A Sparx/Engels Reader

Never throw anyone into a pool unless he is wearing something expensive that will be ruined by the water. (The whole point of throwing people in swimming pools is to recapture a sort of Kennedy administration insouciance. Kennedy administration insouciance presupposes such great wealth that things like rust-jammed Cartier wristwatches are expected to be laughed off as a good joke in the morning.)...Never throw anyone into the pool if she's in her car. This brings back bad memories for the Kennedy family and will wreck all the insouciance for sure.

--PJ O'Rourke, Modern Manners

There are many species of bat in this state, and they are overly active little bastards, even during the harsh Winters, when they should be hibernating, and dreaming of the bounty of mosquitoes that awaits them in the Summer months near above-ground swimming pools in Jordan, and tire dumps just outside Princeton. None of these bats are as deadly or as sleep deprived as the modern human information bat...like Paul Demko. These people have their ears pricked like the most sensitive radar equipment the government allegedly doesn't have for any sort of news or thought reflecting on the joys, hobbies, and even dislikes of their friends and acquaintances.

Case in point, a fairly intelligent young man named Keith Harris used to write for CityPages back in the day. Being part of the old warehouse district crowd, Demko pays a friendly visit to Harris' blog from time to time, and on a couple of occasions has passed on things to me that I might find interesting. To wit, a recent post by Harris:

There is, after all, a large contingent of artists and fans, grouped loosely under the alt-country rubric, that finds in roots-rock an easy way to routinely adopt dated postures of populist authenticity.

In my paper, I will briefly examine the history of enacting rural stereotypes in American progressive culture before focusing on the way questions of authenticity currently play out in certain circles as an opposition between �real� roots-country and �fake� Nashville pop-country. Then, I will extrapolate from that discussion to the broader cultural sphere in order to examine what masks are effective for communicating with a mass audience and, more importantly, how the right has seized upon a nuanced popwise notion of performance and public identity and why the center-left has clung to a bland self-defeating essentialism.

It's an interesting premise, one that deserves some even handed discussion over some crisp air and wood-splitting.

First, he's only half-wrong. The fact is, every kind of genre or sub-genre has people who adopt and cling to it for hipness' sake. I wouldn't really argue too much with anyone who thinks Springsteen and his ilk adopted some kind of insouciant, anachronistic, depression era personae because they thought po' folks just gettin' by under the cruel masters' yolks would resonate with the rubes. Lots of people dive in and out of scenes, costumes, and make-up for ulterior motives.

The backwash of this theory, though, is thinking that alt country is completely made up of people like this. The fact is, there are Country people in this land who just can't get with what's happening in Nashville, and they leave their politics out of it. Some of the Texans in my playlist are Red guys, and some of the Oregonians in it are Blue guys. At the end of the day, we hate Nashville and what it's doing to an American art form, and if you believe that's derived from a bland self-defeating essentialism, you're missing the point of the sub-genre, and its population.

Alt country didn't grow out of a hipsterish, political movement. It's a reaction to the Wal-Martization of Country as a genre for the preservation of its radio format and the decades old studio system that built up around it in Nashville. About three labels, three radio corporations, and a handful of retail outlets positioned this music as a narrow lifestyle with costumes, masks, and various peripherals and killed the artistic creativity that had been a hallmark of it for many years previous to that (Harris might argue that I misunderstand Country's place in history and overestimate the musical innovation that it fostered and produced, but that would probably be the crux of our disagreement, and a point from which neither of us would budge). Artists like Ed Burleson, Pat Green, Charlie Robison, and Reckless Kelly are Texas "alt country" in that they aren't accepted or produced by the 3 or 4 big labels in Nashville and receive little or no airtime on country formatted stations from monolithic disasters like ClearChannel, Infinity and Disney. Acts like The Gourds, String Cheese Incident, Mofro, and Son Volt might fit that hipsterish sphere of "alt country" that too often critics want to lump everyone in the genre with, but all they're doing is blending various music people of our generation have had banging in their eardrums for years with steel guitars, fiddles, and mandolins; not in any desperate or offhand attempt at "making it big," but with a measured and reverential approach toward making some thoughtful music. Bands like Union Station, Kentucky Thunder, and The Gibson Brothers are "alt country" because they play traditional grass and mountain music that has been abandoned by really really really stupid shallow greedy moronic Program Directors and Music Directors at "country" stations for God knows what reason. ALL of these are just three examples of exploring new directions in twang music as a rebellion against some very bad decisions that were made circa 1980 and 1990; you could poll this small sample and find everything from borderline communists to virulent fascism, most likely, and you would find the same in their loyal fan bases.

Like I said Keith, it was a good thought, but it needs work. Maybe it's even more hip to bash people for being too hip.

P.S.--Assuming, for the sake of argument that Harris' premise is true, instead of Springsteen, his first example in the paper should be Dylan.  A young Jewish kid from Hibbing decides he's a Black hobo folksinger, moves to Dinkytown and coffeehouses it up, hops a few trains, ends up in New York City and starts "the Revolution."  I mean, as long as we're running around, accusing folks of puttin' on airs....or, how about "A Prairie Home Companion?"  They both fit the model and thesis he proposes.