This is a guest post by the League’s own Sam Wilkinson! Take it away, Sam:
Whether or not I want it to be, country music is ever present it in my life. There’s no escaping it. I’m stuck then either cursing at the incoming tides like a madman or finding something* that I’m willing to listen to. Nash Trash is right out; I’m not sure there’s a country song within the last twenty years that I genuinely enjoy.**
But that being said there is country music that I do like. I’ve written about it on the site before; I really like Roy Clarke’s, “Goodbye and Greyhound.” I like that song because it flips my expectations on their head. But there’s another song within the genre that does a better job of that: David Allen Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.”
I don’t know about bars throughout the nation. I don’t know about bars throughout the South. But I do know from my days spent drinking in local bars that thing song brings out the singers in everybody, particularly during the chorus. People familiar with the song are always anxious to warble, “you ne-e-e-ver even called me by my naaaaaaaaame!”
But then there’s the final stanza, which David Allen Coe describes as having been written by, “my good friend Steve Goodman.” Here’s what you need to know about Steve Goodman. Coe tells us that after receiving a Goodman’s letter – a letter which contained a song that Goodman described as “the perfect Country and Western song” – he wrote his friend back to tell him that the song failed to be perfect, because it left out references to all of the following: mama, trains, trucks, prison, or getting drunk. So Goodman tried again, and Coe agrees that the song is now the perfect Country and Western song. The new lyrics?
“Well I was drunk/The day my mom got out of prison/and I went to pick her up/in the rain/but before I could get to the station in my pickup truck/she got runned over by a damned old train.”
Let’s be honest about what’s happening here, because it isn’t just that Coe’s offering country music some polite criticism. He’s telling Country and Western music to go fuck itself. He’s saying, “Here are all of your clichés in a single stanza. Look at how easy that is to do.” He’s doing that from within a song that’s ostensibly about his own middling career. And he’s doing it that from within a real country crowd-pleaser. I’m tempted to call it subversive.
The only thing stopping me is David Allen Coe himself. Even a casual glance at his career will reveal the sort of professional contradictions that make his work difficult to embrace. The racism is one good place to start. I’ll let you sort that out for yourselves, but sufficed to say, it seems as though Coe has forever been insistent upon blazing his own trail, everybody be damned. I’ve read theories that Coe is a performance artist, and that literally everything he does is nothing more than an on-stage creation designed to sell product. While that appeals to me generally, I have to say I’ve never found it necessary to go beyond this one particular track. As a result, he lives in my mind as a singular one-hit-wonder, even though he’s had plenty of other successful music (to go along with the music that’s considerably more offensive).
Needless to say, I find it odd that one of my favorite songs is performed by a man that I generally think of as being reprehensible, but as Rasheed Wallace likes to say, ”Ball don’t lie…”
*anything!
**Not true! It just dawned on me that I genuinely enjoy The Dixie Chicks’ “Lubbock or Leave It.” What a liberal I am.
Ah, that brings back memories of the entire crowd at a honky-tonk singing that song. I particularly remember the way they’d yell the second “darlin’.” The only song people in a honky-tonk sang louder back then was “Friends in Low Places.”
I grew up with country music so thoroughly saturating my life that I had to run away from it screaming. When I came back to it, it had changed to a caricature of its previous self. All I can tolerate is the old masters; the only country music CD I own is Dolly Parton’s Horns and Haloes.
Have you ever heard Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt? Have a listen. That is what country music should have become.
That JC cover is fantastic. Like you, I only have much knowledge of, or tolerance for, the country “classics” or “masters”.
For me, it’s not so much over-saturation as it is that the genre is, as Sam alludes in his post, very formally restrictive – you have *some* leeway lyrically (though not much, as Coe is pointing out via middle finger) but musically you can only stretch the form so much before it’s not “country” anymore. Jazz to some degree also suffers from this, and ska, and…
The amorphous and promiscuous blob of the descriptor of “rock” seems to allow for more tangents and musical (and literal) miscegenation, increasing the overall varieties of stew that you can make with it (to mix metaphors to a muddle).
The names we use for very rock subgenres are increasingly meaningless. It seems that being “indie” music has more to do with your sound than your record label status. Classic rock seems to be wholly relative… anything 20+ years old; the term has nothing to do with the actually type of music being played. Etc.
For some reason, the “Classic Rock” station here in town plays songs from Van Halen’s 1984 album.
I get GnR on mine. And have for several years now.
Er, sorry? Exactly what about “1984” or “Appetite” are NOT classic?
I think it makes me wonder what we mean by “classic rock”. If it simply means “music that is old”, then both certainly qualify. But if it means anything about the music itself, than I start to get confused. In the 80’s and 90’s, that music wasn’t classic rock. Now it is.
I’m thinking, “classic” means “old + good”, but not any specific characteristic about the music.
A 1965 Ford Mustang is classic.
A 1975 AMC Pacer is not.
1984 came out the other day, dude.
It seemed so futuristic at the time.
If forced to put a fine point on it, I’d say that “Classic Rock” ended with the advent of MTV.
So… 1983 is the cutoff of the old and beginning of the new era?
I like that. BMTV and AMTV.
But G’n’R, at least “Appetite”, does seem “Classic” somehow, and that’s 1987. What do we do about that?
Back then, we didn’t know Axl was going to bloat the songs and then himself; at the time, G’n’R seemed like the second coming of the Stones and the Pistols combined.
See, I don’t know. (I’ve been chewing on this.) As “classic” an album like Appetite (or, heaven help us, Use Your Illusion) was, there was also something very, very MTV about it. It was a perfect fusion of the Sunset Strip rock and roll and the music video that handled the medium as well as, oh, Duran Duran did almost a decade earlier.
(Billy Squier provides an example of “classic” trying, and failing, to transition to the new.)
By the time of “UYI 1 & 2” there’s no question that MTV had absorbed the band. But “Appetite” doesn’t fit the narrative, IMO.
For all that “Nevermind” is credited for killing off the hairband dinosaurs (the Warrants and the Poisons and so forth; pretty boys, and big explosions) that were MTV’s stock in trade, it only administered the final deathblow; “Appetite” had already poisoned the punchbowl at that party.
(In another of those “History repeats itself as farce” moments, it’s kind of fun to note that Nirvana was explicitly Beatles-influenced melodically, while GNR embodied a dirtier sex-and-switchblades boogie that clearly descends from Mick and the boys).
“Appetite” sounded like Axl looked at that point – lean, mean, and toxic; and if MTV eventually figured out that Slash would look really cool standing on a grand piano, when GNR first came out the only way that MTV could have accurately reflected their sound and look was if they broadcast in Smell-O-Vision, because those cats seemed like they’d just rolled out of a heroin squat.
(Heresy coming!)
I see “Appetite” as a howl coming from a similar place as The Replacements (famously NOT MTV, per the “Bastards of Young” “video”*, and the song “Seen Your Video”**) – the sound of blue-collar Midwesterners (Axl grew up in Indiana) who saw no reason to differentiate between between Kiss and the Dead Boys (or the Pistols).
If Westerberg and co. were ultimately to turn their own appetite for destruction inwards rather than unleash it on an unsuspecting world, that was just because Rose had far greater ambition, and far less of a sense of humor. GNR would break a bottle over your head; the ‘Mats would break it over their own.***
So I guess what I am saying is, I’d let “Appetite” into the “Classic Rock” Club; because if you don’t, it might cut you.
*which consists solely of a speaker PLAYING THE SONG; the perfect middle finger to the entire image enterprise.
**Sum total of the howled lyrics: Seen your video / Your phony rock and roll / We don’t wanna know!
***and of course, thorough a weird twist of fate, the ‘Mats bassist, Tommy Stinson, would eventually end up with Axl; and the Replacements clearly influenced Nirvana, who would end up showing just how ridiculous GNR had themselves become, by 1991.
Great post, Glyph.
I’d never considered GnR’s contribution to the death of the hair band as I’d always considered them to be _part_ of the genre, albeit a much rougher, louder part, but it fits (say…”Appetite” was the global cooling caused by increased volcanic activity, while “Nevermind” was the KT event that pushed the “big hair” genre into extinction). I still remember my first exposure to GnR and how shocking it was to a Poison/Warrant/Skid Row guy, but in my experience “Appetite” fit easily into my musical library, while “Nevermind” took much longer to win a seat (and it was actually Pearl Jam’s “Ten” that broke the barrier for grunge).
I buy that Appetite transcended (there’s that word again) the hair metal genre, but I see it in the same way that a lot of Beatles early stuff transcended their teenybopper marketing niche.
Damn Yankees was still a thing in 1991 is all I’m saying.
The other tectonic shifts that happened contemporaneously were Metallica’s Black Album and the rise of rap as a mainstream phenomena.
If you want some Heresy, how about the opinion that Queensrÿche was and is a severely underrated band that the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/STP continuum also helped kill off?
Damn Yankees was still a thing in 1991 is all I’m saying.
Oh yeah, to follow on Fish’s metaphor, there were still a few DDW’s (Dead Dinosaurs Walking) in 1991; but the process had already begun. People were waiting for something to happen, even if they didn’t know it.
Appetite transcended (there’s that word again) the hair metal genre, but I see it in the same way that a lot of Beatles early stuff transcended their teenybopper marketing niche
Check the Ramones and Misfits shirts for an indication of where GNR were coming from (other images from the period often show CBGB’s shirts, and Duff McKagan is from Seattle, came up playing in punk/hardcore bands there, and knew very well many of the “grunge” musicians that would later become household names).
There’s a Sonic Youth documentary called “1991: The Year Punk Broke”; the title is sort of sarcastically alluding to the way it took America (at least, the musical mainstream) much, much longer than our UK cousins to digest punk, despite America being punk’s originator (MC5/Stooges/Ramones et al).
G’n’R were in the Sunset Strip metal scene, but not of it; they were, at least initially, seeking to inject something much more raw and real and punk-like. If you want to argue that “something” was 90% “attitude” vs. 10% “distinct musical qualities”, that’s fair; but I’d rejoin that rock and roll is approximately 99.9% attitude.*
The other tectonic shifts that happened contemporaneously were Metallica’s Black Album and the rise of rap as a mainstream phenomena. – Agreed, though I remember “One” being sort of a big deal when it came out; actually, a lot of the sort of “technical” metal bands seem like they retained, or have regained in recent years, some of their cachet – bands like Maiden and such.
The poppier ones, though, seem gone for good. This is for the most part no big loss, though I bow to no man in my unapologetic love for DLR-era Van Halen; a consumate showman and jester, Diamond Dave’s like the Shatner of the Sunset Strip – simultaneously cheesy and awesome.
RE: Queensryche, I have to say that I am not really familiar with them (though “Operation: Mindcrime” is a TERRIFIC album title).
* Of course, I reserve the right to totally forget this logic when I want to argue, for example, that AC/DC and The Ramones are not really all that different, at all. 🙂
I always viewed “Black” as being Metallica’s attempt to sell albums before they were all too old to tour and make money. The difference between “Master of Puppets” and “Black” is, well, the difference between “Appetite For Destruction” and, say, Warrant’s “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich.”
Fish, to be clear, I’m just saying the black album changed the landscape. Not (necessarily) that it changed it for the better.
(the metalhead friends I had at the time *hated* it)
I dunno. I think that Rock and Roll had an “ALIENATE YOUR PARENTS!” thing going on for a while there that evolved into mom saying “Oh, that Motley Crue song ‘Without You’ is really pretty” and so if you wanted to alienate your parents, you pretty much had to either switch to Venom or Slayer or general atonality *OR* jump to Gangster Rap.
Guns and Roses still went for parental alienation if not general societal alienation (see, for example, “One In A Million”), while, at the same time, being really good. I mean, the opening chords to “Welcome to the Jungle” are as scary as the opening chords of “Gimme Shelter”. In that, I suppose, there is a pre-MTV thing going on there. It wasn’t about “selling product” and, in that, it had a weird authenticity… but, when it came to Headbanger’s Ball, G’N’R would get played while the Venoms or Slayers wouldn’t have been.
Ooof. “One in a Million.”
I…just don’t know that we can even begin to discuss that song here at MD without veering off into “no politics, and especially not about these topics”.
Like, I think there are possible arguments to be made in terms of, you can write a song from the POV of a character who is stupid, or wrong, or racist, or evil, or psychotic, and that doesn’t necessarily make you that person (=”Scorsese isn’t Bickle”, basically); but on the other hand, jeez, those lyrics; but on the third hand, Rose was young when he wrote it, a messed-up Midwest kid just off the bus, overwhelmed by 80’s LA weird race relations, and he was never the most subtle or sophisticated writer anyway; but on the fourth hand, it’s been covered by (ugh) Skrewdriver.
Forget it. It’d be like trying to discuss Professor Griff.
My fondest memory of _that_ song is having to explain to my French guitar-playing friend while I was overseas why I could not, under any circumstances, sing that song in public!
I can’t listen to it. That performance crushes me.
Now that yall done spent the obligatory 200 words disparaging red neck poetry maybe you could spend the same amount of time talking about the deep philosophical content of most rock songs.
Nothing new but “Your the reason God made Oklahoma”, “Lefty and Pancho”, “Jose Cuervo” and if you really like to jitterbug you might give “Baby likes to rock it” by the Tractors a quick listen.
The nature of existentialism, tied to the nature of adolescence, tied to the nature of disposable cash, generally means that most pop music is about either A) Falling in love or B) Breaking up and a song that you may have heard prior to the moment when either your heart leapt or your heart broke might be too familiar to speak intimately to you so we constantly need a new infusion of songs about either (or both) A and B.
Country music, by comparison, is about much more mature subjects. Being married. Having squabbles. Being a parent. Having problems with one’s boss. Having problems with one’s vehicle. Looking forward to relaxing with some alcohol come Friday. Things that adults feel, well, not strongly… but feel anyway.
It’s funny to listen to Country music with someone who listens to it unironically and point out stuff like “he mentioned beer!” or “he talked about his truck!” but, seriously, if you listen to pop music, you’ll be listening to songs about the things that adolescents feel strongly.
-Is any of this addressed at me? If so, I’ll be happy to respond.
-It’s an entirely different conversation, but I don’t listen to the music for the lyrics. The lyrics are a fall back for me when the rest of the song isn’t really working. When the lyrics are bad, then f**k it, I’m out. That’s my objection to most country music. The music is interesting to me; the lyrics are so utterly devoid of anything genuine.
-My objection to the lyrics might be the bigger deal. I don’t expect anything from pop music. But country music presents itself as this genuine, authentic thing, and then you realize that these songs being sung are written by other people. There’s nothing genuine or authentic about (much of) it, especially the country-pop-radio crap.
RE: lyrics: I generally don’t notice them at all unless they are either great, or terrible. A great song can often survive terrible lyrics (see: New Order and Interpol and U2); a boring song can rarely be saved by great lyrics.
For me, most of the time the lyrics are simply the rungs on which the melody ascends and descends, or are pleasing for the words’ percussive rhythm.
There’s nothing genuine or authentic about (much of) it, especially the country-pop-radio crap.
Well, what standard are we holding it to? There are, apparently, millions of adolescent females out there who see Bieber as “genuine” and/or “authentic” and… well, I hesitate to describe them as anything but adolescent.
Different folks have different kinds of poetry speak to them.
De gustibus non est something something.
Right now Bieber is at the same stage of development as the Beatles singing “I want to hold your hand”. He will become authentic when he composes the equivalent of “A day in the life”, “Dead flowers” or “Desolation Row”. Until then, he is just another pretty face that makes more money than he deserves.
I’m not familiar with Bieber’s ouvre. Is it really as clever and musically inventive as I Want to Hold Your Hand?
Check out his latest: “As Long As You Love Me”.
(I only know about it because a friend stumbled across it while he was looking for the Backstreet Boys’ version.)
Mike, I was not referring to the music. I was talking about the inanity of the words. Also, I was kinda kidding because I could not recongize a Bieber song if my life depended on it. I was assuming that Bieber was not any good artistically because one of our four daughters like him. I get most of the newish stuff from them.
Gosh darn typos. Should read “not one” instead of “one”.
I could not recongize a Bieber song if my life depended on it.
Yeah me too. Also, how could anyone who looks the ridiculous be any good? (Yes, I do sound exactly like my Dad talking about, well, the Beatles.)
I am sure I’ve noted this here before, but whenever I get asked by a CM fan if I like CM, I tell them there are some CM artists that I love. Then they ask who, I tell them, and they seem very disappointed.
Any other than Cash I can only tolerate while in a themed steakhouse.
Seriously. If I hear country, there’d better be peanuts on the floor & a hunk of dead cow on a plate in front of me.
No Hank Williams? Patsy Cline? Waylon Jennings (come on, no Waylon?)? Loretta Lynn (I had a big crush on her granddaughter in high school — she has her own band now.
Ooooh, Loretta Lynn. She did a great album with Jack White that included “Mad Mrs. Leroy Brown” that was simultaneously awesome and terrifying.
Nope. Even after growing up in an overwhelmingly white state, it just doesn’t appeal to me.
I was a huge fan of everything country which came out between “No Fences” (1990) and, say…Jo Dee Messina’s self-titled album (1996). And then I just…stopped. The only explanation I can come up with is that in ’96 the Air Force sent me to Australia and my circle of friends there was decidedly un-country. I was also exposed to Australia’s quite strong music industry and I carried some of that back with me.
I haven’t been back to country music since, but I still know all the words to “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.”
I don’t really know my musical genres (the distinction between folk and country still escapes, and there’s certainly folk music that I love), but I’m pretty sure the Corb Lund Band up here in Canada are country and I like them well enough. Also like the entirety of Dixie Chicks’ album Taking the Long Way (which includes Lubbock or Leave It). And neither are all about the “obligatory elements” of country music mentioned above.
Although “The Truck Got Stuck” by Corb Lund Band is a classic and enjoyed by anyone with taste:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCcWzLAcv4o