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.
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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.
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2. Although it should be noted that David Lee Roth seemed to have no problem with Ronald Reagan hailing from California.