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listening to country
Monday, May 5 2008
Back when I'd built the woodshed in late summer, 2007, I'd made a design mistake that had had to be corrected soon after I'd started loading it with wood. There was nothing for the wood to lean against at either end of the shed, and so it could only be stacked in a pyramid centered in the middle of the shed. I ended up using some scrap particleboard to make solid ends to lean the wood pile against, but I wanted a more permanent solution. So today I added two additional horizontal cross braces at either end and used these to support vertical one by sixes, three at each end.
As I worked, I listened to an FM radio attached to headphones. Because its broadcast antenna is in a provisional state, my computer's FM transmitter's signal was too weak to reach the woodshed and I settled on a country music station called "The Wolf" (it's a part of the interstate Cumulus Media empire). At first I was listening mostly ironically, which isn't hard to do with this particular genre. Like Christian music, there's absolutely no ambiguity to it whatsoever, and many of the songs tell stories that fall into a familiar country music template. A young person resists something about life, is told by an older person that one day he or she will understand why life is the way it is, and finally we fast forward a generation and our young person, now grown, is telling his or her own kid why life is the way it is. These songs usually support traditional institutions and figures of authority, though these days country musicians borrow heavily from the rebellious hellions of rock and roll, at least as the genre existed in the early 1980s. It's a cleaner, less cerebral, more conservative pop music tailored to the large demographic of people who are turned off by the confusion and decadence of rock and roll, the scary blackness of hip hop, and the vapid overproduced rhythms of conventional pop, but want something more substantial than Christian contemporary. More on the latter in a bit.
Over time, as I've lived more and more of my life away from the South, I've come to be more accepting of the conventions of country music. I genuinely like slide guitars now, and I can appreciate clever lyrics even when they're telling me I need to quit whoring and drinking and start supporting the troops by thinking fondly of poorly-considered wars.
After I'd been listening for awhile, I noted that I was entertained by about 50% of the songs, was disgusted by the schmaltz in 40% of the songs, and genuinely liked about ten percent. In this last category was a neo-traditional gospel number called "Long Black Train" by someone with a gorgeous baritone voice named Josh Turner. (Warning for the children: that YouTube video seems to have anti-abortion, anti-lesbian, anti-fishnet stockings, anti-Jack Daniels, and anti-drug messages. I would not want to have been so beautifully discouraged from taking drugs, hanging out with girls in fishnet stockings, and drinking booze when I was younger.)
The community of creative people in the world tend, as a group, to be more open-minded than the average. This follows naturally from the proclivity to bring new non-human things into the world. It's harder to resist change and fear differences when you yourself are bringing about changes. That said, country music is a media dominated by creative conservatives. This has had a stifling effect on the genre, keeping it mired in ancient forms such as the child-adult storytelling template mentioned earlier. Where country music has changed, the innovations have had to come from outside the genre, since none of its musicians have felt sufficiently free to undertake their own innovations. Most of these innovations have come from rock and roll, though occasionally they have also come from fusions with orchestral music, but only because rock and roll had paved the way.
As conservative as country musicians are, they look like the Sgt. Pepper-era Beatles compared to Christian contemporary musicians. As with country, the lyrics of Christian contemporary music is forced by circumstances to be devoid of ambiguity. Additionally, the words must relate directly to either Jesus or God. Christian contemporary musicians are not out to create their own genre of music; their job is to appropriate existing forms, clean it up, inject as much Jesus as possible, and distribute it widely. I've started reading a book called Rapture Ready by Daniel Radosh (someone Gretchen knew at Oberlin) which provides personal accounts of experiences had within the evangelical pop culture universe. It opens with a look at the schmaltzy music and moves on to crappy Christian products, and continues on into the massive diversity among niche-targeted bibles. I haven't read beyond that, but it's proving to be more of a treat than most books in the "people Gretchen knows" library. It reminds me of a bit of investigative journalism I'd once imagined: auditing Biology courses at Liberty University. Alas, now I'm too old.
Today was Cinco de Mayo, which in the calendar I share with Gretchen means it was the anniversary of the day we got engaged, seven years ago on the actual beach in Venice Beach. Tonight we decided to celebrate with dinner and a movie in Rhinebeck. We ate at Gigi's, which is a wonderful (though suitably-for-Rhinebeck overpriced) Italian restaurant. It was warm enough to sit outside and everything about the experience was great except for my main course, which was a miserable ultra-thin-crust pizza covered in root vegetables that hadn't been mentioned in its entry in the menu. (I do not like cooked root vegetables unless they are potatoes and have been fashioned into french fries.)
Next we'd be seeing a movie at Upstate Films, but since we had a little time to kill, we engaged in the activity that makes me hate Rhinebeck more than any other town, village, or hamlet: we walked around its deserted streets looking in windows at things I could never imagine wanting to buy. Sometimes I wonder if Rhinebeck is anything more than a movie set; most of the times I've been in its downtown, the place has been nearly devoid of people and the shops have all been closed.
The movie we saw was called The Visitor, about what happens when a cranky old Connecticut professor goes to his Manhattan apartment and finds that it has been rented to a pair of illegal immigrants scammed into thinking no one else lived there. The Visitor was written and directed by Tom McCarthy, the man who also brought us The Station Agent, and the two movies actually have a lot in common. They both employ simple story arcs, and rely nearly as much on lingering gazes as they do on dialogue. In both, our heroes leave normal work-a-day environments and find themselves in a completely new ones, where extroverted (and somewhat flakey) characters intercept, engage, and managed to wrest free hitherto-concealed interests from our heroes. In The Visitor, that interest is in playing African drums. It's a simple desire, and wouldn't be the basis for a movie were it not for the fact that our heroe's extroverted catalyst, a Syrian who plays African drums, is soon to run afoul of America's post-9Eleven anti-immigrant hysteria. Few Americans have any idea what it is like to be detained for immigration violations, and what that can do to a nascent life as an American. We're treated to the maddening reality of a nation that had the misfortune to be run by precisely the wrong people when 9Eleven occurred. People who don't understand other countries, who don't imagine how a nation can be strengthened and nourished by immigrants, can't be expected to make good decisions on the rare occasions when terrorists attack. Post 9Eleven, a wall of zero-tolerance descended, and in this case the wall was even more Kafkaesque than the kind built by governments. It had one more level of remove. The bleak windowless detention center in Queens where our Syrian drummer ends up is run by a private contractor, and its staff seem to be under even less obligation to be helpful than the staff at, say, a state prison. Still, this tragic turn of events provides the basis for what looks like a nascent love story when the Syrian drummer's mother shows up at our grumpy college professor's apartment. Still, as Gretchen and I left the theatre, my first observation was, "That was sort of a downer."
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