Pot Calls Kettle Black; Film At 11.
E-mail Lucifer; Tell him he’ll have to place an order at Land’s End for winter gear, because I’m about to say something nice about Miley Cyrus.
No, I can’t stand her. She’s a terrible singer and actress. Koda Kumi or anyone in Morning Musume (or any female in the Japanese pop scene, quite frankly) could eat her for breakfast and shit out the Pussycat Dolls. But in a Parade magazine interview that hitting newspaper inserts this weekend, apparently she has a few choice words about the genre her father helped ruin:
“It scares me, that’s why. It feels contrived on so many levels. Unless you’re wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots and singing and whining about your girlfriend or boyfriend leaving you it’s not going to sell. I think that’s why my dad finally got out of it. You have to wear those cowboy boots and be sweet as pie. It makes me nervous, the politics of it all.”
Yeah, it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but in this case, the pot is right: Even though her weak attempts at what she passes off for pop music in this country aren’t exactly any better than the Carrie Underwoods, Rascal Flattses, and John Riches (and their umpteen clones) that Nashville has been passing off as “country” music since her father dropped that achy-breaky one-hit wonder on America’s heads, she hit the nail on the head with an unerring eye. What started out as the unintended invention (for all intents and purposes) of Hank Williams Sr. and Jimmy Rodgers, what used to be the province of distinctive outlaws like Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Kris Kristofferson has become an assembly-line genre dominated by a select clique of writers, producers, and session musicians backing a series of interchangeable clones.
It’s not Garth Brooks that should be faulted, although some people like to use him as a convenient whipping boy. Garth Brooks came in as an artist who grew up on both Kiss and George Strait and turned a genre weakened by the Urban Cowboy fad back around. It was the “parade of horribles”, to borrow a Circle Jerks song title, who didn’t give a fuck about the accomplishments of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, or Buck Owens but saw a way to make a quick buck that infected Nashville. Look up the lyrics to Alan Jackson’s song “Gone Country” and you’ll see a decent idea of what went wrong. Is it any wonder why Garth stopped recording and performing, why Terri Clark walked out on her BNA/Sony-BMG contract and started putting out her own records, why the Dixie Chicks told the country establishment to fuck off and hooked up with Rick Rubin?
Ask Hank Williams III how wonderful Nashville is, or at least listen to or read the lyrics of his songs “Trashville”, “Dick in Dixie”, and “The Grand Old Opry (Ain’t So Grand Anymore)” sometime. There’s your answer.
Not surprisingly, Country Music Television’s blog, playing Fox News to the pop-country establishment’s Republican Party (i.e. acting as an echo chamber/propaganda unit), is seeing fit to defend the current Music Row tripe. Their opinion doesn’t matter – this same blog also praised the idea of record stores going out of business after Sugarland signed with Wal-Mart to have an exclusive right to distribute their next album. Perhaps the author of that CMT blog piece should go visit a real record store – especially on Record Store Day this forthcoming 4.17.10 – and see what real people are buying!
I’m not going to hold my breath and wait to see if Miley has an even bigger epiphany, takes a year off from the public eye to disappears somewhere with a guitar and some Stooges and Minutemen albums, and turns up on some indie label somewhere after letting her Hollywood Records contract lapse. But the mere fact that a super-corporate pop act made such a critical comment speaks volumes – even if she doesn’t follow it up by putting Fun House and Double Nickels on the Dime in her iPod!
