In November of 2000 I reviewed a concert by the Dixie Chicks in downtown Cleveland. A sold-out show. A big deal, sort of. And at the time, I didn’t know a goddamn thing about the Dixie Chicks, beyond what information could be gleaned from their name (which—in my defense—is probably more expository than just about any other pop moniker I can think of, except for maybe the Stooges).
I can’t recall if I liked this concert, but I suspect I probably enjoyed half of it. I mostly vaguely recall that Nathan from MTV’s The Real World 7: Seattle was somehow involved with the event’s promotion, and I clearly remember getting several angry phone calls from readers who read my review the next morning and thought I was cruel for suggesting that Chicks singer Natalie Maines had an “oddly shaped body, fleshy cheekbones, and weird fashion sense.” It turns out Natalie Maines was pregnant. I am nothing if not underinformed.
But ANYWAY, Natalie’s uterus is not the issue here. What struck me about this show was the audience, which appeared to be a cross-section of forty-one-year-old gay males outfitted from Old Navy and fifteen-year-old teenage girls with above-average teeth. I had never before seen so many teenage girls at a concert with real musicians, which is what the Dixie Chicks are. Obviously, we’re all used to seeing thousand of adolescent females at Britney Spears and ’NSYNC concerts, but those shows have nothing to do with music; those are just virgin-filled Pepsi commercials. It’s a teenage girl’s job to like that shit. But the Dixie Chicks aren’t part of that marketing scheme; there was one stunning moment in the middle of the evening’s festivities where Martie Seidel shredded on her fiddle like she was trying to start a California brushfire, and the foggy arena air tasted exactly like the omnipresent ozone from every pre-grunge, big-hair heavy metal show I attended in the late eighties. I looked around the building and I saw all my old friends from high school, only now they had breasts and were named Phoebe. And that’s when I realized that teenage girls are the new teenage boys, which is why the Dixie Chicks are the new Van Halen, which is why country music is awesome.
Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can’t really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn’t work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.
Now, obviously, this hipster distaste doesn’t apply to old country music, because everybody who’s cool loves that stuff (or at least claims to). Nobody questions the value of George fucking Jones. It’s completely acceptable for coolies to adore the idea of haggard nineteen-year-old men riding in cabooses and having their hearts shattered, which is why alternative country is the most popular musical genre of the last twenty-five years that’s managed to remain completely unpopular (if you follow my meaning). I once asked Uncle Tupelo founder Jay Farrar about how his audiences changed as alt country became a phenomenon. “What audiences are you talking about?” he asked me back. “Do you mean the two hundred rock critics who actually care?” Farrar was sort of joking when he said that, but he wasn’t laughing. And he was probably more right than wrong. Columbia decided to rerelease all of Farrar’s early Uncle Tupelo albums on the imprint label Legacy, but it seems like the only people buying them are simply buying them again. On the surface, that’s a bit sad, because it seems like Uncle Tupelo wrote great songs that deserve to be significant. However, the operative word in that sentence is “seems.” What they really wrote were great songs that had no genuine significance whatsoever. I think the person who explained this most clearly was indie rocker/average poet David Berman of the Silver Jews, speaking to the Nashville Scene right after he moved to Tennessee. One gets the impression the reporter must have made reference to the “authenticity” of modern country music when she asked Berman a question:
“One thing that cracks me up in the Nashville local music scene,” Berman said in response, “is this verbal battle between Music Row and alt-country. Alternative country, to me, is just as ridiculously empty in a different way—it’s just that they’re not in power. All these people singing about a life they never knew—it’s really a fetishization of Depression-era country life. If authenticity is the issue, then there’s something more authentic to me about Wal-Mart country, which speaks to the real needs of the people who listen to it, more than talking about grain whiskey stills.”
Granted, the best alt country songs feel authentic, and that should be enough (and in the idiom of pop music, it usually is). The problem is that guys like Farrar embrace a reality that’s archaic and undesirable; the only listeners who appreciate what they’re expressing are affluent intellectuals who’ve glamorized the alien concept of poverty. The lyrics on a track like “Screen Door” off No Depression have the texture of something old and profound, but they’re not; technically, those lyrics are more modern than everything off Nine Inch Nails’Pretty Hate Machine. And more important, they’re only viewed to be profound by people who’ve never had the experience described in the lyrics.[58] Truly depressed people don’t need depressing music. I don’t think I would have had any interest in hearing lines like, “Down here, where we’re at / Everybody is equally poor” when I was sixteen, sitting in my parents’ basement in rural North Dakota, only vaguely aware that I (and everyone I knew) had no fucking money. I probably would have thought Jeff Tweedy was whining. Oddly (or maybe predictably), I love that song today. But that’s because the lyrics no longer apply to the actual condition of my life. I would guess the prototypical Uncle Tupelo fan earns around $52,000 a year and has two VCRs. I would also guess they don’t shop at Berman’s aforementioned Wal-Mart, which is where mainstream country music sells like Pokémon.
“I definitely don’t feel a part of what I call the straighter country music industry of Nashville,” said critical alt country darling Lucinda Williams in a 2001 Billboard interview. “I’m definitely not connected with that world. Nashville is so straight. I guess I’m sort of considered an outlaw here with Steve Earle. They used to write grittier stuff. It’s gotten so puritanical…I don’t want to be identified with the stuff that’s on country radio now. Country music to me is Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.”
Well, good for you, Lucinda. It’s nice to see you’ve jammed the pretension of Kill Rock Stars into country music. Granted, there is some truth to what Williams says; she’s certainly doing what she can to keep her own music “grittier,” inasmuch as she likes to make albums about gravel roads. But this quote is really just an example of why Lucinda Williams’s music won’t matter in twenty years. Oh, she’ll be remembered historically, because the brainiacs who write pop reference books will always include her name under W. She’ll be a nifty signpost for music geeks. But her songs will die like softcover books filled with postmodern poetry, endorsed by Robert Pinsky and empty to everyone else. Lucinda Williams does not matter.
The Dixie Chicks, however, do matter. They matter in the way big things matter… which is to say they matter without duplicity, which is to say they matter the way Van Halen did in 1981.[59] What you have with the Dixie Chicks is real bluegrass music that doesn’t sound like traditional roots music, just as Eddie Van Halen played blues-based guitar licks that didn’t sound anything like John Lee Hooker. Like Van Halen, the Dixie Chicks added a blond singer to make the band an arena-ready megaforce, and—like Van Halen—the Dixie Chicks kicked a singer out of the band when she seemed like dead weight. The Dixie Chicks’ best song is “There’s Your Trouble,” which is about the pain of seeing your man with the wrong woman, and Maines ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, because love is rotten to the core. But all those coincidences are really just peripheral. The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.
Here’s what I mean: For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed—at least among young people—is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men. It’s like girls are trying to attain equality by becoming equally shallow and selfish. Whenever I see TV shows like Fox’s defunct Ally McBeal or HBO’s Sex and the City, I find myself perplexed as to how this is sometimes viewed as an “advancement” for feminism; it seems to imply that it’s empowering for women to think like all of the stupidest men I know (myself included). We’ve all heard the argument that there is an eternal double standard about promiscuity: The cliché is that girls who sleep around are inevitably labeled “sluts” while guys who make the rounds are dubbed “studs” (in fact, I hear people making this particular point far more often than I hear anyone literally calling women “slut s” or men “studs”). What’s interesting about that argument is the way it’s been absorbed by my generation and all the generations that have followed: The consensus is that this double standard is wrong, so—therefore—we should all have sex with as many people as possible, regardless of our gender. Somehow, this became logical. And that’s why modern fifteen-year-old girls are like fifteen-year-old boys from 1981: They’re saturated not only with internal sexual intensity, but also with the social belief that they should be having sex. And this manifests itself in strange ways. In the 1960s, the Rolling Stones realized that if you could make an audience unconsciously think about fucking, you could control the way they respond to music. Mick and Keith manufactured sexual aggression. Van Halen didn’t have to manufacture that sentiment, because their audience was already an ocean of lust, desperately wanting The Big Loud Show. In 1981, that ocean was adolescent boys. But Sarah Jessica Parker and Calista Flockhart have turned adolescent girls into adolescent boys, and those girls want their own Van Halen. And their version of Van Halen is Martie Seidel playing “Eruption” on a fiddle.
This is one example of why Wal-Mart country will never become unpopular, even though nobody I know seems to openly embrace it: It’s flexible, and it’s reflexive. It’s flexible because nobody in the media (outside of Tennessee) seems to care how it operates, so it can quietly make adjustments and corrections to fit its zeitgeist; country music evolves a little like the stock market. It’s reflexive because it doesn’t place an artistic premium on creating new ideas; nobody expects Clint Black to be the first guy to come up with anything. Nobody even expects him to write his own songs. As a consequence, the organic themes in Wal-Mart country filter up from its audience. They actually come from the people shopping in Wal-Mart. And when those Wal-Mart shoppers eventually hear their own ideas on the radio, it somehow seems fresh. While rock and hip-hop constantly try to break through to a future consciousness—and while alt country tries to replicate a lost consciousness from the 1930s—modern country artists validate the experience of living right here, right now.
This started to become clear as glass in the early 1990s. At the time, the presumption in the media was that grungy Sasquatch rockers were emerging as a more “realistic” reflection of public sentiment, apparently because the musicians dressed like laid-off factory employees and down-tuned their guitars. This was not without justification; I will concede that this posit seemed completely sensible at the time. But—with the exception of the second Nirvana album, the first three Pearl Jam records, and maybe four or five Soundgarden songs—that music has not sustained a significant life outside its brief window of import. Most of that music already comes across as dated as disco. But what has continued to matter are crappy country songs like Trisha Yearwood’s 1991 single “She’s in Love with the Boy,” which probably means it isn’t entirely crappy.
“She’s in Love with the Boy” is almost like something the Ronettes could have done: A sweet girl named Katie is dating a local bone head named Tommy, and everyone in town—particularly Katie’s father—thinks she can do better. However, their love is ultimately vindicated by Katie’s mother, who explains that she was once dating a local bone head whom everyone hated, and that man became Katie’s father. Certainly, this is not an innovative narrative (in fact, I think it was actually an episode from the 1991 season of The Wonder Years, costarring David Schwimmer as “the bone head”). However, there are two elements to this song that make it amazingly evocative to a certain kind of listener. The irony is that they’re the same elements that make intellectuals despise modern country music.
The first is that the lyrics to this song are highly specific, but secretly universal. I’m referring particularly to lines like “But later on, outside the Tastee Freeze / Tommy slips something on her hand / He says, “My high school ring will have to do / Till I can buy a wedding band.” Proposing marriage at a Tastee Freeze is not exactly romantic, but it is important, just as it was when scruffy little Johnny Cougar mentioned eating chili dogs “outside the Tastee Freeze” in the song “Jack and Diane.” Tastee Freezes are iconic structures in the rural Midwest, because they say something about your hometown; they irrefutably prove your community does not have enough of a population to sustain a Dairy Queen. In fact, you don’t even have enough of a population to sustain an ice cream facility with indoor seating (you might notice that both Yearwood and Cougar describe encounters that take place outside the Tastee Freeze, presumably in the parking lot). Tastee Freezes are the places that remind you how isolated you are; a Tastee Freeze is like an oasis. And even though they’re everywhere, you don’t realize that until you move away. It’s a circular reality: Tastee Freezes exist where people are disconnected from the rest of the world—and that very disconnection makes them all seem autonomous. So when Yearwood mentions this kind of coquettish proposal between two overtly archetypical teenagers, it cuts an amazingly wide swath. It’s what David Berman means when he says that Wal-Mart country reflects the lives of its audience. There are thousands of people in this country who still can’t believe Trish Yearwood perfectly described the teenage experience of someone they know in real life. And the amazing thing is that they’re all correct.
However, there’s another reason why a song like “She’s in Love with the Boy” is so successful, and it’s even less complicated. “She’s in Love with the Boy” is easy to understand—and I don’t mean intellectually. I mean literally. A huge part of why somebody like Yearwood connects so deeply with so many people (she has career sales approaching 11 million) is because her words can be easily heard and immediately contextualized, even when a person casually hears them one time. I’m sure that sounds like a moronically obvious argument for what makes a piece of music good, but I’ve come to realize it’s one of those painfully obvious things that everyone who’s allegedly enlightened seems to deny.
Whenever you talk to collegiate musicologists about music, they will often complain that rock writers place entirely too much emphasis on the content of song lyrics. Academics tend to argue that lyrics have only nominal importance; they will say that pop critics tend to see pop songs as having two parts—words and music—and that this is an example of ignorance. They think the words to a song like the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter” are only a fraction of the total creation; the lyrics have no more individual importance than the guitar chords, or Ringo’s drum fills, or George Martin’s production, or any other component. Moreover, they’ll tell you that song lyrics are not really poetry, because they only matter when they’re married to a specific piece of music and are often used as filler; lyrics usually say very little about the songwriter and are more important for how practical they are (i.e., “Can I match a melody to this?”) than for how deep they are (i.e., “What does this mean?”). What’s funny is that rock writers sort of validate those suggestions, but only because they take the appreciation of lyrical content too far. They’re exclusively focused on how clever lyrics are, even if that cleverness is only appreciated by their peers (for example, rock critics love David Berman’s buddy Stephen Malkmus, and he is indeed very talented—although I sometimes wonder how funny jokes about Geddy Lee’s voice are to people who have never listened to a Rush album).[60]
The net result of all this is that discernible lyrics are—by and large—dismissed. The elitist belief is that hearing what an artist is saying is either (a) totally irrelevant, or (b) only relevant when difficult. And what these elitists forget is that normal people never think like that. Normal people want to hear what artists are saying, and normal people tend to perceive the vox as the sole identity of the artistic product. This is completely clear to anyone who steps back and just looks at what material works outside of New York and L.A. I find it amusing that so many pundits have tried to create explanations for why Eminem is so polarizing (people say that it’s just because he’s white, or that it’s all because of Dr. Dre, or that it’s just because he’s controversial, etc.). To me, the biggest reason is obvious: He enunciates better than any rapper who ever lived. He’s literally good at talking. The first time you hear an Eminem song, you can decide whether or not you find him entertaining. That seems to be a central quality for anyone who deeply resonates with blue-collar Americans. I once did a feature for SPIN magazine that tried to explain why Morrissey has become a cult figure with Latino teenagers in California, and I suggested a variety of explanations for why a forgotten, asexual Oscar Wilde fanatic would resonate with Hispanic kids in EastL.A. What I came to realize is that relating to Morrissey is easy for anyone who puts forth the effort to try; Moz sings about universal problems (loneliness, alienation, emotional fraud), and he sings about those problems in a way that’s oddly literal. His voice is clear, the meanings can be appreciated on two (and sometimes three) different levels, and you can always hear every thought. He lets you get close to him. I’m more surprised that Latinos are the only kids who still love him.
What I’m saying is that lyrics do matter, and people who say they’re overemphasized by critics are wrong. The significance of lyrics in pop music is not overrated; in fact, it’s probably under-rated. And this is what people overlook about modern country music. They fail to see that it’s a word-based idiom, and words are far more effective than pianos or guitars. The manipulation of sonics makes someone like Moby a genius, but he’ll never have the middle-class importance of someone like Toby Keith.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking that this is a profoundly depressing argument, because it implies that the only things that can be culturally important are things that appeal to the lowest common denominator. But that’s not what I’m suggesting. I realize that Toby Keith seems like a troglodyte, especially when he appears in those long-distance commercials with Terry Bradshaw and ALF—but it’s not his simplicity that makes him vital. It’s his clarity. Keith writes songs like 1993’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy,” and what’s compelling is that you can’t deconstruct its message. “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” is not like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive,” where Jon Bon Jovi claimed to live like a cowboy; Toby Keith wants to be a cowboy for real. “I should have been a cowboy,” he sings. “I should have learned to rope and ride.” Somewhat amusingly, the cowboys Toby references in his songs are all fake cowboys (Gunsmoke’s Marshal Dillon, cinematic crooners Gene Autry and Roy Rogers), but fake cowboys are the only kind that Keith—and most of America—ever wanted to embody. When I was fourteen, I liked Bon Jovi, and part of the reason why was because I liked the idea of riding a steel horse and using whiskey bottles as wall calendars. I aspired to turn my life into that of a modern-day cowboy,[61] and that always seemed vaguely possible. But whenever I go back to my hometown and see the people I grew up with—many of whom are still living the same life we all had twelve years ago as high school seniors—I realize that I was very much the exception. Lots of people (in fact, most people) do not dream about morphing their current life into something dramatic and cool and metaphoric. Most people see their life as a job that they have to finish; if anything, they want their life to be less complicated than it already is. They want their life to only have one meaning. So when they imagine a better existence, it’s either completely imaginary (i.e., Toby’s nineteenth-century Lone Ranger fantasy) or staunchly practical (i.e., Yearwood’s description of the girl who just wants to get married without catching static from her old man). The reason Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have sold roughly 120 million more albums than Bob Dylan and Liz Phair is not because record buyers are all a bunch of blithering idiots; it’s because Garth and Shania are simply better at expressing the human condition. They’re less talented, but they understand more people.
The paradox, of course, is that I’m writing this essay while staring at my CD rack, which currently holds seventeen Dylan and Phair records and exactly three country records released after 1974. And in a weird way, that makes me happy. I have at least one thing in common with Bob Dylan: Neither one of us understands how the world works. When push comes to shove, we’re both Reba’s bitch.
1. This is similar to the way rich white kids in places like suburban Connecticut fell in love with N.W.A. records in the early nineties.
2. Although it should be noted that David Lee Roth seemed to have no problem with Ronald Reagan hailing from California.
3. And don’t even get me started on the line “You’re my fact-checking cuz”!
4. Like Tesla!