune poking fun at some of the more ridiculous tropes in country music, “Truck Candy” is enjoying a run on the kids centric radio network and on iTunes Radio where it is featured.
Rise News recently spoke to the 18-year-old rising star via phone from her apartment in Nashville, TN about her upbringing, her music and what she hopes to accomplish in the changing country landscape.
“I think that history repeats itself,” Ann said when asked about changes in the genre. “I see country music becoming more open to seeing more unique changes. A good twenty years ago that may not have happened.”
Abi Ann was born in Texas but raised in Los Angeles.
“I was an extremely ADD kid, my parents threw me into a whole lot of different activities. Music was the only thing that really stuck,” Ann said. “I grew up with very strong country roots.”
She attended Campbell Hall School where she said that she was encouraged to try to strike it big.
“I grew up in LA and my friends called me Hannah Montana growing up,” Ann said. “I went to a very understanding school and they were very helpful with everything.”
One of her first big breaks came when she was able to join Kelly Clarkson on tour, performing before the superstar in 36 cities in the US and Canada. She said that she learned a great deal from the experience.
“It was my first major tour. Kelly really runs a very loose camp and there is like no tension on the tour. It was just really eye-opening and I learned about my craft,” Ann said of Clarkson. “She really plays with her sound. I have so much more respect for her because of how versatile she is.”
Abi Ann, an 18 year old rising star in the country music world.
After graduating from high school, Ann enrolled in Belmont University in Nashville where she is studying entrepreneurship, not exactly a major for those who wish to skirt through school.
She has a strong business sense, learning from her small business owning father the importance of being self-reliant.
“I’ve always been very much a believer in a separation of church and state in my life. I really like school and music,” Ann said. “I’m going to school for business because I want to be self-sufficient. I’ve just always had a knack for business. And I’ve always loved academics as much as music.”
The Clarkson tour wrapped up on September 20, which cut into the start of the fall semester. As a result, Ann is taking classes online but she hopes to take on campus classes in the future.
In terms of her sound, Ann said that she is very willing to mix different influences into her music from current pop and country music to some older legends that helped define the genre.
“My main influences were Johnny Cash and Shania Twain. That’s a weird combination for sure,” Ann said. “Shania, I look up to as a very strong woman figure.”
And that brings us back to her hit “Truck Candy”, a song that could easily be seen as a modern-day feminist ballad.
“It’s not that intense,” Ann said. But I’m very supportive of female empowerment.”
Saying that she views music as a form of therapy, Ann indicated that the song was more a direct response to the default masculinity that exists in much of country today.
“I wrote it with Walker Hayes. This was before Maddie and Tae and we were concerned about the gender imbalance in country music,” Ann said. “I definitely think it is an acquired taste. Country is not something that everybody loves.”
Ann made it clear that she deeply loves country music and sees it as one of the most vibrant music scenes going today.
Having only turned 18 a few months ago, Ann is still very young.
“I’ve had instances where I couldn’t go and do the typical teenage thing but I keep a pretty tight circle,” Ann said of some of the challenging aspects of fame. “But I have the best friends. My roommate is with me now and she’s smiling [listening to the interview].”
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Rihanna Might Actually Pay For Your College
Notorious BadGirlRiRi has been up to some good lately.
Beginning in the 2016-2017 academic year the Grammy award winner will offer scholarships of up to $50,000 to college students through the Clara Lionel Foundation, an organization she started in 2012 in honor of her grandparents.
The organization’s goal is to “improve the quality of life for communities globally in areas of health, education, arts, and culture.”
Scholarships will be awarded on a “as-needed basis” to 50 citizens or natives of Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, or Rihanna’s own home of Barbados.
Recipients must be students who wish to further their education and have already been accepted at a four-year school in the United States. They must be considered freshman at these schools and be able to provide a birth certificate from one of the eligible countries.
Recipients of the scholarships can get an award between $5,000 and $50,000.
Rihanna spoke about her excitement for the project after the announcement on her instagram account.
“Higher education will help provide perspective, opportunities, and learning to a group of kids who really deserve it. I am thrilled to be able to do this.”
So if you’re willing to put in a little work, work, work, work, work, work, than Rihanna just might be willing to foot the bill. Application will be available for submission on June 10th, 2016.
H/T: USA Today College
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in public affairs. You can write for us.
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Japan Needs To Have A Lot More Sex Or The Country Could Collapse Into The Sea
The Japanese population is rapidly declining.
The population has lost almost one million people over the past five years.
This decline has been long predicted by demographers but the world’s third largest economy has been unable to find a solution.
The situation is dire and hard to overstate.
If Japan can’t start having many more babies then the country will face great challenges later on in the century. These challenges could undermine the very core of the country’s social order.
Japan has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates, 1.41 children per woman in 2012.
As a result, the number of people 65 and over has increased from 12.1% in 1990 to 26% in 2014.
Furthermore, estimates put Japan’s retirement age population at 40% of the total national population by 2060.
This would likely put a tremendous burden on Japan’s social safety net, state pensions alone being ¥792,100 per year ($6,960.76). This accounts for nearly 33% of Japan’s national budget in 2015 and it will only continue to balloon as the years roll on.
Having to cope with close to half of your population being in need of geriatric care is not a problem exclusive to Japan.
There is a lot of pressure on young people in Japan to have more children. But will they listen? Photo Credit: J3SSL33/ Flickr (CC By 2.0)
China recently revoked and replaced its One Child Policy, with the Two Child Policy.
In part this is to combat China’s low fertility rates, 1.66 births per woman, and in part to counter act the imbalance between the number of men and women, a 30 million person disparity.
Other low fertility countries include, but are not limited to: Singapore (0.81), South Korea (1.18), Germany (1.44), Russia (1.61), The United States (1.87), and the United Kingdom (1.89). All of these nations have fertility rates incapable of sustaining their current populations without immigration helping to offset the disparity.
Elderly populations then are not only a threat to the economic growth of Japan, but to advanced economies in general.
It would then seem that in order to combat global population decline, and with a greater number of developing nations creating advanced economies, nations may need to compete for immigrants in order to sustain their populations.
This may be particularly difficult for Japan, due to the relative difficulty in learning its national language, and a culture that is not as used to welcoming immigrants as many of its potential competitors.
Of course the other way for Japan to get back to an equilibrium in terms of old and young is to have young people have more children- lots more children. The government has tried many different methods, including offering to pay parents to have kids, but it has had little impact.
RISE NEWS is a grassroots journalism news organization that is working to change the way young people become informed and engaged in public affairs. Anyone can write for us as long as you are fiercely interested in making the world a better place.
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Why We Shouldn’t Fear A China Hegemony
By Kyle Borland
“China owns us.”
We’ve been hearing it our entire lives. For as long as we’ve been alive, it’s been a constant worry that at some point China will ask us to pay our debt. It’s the Millennial equivalent to Baby Boomer’s hiding under their desks.
Given that comparison, it’s obvious that we should fear the rise of the (once) sleeping dragon. To do so, however, is to ignore one very important factor: history. For much of human history, China has been one of the – if not, the – most powerful countries in the world. Until modern times, China was always the richest and most populous country in the world (some things never change). From 1405 to 1433, the Ming Dynasty under the Yongle Emperor financed a navy for exploration and maritime dominance that the world had never seen.
Almost one-hundred years before Columbus set foot in America, China circled the [known] world to show its muscle. If the next emperor hadn’t burned the fleet to the ground and ceased the expeditions – we might all be speaking Chinese.
But, that’s all history. How should we feel about China now? Should we fear the “rise” of today’s China?
The short answer: no.
If the world still operated as it did before American hegemony, than I would say a hard yes. Before American hegemony, any country that could amass a military to rival your own would be worthy of fear. However, American hegemony is different from other nations that came before it. It has a self-destruct button. Now, I’m not saying that one-day America is going pull a Voltorb and blow itself up. Rather, I am saying that American hegemony has an expiration date built in.
Hear me out.
American hegemony’s ultimate goal is to spread the American way of life around the world. Picture in your mind what the “American way of life” is for a moment. To me, the beauty of America is that everyone reading this pictured something different from everyone else that reads it. No two Americans are exactly the same because our nation was founded on the ideals that no two people are exactly the same – and that’s okay.
Actually, that’s our strength.
American hegemony is unique from all our counterparts throughout history because – though we may not have the noblest of reasons – some of our influence has helped different nations around the world.
America is unparalleled in power. If we had not wanted nations like North Korea, Cuba or Iran (pre-lifting of sanctions) to rise, we would’ve stopped them. We have established a world order where our hands are in everyone’s cookie jar and, for the world to operate, the octopus must function properly.
But just as the American octopus has its tentacles in everything, the Chinese dragon has coiled around all the jars. And, we can either look at the dragon as an adversary or we can say “thank you” for the help. Would Atlas have feared assistance when holding up the world?
Let’s go back to that self-destruct button. Under American hegemony, the seeds from global governance have been laid. In the long run, a global government can never exist when there is a sole hegemon. If that is the case, then the global government is simply a proxy for the bidding of the hegemon (cough UN cough). However, in a multi-polar world (re: a balanced world), a global government can occur. We even created a new form of communication (re: the internet) to facilitate global understanding.
In the next several centuries, nations will watch as our languages, cultures and people merge together. The world will become a melting pot (America’s end game). At some point in the future, all humans will speak the same language because of the Internet and globalization. Don’t believe me? Are you correcting me in Latin from behind your screen?
In 6,000 years of recorded history, the human race has achieved amazing things. But, to achieve the next level of evolution, no one person, city, state or country has ever been able to do it alone. Caesar needed his triumvirate. Zheng-Du needed the Yongle Emperor. America needed the French at Yorktown.
As millennials, we cannot think like our parents and the generations before us. We have grown up with access to technology and knowledge that people could never have dreamt. Because of this, we have a duty to the world to change how it interacts.
I’m sure there was several times throughout this that you laughed to yourself and called me insane. But, isn’t a key component of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect the same result?
So, why would you fear China when you already know it doesn’t work? That’s worse than insane – it’s inefficient.
And that’s something to fear.
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