On not doing what the good-and-propers do

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

30 March 2012

This morning on the way into the office, I was listening to Hell on Heels, a 2011 record by country trio the Pistol Annies. The first song is "Bad Example," as in, "someone needs to set a —." In the opinion of these three women, polite society is too genteel for their tastes. They're proud to "teach all the prim and propers what not to do," and proclaim as much in a Southern-accented twang.

But it was only today that I really noticed the lyrics in the second verse. Here they are:

All the girls that I grew up with went to college
Their rich daddies bought them a degree
But I'm a third generation bartender
Yeah, and I like living from a tip jar week-to-week

This is an attitude that reflects a real cultural divide in America! Just think of Rick Santorum commenting: "President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob!" The Pistol Annies aren't politicians, but, at least in this song, they conceive college education in the same way Santorum does: as an elitest attainment inaccessible to the working class.

But note also the way the band frames access to higher education. Girls who went to college did so because they were born into privilege, whereas the "ordinary" women the Pistol Annies represent are forced into the service industry. College thus becomes a marker of class than a means for social mobility.

It doesn't have to be that way, of course. An American should be able to go to college without having a "rich daddy." But that's increasingly not an option. High tuition costs and the burden student loans can place on someone just heading out into the workforce are pushing a university degree further out of the question for many Americans. There's nothing wrong with being a bartender, but America sees itself as a place where the daughter of a third generation bartender doesn't have to follow in her mother's footsteps. The Pistol Annies — and the slice of America they represent — might disdain college education, but they shouldn't have to see it as something inaccessible to them.

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Incidentally, though the outlook of the song is conservative in that it's implicitly Southern, it creates a conservative identity that is more expansive than party politics usually acknowledges. This if from the first verse:

Those swanky big brick houses don't amuse me
I live in a trailer but I drive a Cadillac

The Cadillac-driving welfare queen has long been a conservative bête noire, and yet the Pistol Annies are identifying with the stereotype to tweak effete sensibilities. As much as each party would love to claim the white working class as their own, in real life, cultural identity is too messy to fit neatly within the two party binary.

 

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Tuning up in Dixie

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

13 March 2012

Next up on the Republican primary calendar are the votes tomorrow in the deep South states of Mississippi and Alabama. Southerners are apparently too polite to poll reliably, but if you believe the forecasts, Mitt Romney has a slight lead in Mississippi, Newt Gingrich has a slight lead in Alabama, and Rick Santorum is surprisingly unpopular. There isn't too much at stake in these contests, but a good showing from Romney might help convince his rivals that this race is indeed over.

It's become a bit of a tradition on this blog to warm up for each state's primary with a relevant song. In that spirit, here's "Mississippi Girl," Faith Hill's ode to the women of the the Magnolia State:

"A Mississippi girl," the country singer informs us, "don't change her ways just because everybody knows her name." No mention on whether Massachusetts men have a similar aversion to flip-flopping.

After the jump, an Alabama tune. (Though not one by Alabama.)

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This is "Let's Roll," by Alabama rapper Yelawolf, with some help from Mitt Romney-supporter Kid Rock. Yela's not your everyday Southern rapper; he's a white boy who looks like a skate rat and spits thick, fast syllables about life in the boondocks of Gadsden, Alabama. His view of Southern life is a melange of Confederate flags, violence, poverty, American cars, methamphetamine abuse, and local pride. It's a place where a black music born in New York City sits comfortably alongside the white tradition of Southern rock, too: "Why's he playing Beanie Sigel?/Cause his daddy was a dope man; Lynyrd Skynyrd didn't talk about moving kis of coke, man," he raps on another song, "I Wish." The modern South is more complex than stereotypes will allow.

Incidentally, I didn't post a tune for Kansas, because its primary was held on a weekend. If I had, it would have been "Campfire Kansas" by revered Lawrence, KS emo group The Get Up Kids.

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What America sounds like

By Jonathan Bradley in Sydney, Australia

24 January 2012

I've talked often in this space about the utility in using hip-hop as a lens to examine American culture, so I was pleased to find someone making well the same point in otherwise unremarkable Financial Times article:

Rap music is the defining American art form of our time. In its showmanship, its exuberance, its hunger for innovation, its love of technology and its ruthless competitive discipline, it represents mass culture in the US like no other medium.

Country music, the only other contender, showcases a different set of equally American values: community, tradition, compassion, patriotism, resilience, faith. But it is principally a domestic phenomenon, largely ignored overseas. Hip-hop, meaning rap music and its associated culture, is both a global force and a central feature of the face America presents to the world.

Rap as a form of American soft power is easy to see if you know where to look; the relationship between hip-hop and the Arab Spring, for instance, is well documented. This is helped by the music's malleability; it offers its Americanness to the world as something to be remodelled and localised.

The FT piece is right that country doesn't have this global appeal, and it may seem less interesting as a result. I prefer, however, to focus on the similarities between hip-hop and country — each being folk musics for a certain subset of American society that have been adopted by the culture at large. And if country music's conversations are consumed on a largely domestic basis, rather than adopted globally as those of hip-hop are, this suggests that it has something to say about the aspects of American culture that don't cross borders: the strange trivialities unique to that society; the most unassuming type of American exceptionalism.

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You be my Iowa caucus, I'll be your Huckabee

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

20 July 2011

My favourite country tune of the past minute is a cornball love song by Blake Shelton called "Honey Bee." It's goopy and bit ridiculous, and I love it. We reviewed it today at one of the other websites I write for, and in doing so, one of my colleagues, Katherine St. Asaph, points out the tune's political roots: songwriter Rhett Atkins was inspired by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee:

“We actually had no clue what we were going to write,” Akins tells Taste of Country. “Both of us got there and had no ideas. I was flipping through a Billboard magazine, and there was an article in there about [former Arkansas governor Mike] Huckabee doing an album or something. I thought it said ‘Huckleberry.’ I said, ‘Well let’s write a song about huckleberry … ‘I’m your huckleberry.’ That turned into ‘honeysuckle,’ but we didn’t know what it meant. Then it turned into ‘honeysuckle / honey bee.’”

All of this somehow resulted into a romantic paean for fans of federalism: "If you be my Louisiana, I'll be your Mississippi," the lyrics promise nonsensically and marvellously. And since the Huck is indeed a musician, I'd luck to humbly propose that his band Capitol Offense add the song he inspired to its repertoire. How about it, Huck? Having decided not to run for President this cycle, you surely have some time on your hands!

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Just being Miley

By Jonathan Bradley in Seattle, WA

21 April 2010

Thanks to Matt Yglesias, I came across this rather nutty post from Brian Cherry. It accuses Miley Cyrus, the Disney Channel actress/pop star/whatever, of being a left wing fifth column on America's Country music scene. Viz:

Music and American politics have become linked, with most of the genres in the “Hope and Change” category. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a country artist I am acquainted with talked about the stress of that election and how her vote was putting her at odds with her family, friends, fans, and industry (three guesses who she voted for). To change the very culture of that industry, you need to pave the way for the shrill Natalie Maines types with the seemingly harmless Miley types. Ms. Cyrus is presented to us a fully Disneyfied young lady with a Christian background and the values to boot. This is the sort of person that the Middle America country fans should love, right? As with many things in the entertainment world, her image is a well manufactured myth and the truth is that this young lady brings an entire suitcase of San Francisco values with her as baggage when she eventually breaks into the country music scene.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to debunk many of the basic errors in the post, and I don't really care exactly what politics, if any, the girl behind Hannah Montana holds. Suffice to say that the only genuine evidence for Cherry's argument is "Wake Up America," a rather awful song from Cyrus' patchy, occasionally marvellous, sophomore1 album, Breakout. "Everything I read is global warming, going green; I don't know what all this means," Cyrus sings. If she didn't swear such allegiance to her Nashville roots in "Party in the USA" I might be tempted to believe Cherry's charges of liberalism against her.

But more interesting than Miley Cyrus is the complicated relationship Country music has with American politics. In short, if Democrats are smart, they will be paying attention to the Grand Ole Opry.

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Cherry's post claims Country music as conservative without a second thought, and why wouldn't he take his assertion for granted? For decades, conservatives and liberals have understood Country to be the domain of the right, and have been fairly happy with the arrangement. Liberals didn't have to bother with the rubes, and conservatives had a sector of the troublingly left-wing entertainment industry to call their own. It was easy to point out Merle Haggard's anti-drug, pro-draft Vietnam-era anthem "Okie From Muskogee," or Toby Keith's retributive, pro-ass-kicking anthem "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" as examples of ideological conformity, and even easier to ignore Willie Nelson's decidedly liberal opinions on marijuana legalisation or the fact that Toby Keith calls himself a moderate Democrat.

To be sure, Country music is music made for the Red States, by the Red States, and both its themes and its performers are traditionalist and frequently conservative. When he proclaimed October 1990 to be Country Music Month, George H. W. Bush declared that the genre "springs from the heart of America and speaks eloquently of our history, our faith in God, our devotion to family, and our appreciation for the value of freedom and hard work." George W. Bush used Brooks & Dunn's "Only in America" in his 2004 campaign. And more recently, Miranda Lambert, who this weekend won the Country Music Awards' Album of the Year prize, re-recorded an old Fred Eaglesmith song about getting a gun to keep away a government man. Topical, perhaps? Incidentally, Lambert's parents are private investigators who investigated Bill Clinton on behalf of Paula Jones' legal team.

But the Red States are more complex than either side will allow, and what Country music and the Republican party have most in common is a shared understanding of the salience of American identity politics. And though that means stars like Gretchen Wilson might have a bit in common with Sarah Palin, it doesn't mean her audience will vote the same way. Both Democrats and Republicans can, and do, value faith, family, hard work, community, and generosity to strangers and the less fortunate. Both Democrats and Republicans, for that matter, have experience with drinking, partying, loving, losing, and cheating. As Blake Shelton and Trace Adkins sing, "everybody's got a hillbilly bone down deep inside."

And in the last year or two in particular, Country music has had its odd Democratic moments. Interestingly, one of the most prominent was a tune by John Rich released last year in the midst of the American recession, titled "Shutting Detroit Down."

 

 

"Shutting Detroit Down" is a paean to a blue-state, blue-collar, union town, sung by John Rich2, the man who wrote John McCain's 2008 campaign theme song "Raising McCain." The words could be sung by a Democrat or a Republican: "I see all these whining big-shots on my evening news," he sings. "About how they're losing billions and it's up to me and you/To come running to the rescue." It's the kind of lament that could as easily be authored by Glenn Beck as it could be by Matt Taibbi. And the chorus is as good an encapsulation of the American public's non-partisan rage as any:

The boss man takes his bonus pay and jets on out of town
D.C.'s bailing out them bankers as the farmers auction ground
While they're living it up on Wall Street in that New York City town
In the real world they're shutting Detroit down.

Less overtly political is a song that similarly shouts out Detroit's embattled working class, Pat Green's 2009 single "What I'm For." Between singing platitudinous tributes to icons of Americana (the Gettsyburg address, past-their-prime boxers, the wisdom of the elderly) Green makes a pointedly contemporary show of support for the Motor City's auto industry employees. The song also honours the decidedly non-rural "inner-city teachers" and takes an implicit stand against law-and-order types by sticking up for the "ex-con out of prison who just wants a second chance." What starts off as a corny homily veers surprisingly close to being a liberal stump speech.

But the most significant example of Country music's liberal sympathies comes in the form of one of its biggest current stars. Brad Paisley, a West Virginian guitarist with a deft playing style and a witty pen titled his latest album "American Saturday Night." The title track is a love-letter to the cultural richness of America's melting pot. "Everywhere has something that they're known for, but usually it washes up on our shores," he sings; it's a small-town song with a global outlook. But more telling is "Welcome to the Future," the tune Paisley performed for Barack Obama at the White House.

 

 

The song starts off light-heartedly, with Paisley, a good ol' boy in a white hat, musing on how, as a kid, he spent hours at the video arcade, and marvelling at the way today he can play those same games on his mobile phone. But by the third verse, the song's larger narrative coalesces:

I had a friend in school, running back on the football team
They burned a cross in his front yard for asking out the homecoming queen
I thought about him today, and everybody who's seen what he's seen
From a woman on a bus, to a man with a dream.

Paisley's touch is light; he makes no mention of the President, or Election Day 2008, or the historic nature of Obama's victory, or even of explicit racial categories. But the song is as emotionally resonant a narrative as any that lays claim to describe the changing nature of America signified by this President's victory.

And unlike the pilloried, anti-Bush Dixie Chicks, Paisley is more beloved by the Nashville industry than ever. Nashville speaks from a distinct perspective, but it is by no means necessarily a Republican one. If it ever was, the Country music listening, exurban public of the flyover states is no longer the exclusive domain of the Republican Party. If I were in charge of the Democratic Party's future political fortunes, I'd be listening to a lot of Country music.

 

 

1 Not actually. Discussing the Cyrus discography is complicated by virtue of her predilection for releasing albums credited to her alter ego Hannah Montana.

2 As I revealed in 2008, John Rich campaigned for McCain, but only donated money to his primary opponent Fred Thompson. Meanwhile, his one time songwriting partner Big Kenny, the man with whom he wrote the words, "I see people gettin' mad on CNN/Who's right: Democrats or Republicans/I don't care who's right or wrong," donated to the Obama campaign. The two no longer work together.

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