More Thoughts on White Trash and Country Music

Kismet moment: in Monday's post, I commented on two articles: Ron Rosenbaum's piece on country music at Slate and Matt Wray's article on "white trash". Intrigued by Wray's article, I tracked down a collection of essays that he co-edited, also entitled White Trash. And, lo and behold, there is a great essay by Barbara Ching entitled "Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction and Critiques of Pure Country". Ching attempts to explain why country music is so disdained be intellectuals and explains the Catch-22 that many critics put it into. Some critics complain about its simplicity, that it is the work of rural primitives with no understanding of songwriting or musicianship. Others complain that it is slickly produced, emotionally manipulative pablum.

This essay was written in 1993, and in the intervening decade, old-school country music, bouyed by Johnny Cash's Rick Rubin-produced renaissance and the influence of alt-country, has taken on a hipster sheen. This renaissance has romanticized the supposed primitivism of early country and disdained the prepacked commercialism of what has come to be known as "Wal-Mart Country". Today, the alt-country ethos has started to seep back into mainstream country through artists such as Miranda Lambert, Jack Ingram and Big & Rich. But there is still a perceived divide between the hipster intellectuals who view old country has the work of charming primitives and the "white trash" who consume country as a regular part of their cultural diet.

This distinction, and the musical cross-pollination between the mainstream and the underground, has put country in a particulary white trash version of a problem common to all popular arts. The best example of this is the case of the Dixie Chicks. To non-country fans, the story is simple: brave artist makes a political statement and is crucified by her simple-minded, Bush-loving "white trash" fanbase. The story in fact is much more complicated. Even before Natalie Maines' famous comment, the Chicks were being viewed with suspicous eyes by many in the country world. They seemed to want to aspire to the hipster street cred of alt-country while keeping the financial rewards of mainstream country success. While on the one hand this alt-country cred meant keeping the rawness of old country alive in the face of the slickness of Wal-Mart country, it also meant taking a slightly superior attitude toward country music fans. The chicks, like other alt-country types, were trying to keep what they saw as the "real" tradition of country music alive despite the effort of country music fans (the "white trash" buying Wal-Mart country) to kill it.

As I said, this problem exists in all popular arts, it just takes on a specific class-consciousness in country music. All popular arts -- film, TV, pop music -- are created for mass audiences by a small elite subculture that considers themselves superior to the masses. Popular artists -- actors, directors, musicians -- are often fans of avant-garde artists who do work that they view as superior to their own. This leads to incidents like The Monkees hiring an unknown Jimi Hendrix to open for them and causing outrage when he simulates sex with his amplifier in front of an audience of prepubescent girls.

This tension will never be resolved and is in fact necessary for popular art to survive. The best pop art will synthesize the best of the underground and the mainstream to create a work that appeals to both audiences. this rarely happens, but when it does it is a glorious moment, and it is those moments--memories of past ones and anticipation of future ones--that keeps us coming back.

Rosenbaum Gets Twangy, LA Times Gets Testy

The simultaneous end of the tax season and the spring semester leaves me with a lot of free time on my hands. And a 21st-century office drone with free time and internet access finds himself reading a lot. I came across an especially interesting crop of articles today that I want to talk about:

• First up, two of my favorite love-hate objects: Ron Rosenbaum and country music. Rosenbaum outs himself as a fellow mainstream country fan and ponders the recent spate of songs about cancer. He ponders whether or not these songs are honest expressions of emotion or manipulative sentimentality. This is an interesting question for country music which, at its best, can be the most honest and direct form of popular music and, at its worst, can be the most glossy and superficial. This does not come down to some juvenile issue of "authenticity" as defined by music critics and indie record store workers. Country music, more than other pop genres, excells at fictional storytelling, so defining the difference between the emotionally powerful and manipulative can be blurry. The best part of this article, though, is country music being written about seriously in Slate. In the Mobius strip cultural existence that we now inhabit, mainstream country is so uncool among hipster intellectuals that it has almost become cool to declare your allegiance (Stanley Fish came out a few months ago in "Guilty Pleasures of Famous Intellectuals" article in the Sunday Times).

• Which leads us to our next article, on "white trash" and its history and current reappropriations. As someone whose past few Sunday dinners with the family have been devoted to discussing the fallout of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s departure from DEI, I feel qualified to discuss this. Is "white trash" an offensive term? Wray has a typical academic's lack of a sense of humor is his implication that using the term "white trash" in a joking way somehow implicitly endorses early-20th century eugenic practices. The term, when used among poor whites, is used to demarcate between those poor whites that have respect for themselves and those that do not. A poor white may not have much class or taste, but they maintain a certain level of dignity that those marked "white trash" do not. Is is similar to Chris Rock's famous routine. I won't pull a Michael Scott on you here, but you know which one I am referring to. The troubling thing is how "white trash" is so widely accepted and used by all groups but that other word is strictly off-limits to all but a certain group.

• Finally a pair of hilariously stuffy and off-base articles from yesterday's LA Times: 1 2. Nothing much to say, they are just pretty damn funny in their grumpy old man-ness. Shickel's article takes one classic approach to the grumpy old man op-ed, taking the worst examples of a new a confusing media form and arguing that it will destroy all that has come before it. Never mind that 100 years of technology rapildy changing our culture have taught us that the emergence of new forms of communication do not destroy old ones but merely take their place alongside them. The pefectly named Darlymple takes an even more idiotic and offensive tack, assuming that consumers of mass culture are mindless automotons that lack the ability process any of the information or entertainment they take in. They believe everyone has the same aversion to irony they do.

Programming note: I have not abandoned the Shakespeare film series and it will return sometime this week just as soon as the copy of Welles' Macbeth I ordered comes in. The combination of the end of school and Welles' Shakespeare films being harder to find than Keyser Soze have put us a little behind the schedule.

Country Song of the Week: "Stupid Boy" Keith Urban/Sarah Buxton

The Olivier post is coming soon; I was only recently able to track down a copy of Richard III. I plan on watching it tonight and having the post up tomorrow. In the meantime, though, I am going to indulge another of my passions: country music. I was raised on country and in recent years have come back around to appreciating it as one of the most intelligent and lyrically interesting forms of popular music going. I am fan of not only the hipster fashionable old-school country (Cash, Waylon and Willie and the boys, etc) and alt-country, but also of mainstream country, especially the things that have been happening in Nashville in the last few years.

So, on to my country song of the week, which I think illustrates how great country lyrics can be. For the past few weeks, I have been haunted by Keith Urban's new single, "Stupid Boy". Today, I discovered that this song is in fact a cover of a song by a young country artist named Sarah Buxton. I am not technologically advanced enough to embed the songs in my post, but you can follow these links to listen to them:

Sarah Buxton's Myspace page: You can play it on the jukebox

Keith Urban's website: You can watch the video

As the song was originally recorded by Buxton (who also co-wrote it) it is a female empowerment ballad by a woman (speaking of herself in third person) breaking free of an emotionally abusive relationship to find herself. Fairly standard stuff lyrically, the kind of thing the Dixie Chicks would have recorded around '98.

Urban, however, while only changing a single pronoun, turns the song around into a plaintive lament by the abusive boyfriend. Slowing the tempo, stripping it of the original's glossy production and singing slightly behind the beat, Urban takes a typical Nashville Sound song and turns it into something gloriously weird and sad. Most importantly, the lyrics, which come dangerously close to corny in the original, take on a new resonance when the speaking roles are reversed. The dialogue the songs create between each other shows the beautiful ellipticism of country lyrics and the ability of country singers to transcend a song's lyrics while never devaluing them.