Sigh II

I gave up recently.

In the last few months, I've been inundated with shit from Nashville encouraging me to vote for absolute fucking wastes of time like Rascall Flatts and Kenny Chesney for CMA awards.

Here's the thing, you, me, we, us, them...we don't want stimulating variety. We want a package. Let me illustrate.

ESPN.com has a pretty entertaining writer on Page2 of their web site named Bill Simmons. Bill is a very engaging author, who is talented at dropping pop culture references into his work to flesh out ideas and add humorous twists to his topics. He's also one of the most un-abashed Boston sports fans you'll ever read. He bleeds for the Sox, Patriots, and Celtics. And, for that reason, his articles during the past few baseball and football seasons have really added a honed edge to the "Boston experience." His fear and his lament, however, have been stuff like the HBO special "The Curse of the Bambino," the movie "Fever Pitch," and every useless shot of Ben Affleck in his Red Sox cap on TV. You see, what Hollywood and TV think we want is a derivative Red Sox experience, and so they've hand-delivered this sort of cliché-ridden picture of the thing to suck us in.

Don't get me wrong, Red Sox fans are awful, I hate being around them. But I have the good sense to know that their pain leading up to last season's World Series was a very ugly thing, deep and rich, striped and spotted, with wave after wave of idiosyncracy and nuance. I would rather run into some drunken guy in a bar yelling "Sawks!," and tell him the only reason it took so long was because Yawkey didn't like black ball players. THAT'S when you get the true picture of what that whole mess was all about, not some bullshit movie where Drew Barrymore bounces her ample bossom up and down on a baseball field grossly cheapening a moment that literally millions of people were praying for, for 86 years.

But your stupid children won't know the difference. They're going to equate this thing with Ben Affleck, not Leigh Montville and Peter Gammons.

And who's to say they shouldn't?

The point is, you could go buy a Red Sox hat, a "Good Will Hunting" lunch box, watch "Fever Pitch" and the "Curse of the Bambino" and call yourself a Red Sox fan, and no one at the Wal Mart or Target where you bought these things would say anything to you.

Now pay close attention here...

Right after Gretchen Wilson strutted out on stage with a dip in, proclaiming herself a Redneck Girl...Faith Hill is now at or near the top of the charts as...tah-dahhhhh...a Mississippi Girl! No more whispy goddess in designer dress moaning of love from the Eiffel Tower with her bald husband by her side. Dammit, she's DOWN HOME.

The number one Billboard Country song right now is "Play Something Country," by Brooks & Dunn. This comes from the authentic duo--put together by the marketing managers of two labels in Nashville who thought one's voice and the other's pouty cowboy act would play well with the hausfraus--who brought you the boot-scootin' fucking boogie.

Well fuck you Kixx (what a stupid fucking name by the way, what's your real name?) and Ronnie. Johnny Cash fucking hated you. And he hated you too, Kenny. He hated all of you people in Nashville. You know why? You gave up relevance for money. Country music wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't like it was just going to up and disappear. But you panicked and decided it needed to be a product.

"Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy," isn't in the Harlan Howard tradition. Harlan Howard would have invented that phrase, not read it off of a bumper sticker and made a song out of it, ten or fifteen fucking years after it was first said. The long ago dead genius of the songwriters in Nashville was their ability to translate common life into meaningful music with clever twists of language. You fucking people have turned that all around bass-ackwards. Now you take jingle slogans and inundate your radio listeners with them until they go to the fucking Wal-Mart and buy whatever it is you're selling.

Several people at a small radio station in Stillwater can attest to this. I got piles and piles of mail in the last few months encouraging me to vote for this and for that for CMA awards. Many for artists in direct competition with each other for THE SAME CATEGORY. Piles of it. You want to know the joke? IT ALL CAME FROM THE SAME ADDRESS IN NASHVILLE.

You, me, us, we, them...we don't want Country Music. We want the Country Music package.

I give up. I miss you Johnny.