Proposal for a Book Chapter on the Magnetic Fields:

Cowboys, Cowgirls and Other Problems of Genre.
Gender and Rural Culture in Stephen Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo (and Kelly Hogan’s Cover)


Cover versions crossing gender lines become complicated creatures, and performers alterations of lyrics is often a disputed site of resistance. Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Field’s 3 volume 69 Love Songs, is even trickier, because Merritt works so hard on disrupting any possible gender or sexual clue. The version of Papa was a… in 69 Love Songs, on the surface, is a gay cowboy love song, unusual but not unheard of. The cover, on the surface, is a straight cowboy love song, casual in its banality. Merritt has claimed that Papa…was a straight country song and Hogan introduces the song live, plainly, as one of the loneliest songs she’s heard. It’s even lonely with a lover of the proper place and gender emerging in the third verse. A marriage in the third act is supposed to set everything right.

There is something confusing in the interplay between these two songs. Some of it deals with gender and personae mentioned, but there are also issues of geography. The song mentions no geographic place directly, unlike the Magnetic Albums country album Charm of the Highway Strip, so it discusses a Middle America, filmed, photographed, written about, and mythologized as archetypal and not “real”. Though this could be explained by Meritt being the archetypal, decadent New Yorker, how does it leave Kelly Hogan who’s record label Bloodshot was founded in Chicago, and knows a bit about all that space in the middle.

Starting with those intersections of aesthetics, sexuality and geography is to begin to slowly tangle and untangle sign and signifier, in these two songs, and in other country songs that Merritt may have sang. Using the theoretical tools as varied as Lacan on lacunae and phallic presentation; Judith Butler on the performance of gender; Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry’s concepts of urban and agrarian; the American travelogues of Baudillard and Bernard Levy, but also branch out from that.

I want to talk about how these two songs fit into film (Johnny Guitar; Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show; Brokeback Mountain); fine art photography (American Surfaces by Stephen Shore; Los Alamos by William Eggleston); and country music (Patsy Montana; Roy Acuff; Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie)

Like Wayne Kaustenbaum’s recent articles for art forum, and books like Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus and late Barthes, the article will be in numbered paragraphs. I am doing this for several reasons, including Merritt’s fondness for the list form, the spare minimalism of the plot, and to extend the songs loose web of referents. Think of it then, as a long highway, and the prose being the gas stations, hotels, honky tonks, truck stops, weigh stations and churches one sees on its highways.