Attempt at a last ppgh for the Kenny Essay

I think part of the reason why I wrote this essay, was that I love country music, and i think that it is a bellwether for the way that America sees itself. I am a Canadian, I have to keep track of the empire, like being in bed with a buffalo, it might roll over on you, it might crush you in the night. The thing is, reading about Cheseny, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country about death, about anything but the sunbelt and the suburbs were, and there are all these movies and television shows and novels about dark things done in the basement of the suburbs...the thing is, i think the patterns of how we listen, how we create and how we consume reflect how the world runs, and i think that the more normal things are, the more anthropolgically, we can determine a culture---we know more about the romans via pottery shards, then we do via the states in the temples, to speak broadly.

I think that, then, Chesney's blankness, this complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time, I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I loved that which I loved...

I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and i think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that illustrates this point, that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most tourist spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking micro brew, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because i wanted some down home charm
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they dont think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at capernstria and swallowing of oral sex...and he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.

I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because everytime I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a jason mccoy concert.