Farm Report Seeks New Country Record To Be Angry About
Glen Rock, PA?The state motto of Virginia is "Sic Semper Tyrannis": Thus Always to Tyrants. To which a real American and a real man, like me, can only respond, fuck yes. However, "sic semper tyrannis" calls for a bit of exegesis, and I'm just the farmer to provide it. Let's start with "sic," which we're translating as "thus." "Thus," you will admit, is a highly ambiguous term, but here as in so many other contexts it simply means "death." So we see that the first element of the motto is a severe buttwhipping. If we can't physically assault them tyrants, though, because security is too tight, or because we're too busy plowing the south 40, or because we're too fat and drunk, we will ridicule them to within an inch of their lives. We learned that shit from Tom Paine.
Then there is "semper": always. That means after we got finished with George III, we've only just begun, as Karen Carpenter would put it. We proud Jeffersonian agrarians will chastise tyrants wherever they may rear their ugly pinheads, and we will do so unto eternity.
Perhaps the most difficult element in the hermeneutics of the state motto, however, is "tyrannis." The American Revolution was a tax revolt and, to be frank with you, I've seen more restrictive zoning ordinances than the tyranny the colonists were fighting against. What Sam Adams would make of the FDA depends on what kind of weapons he could obtain.
I propose to you that the nastiest tyrants of today are the people who make our culture the thing of horror that it is, the arbiters of our mediocrity. Philippe de Montebello, perhaps, protecting the world's cultural legacy while making art safe for extremely rich people. THUS ALWAYS. Or David Remnick, ensconced in that fortress of pseudo-intellectualism, The New Yorker. THUS ALWAYS. Or Steven Spielberg, who teaches us important moral lessons using animatronic Holocaust survivors. THUS ALWAYS. Or the music writers of The New York Times, anointing folkies and exercising (at least in their distended minds) a pervasive cultural authority. THUS ALWAYS. For pity's sake, Diane Rehm and Juan Williams. THUS ALWAYS, I say.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about these chumps is that they aren't aware of their own hegemony; they actually look at themselves as embattled vestiges of truth and quality. Meanwhile, they all voted for Al Gore. They are a Stasi of cultural orthodoxy and high art schlockmeisters of extreme conformity.
Perhaps you are thinking to yourself at this point, "Farmer Crispy, the reason that you regard these people as tyrants?aside from the fact that they have names like 'Philippe de Montebello'?is because they send you rejection letters and don't answer your e-mails. If you could get something in The New Yorker, you wouldn't be thinking of it as a pretentious mediocrity. If Spielberg would just option your script for the biopic of Barry Goldwater, you'd disarm, quit the militia, lunch at Nobu with a waif model and drift toward sleep each evening in a private orgy of self-congratulation. Dude: you'd be singing with the castrati."
Well, fuck you, you little meat weasel. All that is perfectly true, but irrelevant. My point of view from here on the farm, addled by herbicide and a lifetime of miserable failure, is a perfectly legitimate one. It takes a colonist to detect a tyrant. (And about the origin of the phrase "meat weasel," it is listed in Cassell's The Big Book of Filth as a synonym for "penis." The Big Book of Filth is an incomparable reference work for the aspiring author or adolescent, far more useful than that prig Roget, for example. Some other terms for the male member: dingwallace, pinkler, big foot Joe, trouser trumpet, pimple, todger, crack-hunter, the Ambassador, Old Slimy, Percy, Roger, Julius Caesar, old blind Bob, Barney, meat-cleaver, schnitzel, ham howitzer, reamer, shitstick, tentpeg, gobstopper, bacon bazooka, winny-popper, tosh, beaver cleaver, pork sword, tickle faggot, trouble-giblets, arse-opener, beard-splitter, blue-veined custard-chucker, quimstake.)
All of this (except the meat weasel and its synonyms) brings me to a very cool CD, which features the state seal of Virginia on the cover and is called Thus Always to Tyrants, by Scott Miller and the Commonwealth (Sugar Hill). It's alt country or classic rock or something, but one can hardly disagree with the sentiments: Virginia pride and good American music. The range is Springsteen to the Cult to Appalachian/Celtic to a Civil War-style ballad to a gospel hymn: all of it original, all of it extremely well-written and well-played. Really, all Philippe needs is to ditch the Mahler and baste himself for a few years in excellent, guitar-based roots rock, and he will be a much more positive influence on the cultural environment. Miller is from rural Virginia, and he's proud, Ms. Rehm. Understand?
I am extremely sick of writing positive reviews. First of all, I am a bitter asshole, and second, like most other folks I'm a much better writer when I'm slaying people than when I'm praising them. How many times can you say "extremely well-written and well-played"? My own eyes glaze over while I type it in. Imagine the gratification I felt, therefore, when I got the latest Trisha Yearwood album in the mail. Trish has a definite list to schlock, and is one of those people who has led Nashville further and further away from actual country music.
But sadly, I have to admit that Inside Out (MCA) is a pretty damn good disc. What Nashville gives its biggest stars is absolutely impeccable craft, and the album is perfectly?really perfectly?produced, down to the last note all the way back in the arrangement of the last song. And Trisha does have a transcendently beautiful voice: an incomparably pure tone with just enough of a country catch to pack some emotional wallop.
While there is the occasional sign of vapidity, for the most part the songs are good, too. For example, she sings the classic Rosanne Cash song "Seven Year Ache," and she sings it with Rosanne, and though the arrangement is identical to the original version, it sends chills through me. Even the syrup, as in "Melancholy Blue," is a cut above average. So what the hell, you know?
I lost track of K.T. Oslin sometime in the 80s after her brief reign as one of the top female country singers. She was always a bit unusual: a little more urban and feisty than most, with no pedal steels. Then she faded from view; I'm not sure exactly why.
Now she's absolutely back. Live Close By, Visit Often (BNA) is a great album, though really it doesn't have much to do with country. It's more like the kick-ass soul that Wynonna's been doing lately, or for that matter a more unnerving or menacing Bonnie Raitt. You just hope that something this good can find a commercial niche, because I don't hear a country hit on it. But I swear, if you buy this and play it for people, they'll be a little happier when it's on than they were before. The lyrics are clever, the interpretation is masterful and the whole thing gives more momentum to whitegirl soul.
Now, I'm probably not the only one who thinks that the best mainstream male country artists working now are Dwight Yoakam, George Strait and Alan Jackson. But those guys all started in the 80s and what I lie awake at night in Pabst-soaked despair wondering is where the next generation is coming from. An extremely good possibility is this kid Brad Paisley, who's just put out his second album. The album will sell hundreds of thousands of copies; he's hip to Garth Brooks' program. But perhaps a bit slyly, just under the radar, there is a strong neoneotrad esthetic lurking. Part II (Arista) is delightful, with songs alternately hilarious and touching. Brad is a fine singer with his finger on the tradition's pulse, but he is also a masterful guitar player, and perhaps the best moment on the record is an instrumental, a steaming version of the Munsters theme. Paisley is already being anointed as heir apparent, and I'm anointing him too, though not his bacon bazooka. If music for white people is not to perish from the earth, it will survive with Brad's help.
Okay. I might as well just come out and admit it. My favorite kind of music is bluegrass. When Wanda's out at the hairstylist and the kids are at school, or when I'm driving somewhere alone in my truck, that's what I've got on. (Otherwise, they won't let me play it, insisting in their vicious way on Akinyele's stunning and profound power ballad, "Put It in Your Mouth"). So imagine my pleasure last week when new albums by Rhonda Vincent and Del McCoury arrived in my mailbox out here on Rural Route 4. Rhonda and Del are from different generations, and their music is in some ways very different indeed: they give you the two poles of contemporary traditional grass.
The Storm Still Rages (Rounder) is Rhonda's second album. Among all American musics aside perhaps from jazz, bluegrass places the most emphasis on instrumental virtuosity. Rhonda is a fine mandolin player, and is accompanied here by a group of masters who play flawlessly. The result is a record that is both trad and very smooth: comparable to the first few albums by Alison Krauss and Union Station, though Vincent is perhaps not as distinguished a singer as Krauss. Wanda calls bluegrass "nerve-jangling music," but I find albums like The Storm Still Rages bring me more peace and composure than any other sort of music. I have already played this album perhaps 10 times. And you've got to give Rhonda credit for the beautiful Bill Monroe tribute, "Is the Grass Any Bluer."
Wanda instantly and literally started screaming, though, when I played Del and the Boys (Ceili), and I see why. Putting on this album makes you think it's 1952, and Del just came down out of his shack in the Kentucky hills to record for the first time. Again, the playing is virtuosic, but hard, if you get me. And Del's high lonesome tenor, which bears comparison to Monroe's and Ralph Stanley's, often hits pitch that's merely approximate, but somehow right, and that gives you a shivering sense of ancient otherness. I play this one a lot, too (along with my other Del McCoury albums), but I really do play them alone.
The Statler Brothers have been around for eternity. Back in the early 60s, when they were recording classics like "Flowers on the Wall" (recently covered in a hit version by the waycool Eric Heatherly), they were a harmony quartet who emerged in the 50s from a Southern white gospel tradition (specifically, from Staunton, VA, in the Shenandoah Valley) into the world of secular music. None of them was named "Statler"; legend has it that they named themselves after a brand of facial tissue. They spawned a whole style of country music: the Oak Ridge Boys, for example, churned out number-one hits using the Statlers' basic metier.
You're not going to hear any of the songs on Showtime (Music Box) on the radio, but and because the Statlers still sound the way they did in 1964. Most of the songs were written by Brother Don Reid, and feel like classics. There is something a bit Night of the Living Dead about this album precisely because it seems so indifferent to the passage of time and the Statlers seem to have reawakened into the 21st century. Perhaps, judging from the gospel tunes here like "The Other Side of the Cross," they've achieved resurrection. But what Philippe de Montebello, say, needs to understand is that country music does not have to go anywhere to be great: the miracle is that it survives as a traditional art and a traditional culture in a nation that the cultural authorities regard as being administered from gleaming offices in NYC and L.A. We and the Statlers are surviving out here in a world infested by meat weasels, a world of rootless pop, pretentious avant-garde gestures, and the museums/mausoleums of fine art.