A Little Bit Country
What's wrong with country
music today? "Once upon a time, wild-eyed boys, high on home brew and diet
pills, ran amok and plowed the occasional luxury sedan into restaurants just
off [Nashville's] Music Row. ... The women had big hair, bigger times,
truckstop/trailer park chic, and no problem singing songs about the real sexual
politic." This bit of historical camp comes from a recent issue of No
Depression , an infectiously enthusiastic Seattle-based magazine that calls
itself "The Alternative Country (Whatever That Is) Quarterly." Most journals
about country music are either oriented toward collectors, like the Journal
of Country Music , or oriented toward consumers, like any number of
Nashville publications about commercial country. But this is a magazine for a
new market: young music fans who grasp the absurdism in Dolly Parton's act, who
understand that Merle Haggard is a better singer than Garth Brooks, who see
punk-influenced bands like the Waco Brothers and Wilco as a vindication of
their idea of country music.
Alternative country is a reaction against the antiseptic safety of mainstream
country music. It's retro by necessity, so as to avoid the anemic white-soul
pablum that country became in the 1980s. It is deprogrammed, studiously sloppy,
bad-tempered, unfit for commercial country radio, heavy with the down-market
embarrassment of country's hillbilly past, and mostly made by rockers. Its
lyrics often caricature old-style country songs; they sound a lot like bad
Faulkner ("June went insane by the time she was nine/ killed her brother with a
tire iron," sings one alternative country act, Moonshine Willy). Its
instrumentation tends toward authentic-sounding fiddles and steel guitars, but
its sources are people like Neil Young--who shows up in Wilco's and Son Volt's
maundering ballads--and the Byrds, whose country-rock Sweetheart of the
Rodeo album appears in nearly everything.
The phrase "alternative country" has become as good as hard
cash in the last year, so desperate is the white pop industry for anything new.
"The next 10 years are going to be wild," says Gary Bennett from country band
BR5-49. His band was nominated for a Grammy, and country radio is slowly
picking up its singles. Wilco has sold 60,000 copies of its new album, Being
There ; the Old 97's, another of No Depression 's frequent causes, has
just been signed to the major label Elektra.
Alternative country could be prematurely taxonomized as being made up of four
kinds of bands. First there are those whose sheer talent makes them appealing
to fans. These include the Mavericks, Dwight Yoakam, and strict honky-tonk
classicists BR5-49, all of whom strike the difficult balance between
professionalism and cool, in the hallowed tradition of Merle Haggard and Willie
Nelson.
Next there are the semilegit crossovers between
country and rock or folk--Wilco, the Old 97's, Son Volt, Iris DeMent--who adorn
themselves in the trappings of country but use a studied, shambling rawness to
appeal to rock fans. Wilco, the No Depression -approved band with the
strongest fan base, swings between down-home sentimentality and rock
aggression: The lyrics to a new song, "Misunderstood," begin with spare piano
accompaniment and local color ("You're back in your old neighborhood/ where the
cigarettes taste so good") and end with feedback and tantrums ("I'd like to
thank you all for nothing at all!").
Then
there are the true eccentrics. Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean are the
singers and songwriters of Freakwater, whose recent album, Old Paint
(Thrill Jockey), is "alternative" by process of elimination, not by design.
Their songs sound like starched and nasal Appalachian old-time country music,
unvarnished to a fault, and their lyrics are anything but mythopoetic cliché.
Freakwater's bad-habit songs "My Old Drunk Friend" and "Smoking Daddy" are
about the anxiety and unglamorousness of bad habits, and consequently
believable as contemporary songs. They don't respect religion much, either. On
"," they sing: "There's nothing so pure/ as the kindness of an atheist/ a
simple act of unselfishness/ that never has to be repaid." Lambchop, a very
quiet 11-piece band fitted out with a trumpet, baritone saxophone, and organ,
as well as the standard country setup, has been building a low-budget and
slightly surreal version of Billy Sherrill's string-swept 1970s country
productions. Their are slow and graceful, with lulling chord cycles, shimmering
dynamics, and surreal lyrics delivered just above a whisper (as on a recent
full-length album, How I Quit Smoking [Merge]).
Finally, there are the amateur ethnographers from Chicago,
Seattle, Austin, Brooklyn, and other centers of bohemia. This fourth
group--bands such as Whiskeytown, Moonshine Willy, and the Waco Brothers--uses
country as a shock device, a flash of bad taste, and seems to view the genre as
an oppressive religion. The cover of Angry Johnny and the Killbillies' album,
Hankenstein , shows Hank Williams drawn like Frankenstein's monster; the
cover of a Bloodshot alternative-country anthology called Hell-Bent
parodies a famous photo of a grimacing, emaciated Williams in an Alabama jail.
The drawing is by Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers--also a founding member of
the Mekons--and it puts arrows through Williams, so that he's half St.
Sebastian, half drunken starveling.
"Alternative" has famously been defined as meaning that at least one of the
musicians in the band can't play. BR5-49 and the Mavericks place out of the
genre on those grounds. On BR5-49 (Arista), the band demonstrates a
grasp of 1940s and 1950s country, down to the grace notes and details, and
invests its songs with so much professionally recycled enthusiasm that a
listener can relearn the dynamics of the old stuff. The Mavericks, in Music
for All Occasions (MCA), clearly possess enough knowledge of country's
history to feel ambivalent toward it; but it's such a high-functioning bar band
that it can't be alternative. Freakwater, on the other hand, often leaves you
thinking that it would be great if it just sang its harmonies with a
modicum of timing.
One thing clearly absent from a lot of
alternative country, however, is piety. Traditional country is a sidestepping,
roundabout art, fond of coy and cagey divagations. "I'll believe that you still
love me/ when you wear your veil of white," Williams wrote in 1949. "But you
think that you're above me/ so there'll be no teardrops tonight." The educated
bohemian atheists behind alternative country, on the other hand, have no shame
at all. The hell with piety, they say; they'd rather play up country's
self-destructive side: drinking, cheating, and family crackups.
The problem with all this is
that posturing about Southern "truckstop/trailer park chic" can sometimes be
little more than that--posturing. A great country singer is someone who's been
around the block but can't get to the point in mixed company. Being punk-blunt
in country music usually yields little more than a cheap lampoon. It's not as
if all this postmodern self-consciousness amounts to anything new. The
country-music business has always marketed a certain nostalgia for itself. The
earliest "hillbilly" recordings had a sort of present-immediately-becoming-past
effect: They purported to be old-timey as soon as they were released. Contrary
to the easily caricatured image of country musicians as "the real thing," many
hillbilly artists were as self-conscious as their pop and folk counterparts. In
1936, well before No Depression was launched, the Carter Family recorded
a song called "No Depression in Heaven." A.P. Carter, the family's patriarch,
was certifiably rural; he grew up in southwestern Virginia's Poor Valley. But
he was no primitive. He was a song collector obsessed with the idea of
recovering America's vanishing oral tradition. The Old 97's take their name
from "The Wreck of the Old 97," a song popularized by Vernon Dalhart in 1924.
Dalhart, born Marion Slaughter, was the son of a successful rancher from a
Texas port city. He enrolled at the Dallas Conservatory of Music, and sang
Gilbert and Sullivan in New York City opera houses before perceiving that there
was a market in hillbilly songs.
Not to dismiss this new
breed of country rockers altogether. American culture has always fed off
half-truths about authenticity, and this is the way in which alternative
country is a genuine expression of something: Hipsters with a sense of ironic
detachment, like Chicago's Moonshine Willy, have as much claim to the "real"
America as any mule-driver. Where alternative country runs into trouble is its
tendency to ignore what's durable about country in favor of its stereotypical
hay-bales-and-whiskey-bottles shtick. At its worst, it's become a new refuge
for the untalented musician, a fact that Ryan Adams from the band Whiskeytown
owns up to in the song "Faithless Street": "I had started this damn country
band/ 'cause punk rock was too hard to sing."
