My friend Jason says that country ain’t good. And if it’s good, then it ain’t country. And you better believe he ain’t the only one that thinks this.
Countless bumper stickers, T-shirts, and catcalls have made it obvious that most people find country music only slightly less irritating than Nancy Kerrigan’s smile.
And it’s not only the dunces who shower themselves in BBMak and Dave Matthews Band who feel this way. It’s people who like good music, too. It’s people who dig the stuff that country turned into.
How many people out there love Elvis? He’s a country boy, man. Buddy Holly? Country to the bone. Heck, even Sly threw some country in with the Family Stone. All that funk left a little room for some down home stomp.
No one realizes that country is like R & B; it’s an integral part of rock ‘n’ roll. Granted, R & B has fallen into an overproduced, Coke-selling trap in recent years, but there are still artists like D’Angelo who put out albums that got all the soul of Sam Cooke and then some.
The same goes for country. Sure you gotta look a little harder, but the good stuff is out there. I’m not talking about all the gunk that comes out of Nashville and spreads its wide, open spaces all over VH1. I’m talking about the real McCoy. The stuff that hunkers down in the slop with the pigs, wallows in the groove and pumps straight from the heart.
Back in the day, country was punk rock. Everybody’s parents hated it. It was loud (louder than anything else down South), it bastardized church music, and it made people want to get a movin’ and a hollerin’. Them yellers would sing about your problems; the problems that go along with working hard and gettin’ nuthin’.
People still appreciate that kind of country. Jason likes Johnny Cash and Hank Williams. Merle Haggard still tours and gets his grub playing music. But no one seems to realize that there are bands out there now who are as good if not better.
There are groups that bypass all the diluting production of Shania Twain, the soulless songwriting of Clint Black and the worthless pompousity of Garth Brooks (not to mention the mullets of anyone south of the Mason-Dixon line) and lay down shuddering, stirring boot kickers. Songs that kick you in the teeth and then run off with the fillings. This is music you gotta watch out for, cause it was raised in the backwoods and there ain’t no rules out in the backwoods.
Look at bands like Cash Audio (formerly Cash Money, but they got sued for having that name), out of Chicago, who pull the blues out on the highway and push it into overdrive while channeling Elvis with a distortion pedal. They even respect the beat enough to forgo a bass player in favor of planting the drums into the mix, all big and heavy. And, boy, if you got one sense of what soul is, then you’ll find ten tons of it in their gizzards.
On the sweeter side of things is Neko Case and Her Boyfriends, another Chicago realer who sounds how I imagine Faith Hill would sound like if someone shoved her inside a shoebox and made her listen to Jerry Lee Lewis records for ten hours straight. She rips her voice out of her gut and sings songs about killing lovers who cheat and pretty girls from Kentucky. What more could you want out of a woman?
There’s even a Nashville clocker who still knows that country should rattle and roll, like a tractor flying through a cornfield on its way to be fed. You see, Hank Williams III remembered that country was punk rock 30 or 40 years before punk rock and he brewed up a concoction of the two.
Of course, he had a bit of home schoolin’ from his grandpa who could shoot a tune straight full of buckshot in his sleep. But, Hank III did have to escape the atrocities of his father’s festering output so he gets quite a bit of credit for sidestepping that pothole.
But there are bands that were weaned on the Nashville trash and brought out what was hot in the schlock and twisted it into some blazing banging. Like the Country Teasers, who heard some of the stankest rubbish Nashville had to offer while growing up in Scotland, but still manage to shuck out the most furious, insidious, devil-driven hogswaller you might ever hear.
And if a bunch of blokes from the U.K. can catch the grease fire burning behind Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, then I hope you can, at least, get singed by the bands that try to stick the red hot poker straight up your backside.
Kyle Pearson in an undecided sophomore who worries more about rock ‘n’ roll than he worries about his health. Of course, your mom is always there to give him a hand with that. Send love mail, hate mail and credit card numbers to kylomite@hotmail.com.
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