Posted on 05/09/2003 7:41:03 PM PDT by Pokey78
Last week, I watched ''Wag the Dog,'' the 1997 Barry Levinson film about a Hollywood producer who is hired to create a television war to cover up a domestic crisis. The first call he makes is to a character played by Willie Nelson. Every war needs a theme song after all, even a fake war, and so Willie flies out to California and walks around the swimming pool, strumming his guitar and riffing on words like ''America'' and ''proud'' and ''free.''
Country music is not providing the soundtrack to American life on an average day, unless you count the crossovers, which means that Shania Twain is played on pop stations and Faith Hill lands on the cover of fashion magazines. Most of the time, country music, like pop music, is just a bunch of love songs anyway, and no one really cares if there is a little extra twang in the guitar. Peacetime blurs the cultural divide between Britney Spears and LeAnn Rimes. But during times of war, Americans find a flag to snap onto the windows of their S.U.V.'s and country music sails into the foreground. For every battle, we get a new, disposable anthem, one that's catchier than ''The Star-Spangled Banner'' and easier to sing. Cultural conservatives, who rightly feel unrepresented in most of popular culture, are as comfortable with the lyrics of a country hit as they are tuning into Fox News, as these are the places their viewpoints are powerfully and abundantly represented. And that's exactly what makes these venues so popular. Country is no longer about the South; it's a state of mind. (Two of the Top 5 country stations are in Los Angeles and Chicago.) Listeners and viewers are united by ideology, not geography.
In 1967, Merle Haggard wrote the first of the pro-war, anti-hippie-liberal-protester songs, ''Okie From Muskogee,'' a line from which -- ''We don't burn no draft cards down on Main Street'' -- set a standard for what it means to be a country-music-loving patriot that still stands today. Lee Greenwood was able to base an entire career on his 1983 ''God Bless the U.S.A.,'' a song that has been trotted out for wars, fireworks displays and all occasions in between. Everything that has come out since has felt like a variation on the theme. Darryl Worley's new album, ''Have You Forgotten?'' -- which is currently sitting at the top of the Billboard country charts -- covers just about every flag-waving impulse known to man. He wails about the importance of not backing down, being up for the fight, getting bin Laden (whose name he manages in a feat of vowel gymnastics to rhyme with ''forgotten''). Toby Keith has also scored big with ''Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (the Angry American),'' whose chorus pretty much packs it all in: ''And the Statue of Liberty/Started shaking her fist/And the eagle will fly/And there's gonna be hell/When you hear Mother Freedom. . . . '' You get the point.
There was a time when the fire that country music lighted beneath its listeners was to get down to the bar, get drunk and see if you couldn't find somebody to go home with. But the only rabble being roused these days is the call to arms. Country music has become so squeaky-clean that a recent song in which Tracy Lawrence claimed that his grandfather taught him ''how to cuss and how to pray'' was banned from several radio stations, cussing being too strong a concept for airplay. Long gone are the days when Merle Haggard took care of his searing morning hangover with an ''afternooner'' and sang about it. This is thanks in large part to the vice grip of Clear Channel Radio, which buys up radio stations and makes carefully researched decisions about what Americans are free to listen to. Clear Channel has decided that patriotism sells, and that cussing and afternooners are definitely out. As a result, the music industry is frantically trying to find people who look and sing like whoever was on the top of last week's chart.
Until the invasion of Iraq, the band that everybody in Nashville most wanted to copy was the Dixie Chicks, whose most recent album, ''Home,'' had the best of the war singles, a Vietnam ballad called ''Travelin' Soldier.'' Then, in a concert in London, the group's lead singer, Natalie Maines, told a cheering audience that ''we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.'' And that was it for the Dixie Chicks. Suddenly they were standing on the other side of the Merle Haggard line in the sand. They had become those hippie-liberal protesters they should have been singing against.
Oddly, though, because of country music's political consistency, what the Dixie Chicks did was big news. Their small statement of protest put them on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and earned them a Diane Sawyer interview, something that could not be replicated by any rock or pop or movie star whose protests are frankly expected. It would have been disappointing if Michael Moore had won an Oscar and failed to mention that President Bush didn't win the popular election. That's his job, and so he takes his boos and exits the stage, and no one really thinks about it much again. But country music is firmly on the other side of the cultural divide. Nashville is making music for an audience that is largely white and Republican. It is making music for the people who supported the war, though not necessarily for the people who fought in it.
In a sense, the songs become a kind of news service in themselves. A war is easier to understand when you can squeeze all the major objectives into a chorus and back it up with a catchy tune. You can hum along to all the reasons people fight and die. It's one way political opinion is made. Of course, free speech is another time-honored American tradition, even if it's not a hallmark of country music. Maybe the Dixie Chicks were speaking for some of those other folks. Maybe country music could use a few new hallmarks.
Ann Patchett is the author of ''Bel Canto,'' which won Britain's Orange Prize for Fiction.
Well, honey, neither is (c)rap. But to hear the shills tell it, that is the dominant "musical" force these days. It's not, of course, but that doesn't stop the Left and the gangsta wannabes from making the claim.
I sincerely doubt that this writer has ever done a Texas two-step, or ever set foot in a feed lot, or ridden a bull (mechanical or otherwise). But none of that matters. The idea in the Times is to sprinkle references about and SEEM to know what you're talking about. Actually knowing the subject of country music would be a handicap in writing for the Times Magazine. Might lead the writer to say things the editor would never allow to be printed.
Quelle domage, as the snots would say.
Congressman Billybob
Would you believe that there are currently NO FM country stations here in NYC since WYNY went off about 6 years ago?
What is "country"?
I thought that Country and Western was about the southWEST. Where cowboys rode. Blues was from the south (and moved up north as workers moved to northern industrial jobs). Jazz was from the south (New Orleans).
Nashville has offered a glossy version of country but the music making the charts hasn't been "country music" in a long time.
There was a classification of music that lasted as a classification into the 1950s called "hillbilly music" (just as rhythm and blues records would also be called "race records"). These names were just as common in NYC as they were in the south.
Was 1930s Texas Swing "big band", country, or pop music?
Start with a faulty premise and blather is sure to follow.
Jimmy Dale Gilmore or one of the other Flatlanders (who all hail from Lubbock and went to school together) spouted off against the President too at a small show.
These artists don't top the charts though (so they wouldn't be likely to get a bump on commercial radio from the controversy). They are favorites of left wing hate radio (aks Pacifica) though.
Another distinction is that the Vichy Chicks made their comments on foreign soil when the nation was on the verge of war.
They claim to have apologized but in reality have done no such thing. They have said that they were sorry for irritating their fans but there was no apology to President Bush or the citizens of Texas. Natalie has also defiantly said that she likes getting flak for this.
Did this author see the same movie we all did ( "Wag the Dog" )? The use of Willie Nelson in the film as "Johnny Dean" relied more on Willie's real life tax problems as his character's motivation than just a country star called to make a patriotic song. What a maroon she is.
The recent ABC* report of circulation you cited from also established that, of the Top 20 newspapers in terms of daily circulation, only two were down more than 1.3% from the same year-ago period. The two:
1. The New York Times
and
2. The Boston Globe, owned by the NYT and, if anything, an even more extreme left-wing rag.
Both were down over 5%!
Fewer are being fooled. And more are increasingly reaching the point of outright rejection.
Good for the U.S. of A.
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