Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Monday, April 13, 2009
growing up lds, was to acknowledge that men did things together, social things, that did not include women, and those things were inscrutable to me. this inscrutabilty was and is central to my life, from the sexual games i played in sjsa, to my complicated life in highschool, from my realtionship to my grandfathers, to my love of ray...i think this homosocial ambugity is central to a lot of gay men's lives, and in many ways, regardless of how unstable and unsimple the tag gay is, i am a homsexual in a world that rewards homosociality.
eve sedgewick died last night, on easter sunday, just as i was praying for the reseruction, her work esp. in between men provided the rosetta stone that translated "boys together clinging", to the secret works of men. when she said this to the best of my understanding, the sexual context of that period is too far irretrievable for us to disentangle boasts, confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the unmentionable, but often done anyways, etc.” (Between Men, 35). about shakespere, it was the closest she got to the eternal.
eve sedgewick died last night, on easter sunday, just as i was praying for the reseruction, her work esp. in between men provided the rosetta stone that translated "boys together clinging", to the secret works of men. when she said this to the best of my understanding, the sexual context of that period is too far irretrievable for us to disentangle boasts, confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the unmentionable, but often done anyways, etc.” (Between Men, 35). about shakespere, it was the closest she got to the eternal.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
top 10 paintings and art stuff at the noma:
1) otto marseus van schick's serpents and insects, 1690
basically a dutch still ife from the 17th century, with the harsh lighting and dark colours that implies, but swarming with black flies, red ants, jungle leaves, almost phospercent mushrooms, and a perfect phallic python curling up around the bottom of the compostion (intersting, a game painting from about he same peroid had a hanging hare, by a different artists, the dutch sure knew how to paint shit dangling)
2) large screen illustrating the tale of genji, edo era.
the screened porches holding women are hidden and visbile, the flatness working in oppoistion to a general narrative compoistion in some places, and in congurence in others.
3) qi dynasty battle camel
earlier then the tang dynasty camels i previously loved, this one had gnashing teeth and a fully armoured warrier on its back. BATTLE CAMEL FOR THE WIN.
4) vuillard, interior, 1850.
chalk pastel on paper, with a perfect mustard yellow lamp in the middle of a muddy purple and black compoistion.
5) carl wuffi drawing
the drawing was included with braque, boccini, calder, picasso, and davis, among others, so he was not ghettoized as part of an outsider tradition, which is nice, that the colours and patterns are of the time, not sui gensis, they also placed it outside the wall, so both recto and verso could be seen, though they did not translate the german on the back (its a nice wuffi, with some great line work)
6) one of Rbergs Hoarfrost, 1972
a) it was severe, more severe then i am used to with rberg.
b) it was almost monochromatic.
c) the use of white cotton and grey satin had a funeral qauilty, and that the work was basically human sized had the qauilty of the shroud, that the white cotton panel was included about three feet down the peice, and ended about 3 feet from the bottom, where on the body that would cover from the heart to the genitals is suggestive.
d) the white cotton section had only one major image, a triumuphant gymnast.
e) the rest of the images are reversals, or transfered lightly, implict instead of explicit.
7) Anne Truitt Large Square in Red and Orange
almost a puzzle box, uneven with a large horizontal compoent in bright red, and smaller sections in yellow, sculptural in ways that her towers are often not.
8) two nice rosenquits, including the spiky and perhaps misogynist hibsicus and woman
9) One of Borgeuious Spider's was ready to dismiss it, because the noma sculpture park also had an Indiana Love in red and blue, and one of Oldenberg's saftey pin's, sculpture by a catalog (also a hepworth, a chadwick, a malloi, a rodin, etc) but this peice was before the mammon peices, slightly smaller, and reaching out instead of reaching up, with the egg sac much less promient, so it was a different work
10) sam taylor woods big print of hayden crying, from her men crying seires, that was all pink excess, his skin, his lips, his shirt, in a hotel room, so femme, so hott.
other things:
a bunch of cornell, mostly collages, put in a room b/w early and late modernist, working as a functional arguement about his place in the cannon, mostly collages, with some boxes, including what you would expect (the mirror, the parrot, the pipe, the doves, the rabbits, work with his brother, etc) though the only nude adult female ive seen him make. (mostly donated by the cornell estate, something to look into)
the obligatory warhol
alot of semi pornographic french 19th century portraits, none of them nudes, english decorative furniture, and the dross of a medicore encloypedic colleciton (though there was half a dozen 13th century italian saints that were nice, and a decent pretty boy tintoretto, and some polynesian head dresses that had excessive black feathers, and four decent but not out of this world moghul drawings, and one laquer samuri suit, and etc)
the photography and depression show, from the collection was pretentious, unguided, theory heavy, and fell apart, it lacked genuine rigour, and though some of the work were obv. around the theme, there were too many exceptions and misunderstandings to make it genuinely work, too many wtf moments, though it had a great freinger, a beautiful vintage muybridge of herons, a nice eggleston, one of julia cameron's maidens, and a great friedlander nude.
1) otto marseus van schick's serpents and insects, 1690
basically a dutch still ife from the 17th century, with the harsh lighting and dark colours that implies, but swarming with black flies, red ants, jungle leaves, almost phospercent mushrooms, and a perfect phallic python curling up around the bottom of the compostion (intersting, a game painting from about he same peroid had a hanging hare, by a different artists, the dutch sure knew how to paint shit dangling)
2) large screen illustrating the tale of genji, edo era.
the screened porches holding women are hidden and visbile, the flatness working in oppoistion to a general narrative compoistion in some places, and in congurence in others.
3) qi dynasty battle camel
earlier then the tang dynasty camels i previously loved, this one had gnashing teeth and a fully armoured warrier on its back. BATTLE CAMEL FOR THE WIN.
4) vuillard, interior, 1850.
chalk pastel on paper, with a perfect mustard yellow lamp in the middle of a muddy purple and black compoistion.
5) carl wuffi drawing
the drawing was included with braque, boccini, calder, picasso, and davis, among others, so he was not ghettoized as part of an outsider tradition, which is nice, that the colours and patterns are of the time, not sui gensis, they also placed it outside the wall, so both recto and verso could be seen, though they did not translate the german on the back (its a nice wuffi, with some great line work)
6) one of Rbergs Hoarfrost, 1972
a) it was severe, more severe then i am used to with rberg.
b) it was almost monochromatic.
c) the use of white cotton and grey satin had a funeral qauilty, and that the work was basically human sized had the qauilty of the shroud, that the white cotton panel was included about three feet down the peice, and ended about 3 feet from the bottom, where on the body that would cover from the heart to the genitals is suggestive.
d) the white cotton section had only one major image, a triumuphant gymnast.
e) the rest of the images are reversals, or transfered lightly, implict instead of explicit.
7) Anne Truitt Large Square in Red and Orange
almost a puzzle box, uneven with a large horizontal compoent in bright red, and smaller sections in yellow, sculptural in ways that her towers are often not.
8) two nice rosenquits, including the spiky and perhaps misogynist hibsicus and woman
9) One of Borgeuious Spider's was ready to dismiss it, because the noma sculpture park also had an Indiana Love in red and blue, and one of Oldenberg's saftey pin's, sculpture by a catalog (also a hepworth, a chadwick, a malloi, a rodin, etc) but this peice was before the mammon peices, slightly smaller, and reaching out instead of reaching up, with the egg sac much less promient, so it was a different work
10) sam taylor woods big print of hayden crying, from her men crying seires, that was all pink excess, his skin, his lips, his shirt, in a hotel room, so femme, so hott.
other things:
a bunch of cornell, mostly collages, put in a room b/w early and late modernist, working as a functional arguement about his place in the cannon, mostly collages, with some boxes, including what you would expect (the mirror, the parrot, the pipe, the doves, the rabbits, work with his brother, etc) though the only nude adult female ive seen him make. (mostly donated by the cornell estate, something to look into)
the obligatory warhol
alot of semi pornographic french 19th century portraits, none of them nudes, english decorative furniture, and the dross of a medicore encloypedic colleciton (though there was half a dozen 13th century italian saints that were nice, and a decent pretty boy tintoretto, and some polynesian head dresses that had excessive black feathers, and four decent but not out of this world moghul drawings, and one laquer samuri suit, and etc)
the photography and depression show, from the collection was pretentious, unguided, theory heavy, and fell apart, it lacked genuine rigour, and though some of the work were obv. around the theme, there were too many exceptions and misunderstandings to make it genuinely work, too many wtf moments, though it had a great freinger, a beautiful vintage muybridge of herons, a nice eggleston, one of julia cameron's maidens, and a great friedlander nude.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
 |
| From Untitled Album |
46 photos of bats.
beard meme as tumblr.
fascinting case study of the generation gap in technology.
justin david cox is a graphic designer who works hyper minimal, graphicly clean and textually pure gig posters. The Crystal Castles one might be my favourite non ironic use of the rainbow motif like ever
 |
| From Untitled Album |
New still from Inglorious Bastard, which will premier at Cannes.
red river flooding photos, via the big picture
the blue whale of catoosa, ok.
turkey hunting as a way to bring youth as jesus.
the one vessel, is a way of heating water on the stove, making tea with it, pour it into a cup included, without dirtying a pot, a kettle, and a cup.
the daily mail's paranoia about google street view infects their coverage of protestors using social media to organize.
Maddow speaks to Colin Powell about torture, Powell evades.
paedophiles priests were known by American bishops as early as 1952, and by the Vatican in 1962, according to the records of Servants of the Pertaclate, who were in charge of dealing with this shit. The founder, Rev. Fitzgerald, thot that the problem was unsolveable, that he "Father Fitzgerald, who died in 1969, even made a $5,000 down payment on a Caribbean island where he planned to build an isolated retreat to sequester priests who were sexual predators. His letters show he was driven by a desire to save the church from scandal, and to save laypeople from being victimized. He wrote to dozens of bishops, saying that he had learned through experience that most of the abusers were unrepentant, manipulative and dangerous. He called them “vipers.”"
 |
| From Untitled Album |
via warren ellis.
insanely complete essay documenting james bond's sexual conquests.
a nice article about the lacunae of discussion vis a vis' rberg and johns fucking. and a repro of katz's article on the couple, which is a really telling example of homophobia in the art world.
fantastic graphic design blog, the first two entries are on swiss medical illustrations and florid victorian type.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Black Quartz Lamp, PDC, Los Angeles (want)
the wisconsin historical society has a set of international harvester scouts, on flickr. i love international historical trucks.
68 photos of surfing by ollie banks
people call polticos whores all the time, but whores are honest, they will fuck you for the set rate,and at worst will only steal yr watch, plus they provide something useful. Polticos (and pseudo academics working as polticos), like Lawerence Summer attempt to look poor wile getting millions from the wall street he is trying to save. fire him obama.
zombie stripper heels.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
chesney in vegas after the academy of country music awards hooking up with two blondes
apologies do not result in concrete actions in a hawaiian soveringity case.
castle and things make elegant, tiny, and highly conceptual felt peices, i like the grids, and the song lyrics in the style of sr corritta kent.
ecma and the american presbyterians are finding a solid, american protestant higly localized soultion to hte fag situation.
decimation, of the anti vaccanine idiots
Cookie Monster does Waiting for Godot.
us postal serviceglossary
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Monday, April 06, 2009
In the last few years, country music has moved from its desire for formal purity, to incorparting traditionally verboten rock and pop stylings. But in that loosening, there has been an increased, almost reactionary desire to mantain traditional lines of gender and sexuality. In 2008, these instincts of musical prolifagacy, and moral severity, combined in the figures of Eric Church and Heidi Newfield. These two artists, and espeically their singles about teenage pregrancy Two Pink Lines and Knocked Up, worked in conjunction, with the trouble that the Republicans had with Bristol Palin. These texts could be contextualised by Tim McGraw notaligc pro choice fable Red Rag Top These narratives seek but fail at finding of consistent discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and desire.
Heidi Newfield, who is the youngest artist, and perhaps the least famous, introduces these themes easily, and is a good beginning. Her first single, about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the
sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierachy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour, in that capacity it ignores Cash’s drug use, adultery, conserative christianity, or his equal partnership with June Carter Cash.
That Newfield looks up to Cash/Carter though suggests that she is of a new wave of female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, a group that refuses to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's first two singles heavily emphasizes drums and guitars making it’s musical status as country unsure. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the moral edicts (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and her presence as the second youngest in a multi generational, matriarchal line.
That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.
This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.
Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. Lynn’s writing mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has either not internalised or failed to hire out. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.
The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents: “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.
There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.
Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)
Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are now the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.
Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.
The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.
All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.
This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.
The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)
The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
Compare it to Kinky Friedman’s Rapid City, South Dakota, recorded in 1974 is an interesting contrast. Both songs use oblique references to discuss abortion, and both describe the desire to avoid having a child. But Friedman’s song comes from a place of rural isolation and criminality, it is an outlaw song, and not a song of suburban ennui. With his broad accent, and the lone guitar, the song starts as a song about a man leaving a woman—though he has to leave “Rapid City, South Dakota, might fast”. There are a number of reasons why he might have to do so, but the penultimate verse discusses exactly what is going wrong: “There’s A Doctor In Chicago/I Know She’ll Be Alright/He told himself as he stared into the night./And he said, “I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her/But The Mail Don’t Go To Fast In Rapid City South Dakota”
Comparing what is said, and what is unsaid about the song sung in 1974 tell us a lot about what it means to live in places like South Dakota. Friedman tells us spefically that the father in question is working class, McGraw hints at it, Friedman talks about money, McGraw hints at, neither and the question remains, how would they pay for the termination?
Most importantly is the motif of choice. Friedman’s protaginist has none, he is forced to leave his small town, for Chicago or Minnepolis or the coast, the consquence of his actions is exile. McGraw’s realtionship fails to surrive, but because both chose to separate. McGraw alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church? Could Friedman’s frightened farm boy kept the realtionship surrive, would it have resulted in marriage, in 1980?
In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, or theexile narrative of Freidman, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a child”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:
No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.
Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.
To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. This contience is central to the confusing the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. Friedman, McGraw, and Church facilate this blankness as well, it is telling that what has been discussed is mostly men talking about women.
There are some correctives of that, Newfeild is one of them and Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or the presence of Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” But not all discourses by women for women are positive, and not all of the discourses about Palin are this clear.
There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.
For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.
Heidi Newfield, who is the youngest artist, and perhaps the least famous, introduces these themes easily, and is a good beginning. Her first single, about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the
sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierachy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour, in that capacity it ignores Cash’s drug use, adultery, conserative christianity, or his equal partnership with June Carter Cash.
That Newfield looks up to Cash/Carter though suggests that she is of a new wave of female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, a group that refuses to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's first two singles heavily emphasizes drums and guitars making it’s musical status as country unsure. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the moral edicts (Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and her presence as the second youngest in a multi generational, matriarchal line.
That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.
This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.
Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. Lynn’s writing mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has either not internalised or failed to hire out. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.
The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents: “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.
There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.
Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)
Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are now the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.
Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.
The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.
All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.
This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.
The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)
The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
Compare it to Kinky Friedman’s Rapid City, South Dakota, recorded in 1974 is an interesting contrast. Both songs use oblique references to discuss abortion, and both describe the desire to avoid having a child. But Friedman’s song comes from a place of rural isolation and criminality, it is an outlaw song, and not a song of suburban ennui. With his broad accent, and the lone guitar, the song starts as a song about a man leaving a woman—though he has to leave “Rapid City, South Dakota, might fast”. There are a number of reasons why he might have to do so, but the penultimate verse discusses exactly what is going wrong: “There’s A Doctor In Chicago/I Know She’ll Be Alright/He told himself as he stared into the night./And he said, “I hope to God she finds the good-bye letter that I wrote her/But The Mail Don’t Go To Fast In Rapid City South Dakota”
Comparing what is said, and what is unsaid about the song sung in 1974 tell us a lot about what it means to live in places like South Dakota. Friedman tells us spefically that the father in question is working class, McGraw hints at it, Friedman talks about money, McGraw hints at, neither and the question remains, how would they pay for the termination?
Most importantly is the motif of choice. Friedman’s protaginist has none, he is forced to leave his small town, for Chicago or Minnepolis or the coast, the consquence of his actions is exile. McGraw’s realtionship fails to surrive, but because both chose to separate. McGraw alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church? Could Friedman’s frightened farm boy kept the realtionship surrive, would it have resulted in marriage, in 1980?
In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, or theexile narrative of Freidman, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a child”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:
No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.
Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.
To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. This contience is central to the confusing the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. Friedman, McGraw, and Church facilate this blankness as well, it is telling that what has been discussed is mostly men talking about women.
There are some correctives of that, Newfeild is one of them and Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or the presence of Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” But not all discourses by women for women are positive, and not all of the discourses about Palin are this clear.
There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.
For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
In the last few years, country music has moved from its desire for formal sameness, and musical purity, to incorparting traditionally verboten rock and pop stylings. But in that loosening, there has been an increased, almost reactionary desire to mantain traditional lines of gender and sexuality. In 2008, these instincts of musical prolifagacy, and moral severity, combined in the figures of Eric Churc and Heidi Newfield. These two artists, and espeically their singles about teenage pregrancy Two Pink Lines and Knocked Up, worked in conjunction, and the lessons that they taught us about current day Nashville could be interlaced with the trouble that the Republicans had with Bristol Palin, or be placed against Tim McGraw hit Red Rag Top, with its nostaligic tale about abortion. Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent langauge that allows readers to understand discourses of class, gender, sexuality, and desire, that have traditionally been ignored by progressive academics, polticians, musicians, critics, and audiences.
The youngest performer, and the one with arguably the least media attenion or studio help is Heidi Newfield. Both of her biggest singles are about traditional marriage. The first is about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierach and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour.)
The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style: the music contains rock and roll plus pop, so it is not musically country, but the lyrics ignore a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, and his contempt for Nashville.
Newfield is of a new wave of sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years. This group (Kellie Pickler, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lamert, Skye Sweetam, etc) . They refuse to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's music has a mix that heavily emphasizes what would traditionally be called Rock and Roll, the drums and guitars are so central, that if it were not qouting Johnny Cash, it would be difficult to taxonomize it as country. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the use of moral language (“Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.
The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but is dismissive of the effort required to birth a child, and refusing any option but the keep it. To be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.
That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.
This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.
Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. This history mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has not internalised. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.
The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.
There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.
Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)
Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.
Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.
The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female representation, just as the musical forms in Eric Church’s track refuse to discuss all of the options on hand, or how Heidi Newfield’s track heavily genderizes and dismisses the cataclysmic possibilities of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama is a form that it expects certain things from its participants, and the rules of it’s creation become highly solidified.
An 18 year old, who has the desire to marry, to pine and to wait for her solider lover to return from away, is so ancient and so expected, that it can only be discussed in a way that is heavily codified, that is intensified by history, by genre expectation, and by the political implications of both new Nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implications of a working class life. Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war both came from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica Lynch. Those two, who were supposed to be the villain and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easily accessiable way. Even the Pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of feminized, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
.
All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.
This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion. This discussion has become a standard genre, and a highly popular one.
The industry can be divided into those who listen to music, and those who create it. Using two metrics, the billboard Hot Country 100 chart of singles, and the best single/song awards from the Billboard Music Charts suggest how popular this cult of nostalgia can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostalgia, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run being Kenny Chesney’s Good Stuff for 7 weeks. In 2003 four songs followed the same kind of flash back narrative, or took the place in the past, and suggested a similar aesthetic to the ones in 2002, taking up 20 weeks of the chart. The longest was There Goes My Life for 7 weeks. This year included the previously discussed Travelin' Solider, and Beer for my Horses, by Willie Nelson and Toby Keith that became so popular that there was a movie made for CMT last year starring both Nelson and Keith. In 2004, three songs following the same pattern, took up 7 weeks of the chart, with the longest being Days Go By, by Keith Urban, for a month. In 2005, 7 weeks, 3 songs, Fast Cars and Freedom by Rascall Flatts, for 3 weeks. In 2006, 3 songs for 9 weeks, two months of those being Kenny Chesney tracks, in 2008 an uptick, with five songs and 12 weeks, Kenny Chesney and Rascall Flatts tying for a month a piece, 2008 3 songs, 7 weeks, the longest being Brad Paisley’s ode to high school and making the same mistakes earlier, Letter to Me, and so far in 2009, two songs for three weeks.
As for the CMA awards, four songs in 7 years have won either single or song of the year with themes or music that was explicitly nostalgic. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this particular meme, Tim McGraw is not immune to it (his hits that talk about the past, that frame moral narratives into flashback parables of suburban disenchantment include Grown Men Don’t Cry, Memory Lane, Telluride, 17, and Please Remember Me and Please Don’t Take The Girl.
Chesney and McGraw have much in common, they speak moral lessons, talk of spefici cities in general stories, have complicated relationships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents that manifest as a bittersweet desire to abandon fame for the simpler pleasures of youth. Though this narrative sells very well, and on a surface level Tim McGraw provides these base pleasures to his audience, he appears much more aware of the natural consequences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.
The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)
The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
There are other questions about respobsibility. If they are working class, which seems to be a fairly safe bet, considering the demographic of country music right now, how would they pay for the termination, and though he alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church?
In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:
No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.
Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.
To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregnancy of Bristol, and some discussion about when Sarah knew as well. Though she mentions that she told her parents, and presents a domestic narrative that includes having Levi Johnson in the room, and sending her children away, Bristol does not tell exactly when she told Sarah.
The confusion about what was told, and what was left out, and the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The 16th century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virtue (and for virtue read hymen) has been comprises: “the threat of ostracism, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young women’s sexual behavior, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merely personal.” (Quoted in Virginity, A Cultural History, Anker Berno, 139). That Bristol Palin even bothered to have sex, that she claimed the autonomy of her own body, is the beginning vector that begins the contagation.
The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or be like Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.
For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.
The youngest performer, and the one with arguably the least media attenion or studio help is Heidi Newfield. Both of her biggest singles are about traditional marriage. The first is about Johnny and June Carter Cash, and although it mentions how Johnny kicked out the footlights, it is mostly a lachrymose ballad, contiuning the sentimentalizing/cannonizing of Cash (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierach and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behaviour.)
The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style: the music contains rock and roll plus pop, so it is not musically country, but the lyrics ignore a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, and his contempt for Nashville.
Newfield is of a new wave of sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female artistss that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years. This group (Kellie Pickler, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lamert, Skye Sweetam, etc) . They refuse to particpate in territorial disputes around rock and roll vs country. These pererinal skirmishes are so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's 2000 single Murder on Music Row—with it’s chorus: “For the steel guitars no longer cry/And the fiddles barely play/But drums and rock 'n' roll guitars/Are mixed up in your face”
Newfield's music has a mix that heavily emphasizes what would traditionally be called Rock and Roll, the drums and guitars are so central, that if it were not qouting Johnny Cash, it would be difficult to taxonomize it as country. Her second single, Knocked Up cannot be claimed, formally as country. What makes it country, is then is the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (“Here comes what Granny's been dreadin'/Belly full of baby in a shotgun weddin'), the signifiers of a rural working class poverty (“Hand-me-down crib in a pick up truck”), the use of moral language (“Knocked up, shame shame/I'm gonna ruin my family name”), the vague references to country music history, and how she is in the middle of a multi generational, matriarchal line.
The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote Lee Ann Womack’s I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with the kind of aphorisms that on the surface would appear to suggest taking great risks, but only those risks that will not result in seismic changes. Knocked Up is about radical changes to an adolescent's life, but is dismissive of the effort required to birth a child, and refusing any option but the keep it. To be an unplanned mother is a gift, that can not be given away or gotten rid of, regardless of how surprised or unprepared a teenager is to raise children.
That she depends on a hand me down crib indicates that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. Southern critic and memorist Dorothy Allison, born poor provides the moral context that Newfield lacks: “I understand we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job, women invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours...” (Skin, 15) Just as the rock and roll guitars are considered criminal in “traditional” music, the idea of having babies before birth is considered systematically broken in the working class argot that Sanders employs. In order to prevent shame and being bad poor, she gets married.
This moral languge places the song in the nashivlle history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. Tanya Tucker calls these young folks “two sparrows in a hurricane” , who have “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. A few years later, Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy discusses how difficult and how close to literal starvation children who marry and have children can be.
Sander's skims over these dangers in just two lines: “Daddy, he's a good lookin' guitar man/I was his from the very first kiss”. The line good lookin' guitar man is so historically minded that it includes basically anything. What means even less, is Newfield's explicit claiming of the work as a sequel to Loretta Lynn's The Pill—this is confusing, because Newfield seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down. This history mannifests itself in emotions like anger, or contempt or exhaustion, emotions that Newfield has not internalised. In fact she uses the rollicking fun of rock and roll as a way to formally mask the turmoil of young pregrancy.
The paucity of emotions and the formal masking that occur in Knocked Up are also seen in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates these difficulties. The song is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting to see if they are parents; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
The song rockets through the narrative, and the mix does not dip perceptibly in the middle, unlike Newfield. There are differences in the narrative as well. The narrator in the Newfield song is already pregnant, and is keeping the baby. Church has decided what he is going to do if his lover is with child; there is again no discussion of options, just a diamond ring and a life together.
There is less shame in Church’s track. He will do what is required of him, but is glad that this is unnessecary. Everything is okay, and there lives are not ruined. The difference then, is that Church refuses to judge pleasure, and Newfield refuses to acknowledge it’s existence. This attitude towards pleasure, even the pleasure of the rock and roll, is heavily gendered. The woman is receptive and the male is active. That they are both basically rockabilly tracks, muddies the water though.
Country Music once feared the sexual power of rockabilly, so it becomes ironic that the push and pull of sexual shame and being with child is now places on it’s cradle. David Shapiro talks about this history in his essay Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, "It may well be that the struggle to suppress country music, 'this deep sense of fear and resignation' by which it was constrained, provoked the eruption of country's deviant offspring rockabilly, and caused so many to rail against it as a threat to their livelihoods, if not their souls. Rockabilly, in the words of (Bill) Malone' gave vent to impulses that had long been impeded, if often dormant, in southern culture, a hell-for-leather hedonism, a swaggering masculinity, or in the case of the women, an uncharacteristic aggressiveness and strangely a visceral emotionalism among both men and women that seemed as reflective of the church as the beer joints” (30)
Rockabilly is no longer threatening to Country Radio and country promoters, because the men who listened to it, and its antecedents in the last few decades, are the same demographic. (ie white, working class, young men, from the west and south) This demographic is delineated in a brilliant essay by Adam Watts, collected in White Masculinity in the Recent South. A Real Place, Attitudes and Environment in a Southern Deer Camp uses the heavily localized space of shooting deer, to make two cognizant points about this new masculinity, both of which are talked about in Church’s work.
Watt’s initial observation, (and it helps to think of the Deer Camp as a metonymy of places where working class men gather recreationally, away from the influences of women) is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...” making a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is, class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside traditional Marxist language. Church has written extensively about this new mutability especially in the song, Guys Like Me with lines like “I spend Saturdays working on my truck/I don't like to fight/But I ain't scared to bleed/Most don't mess with a guy like me/Guys like me drink to many beers on Friday after work/Our best blue jeans have skoal rings/We wear our boots to church/So rough around the edges”, here he outlines a set of specific cultural significations.
The mutability of class another point that Watts makes. He talks about his membership in the deer run that he visits, that he uses to shoot... “Members of Clear Run, like those of other white Southern men, view the pursuit of white tail deer as a natural, even necessary reason for white Southern men and boys, increasingly suburban, or urban with predominately indoor lifestyles and careers, to enjoy the outdoors...” though Country is usually ex/suburban, and increasingly function as service workers as opposed to manufacturing, there are a variety of self-identifying moral signifiers. The ability to take responsibility for unforeseen actions, to provide for women and children, and in the words of Two Pink Lines: “yeah her Daddy's gonna kill me and that’s a fact/maybe we'll just leave town and never come back/or I could stand there and tell him/face him like a man” or “not being scared to bleed” or the ability to kill deer to feed family for a living, are all things that are not only about working for a living, but an ethical desire to serve. It is the same ethical desire that gives Newfield the new crib, or prevents her from aborting the fetus.
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female representation, just as the musical forms in Eric Church’s track refuse to discuss all of the options on hand, or how Heidi Newfield’s track heavily genderizes and dismisses the cataclysmic possibilities of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama is a form that it expects certain things from its participants, and the rules of it’s creation become highly solidified.
An 18 year old, who has the desire to marry, to pine and to wait for her solider lover to return from away, is so ancient and so expected, that it can only be discussed in a way that is heavily codified, that is intensified by history, by genre expectation, and by the political implications of both new Nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implications of a working class life. Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war both came from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica Lynch. Those two, who were supposed to be the villain and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easily accessiable way. Even the Pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of feminized, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
.
All of these narratives with their hygenic use of previously filthy genre music , bleach out the details of lives lead when one is 18 and scared, the choices about keeping the baby or not keeping the baby, about aborting it or adopting it, or even a song that mentions high school or morning sickness or what it means to piss on a stick in a filthy bathroom in a gas station or even discussions of what it means to have sex at 18, so the listener is forced to complete the narratives on hand.
This desire to keep things clean, leads to long gaps that hint and do not tell the whole story, in Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits. It is the only song that talks about terminating the pregnancy. This termination is encased in a narrative of nostalgia and completion. In this way, it becomes a normalized text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indiscretion. This discussion has become a standard genre, and a highly popular one.
The industry can be divided into those who listen to music, and those who create it. Using two metrics, the billboard Hot Country 100 chart of singles, and the best single/song awards from the Billboard Music Charts suggest how popular this cult of nostalgia can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostalgia, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run being Kenny Chesney’s Good Stuff for 7 weeks. In 2003 four songs followed the same kind of flash back narrative, or took the place in the past, and suggested a similar aesthetic to the ones in 2002, taking up 20 weeks of the chart. The longest was There Goes My Life for 7 weeks. This year included the previously discussed Travelin' Solider, and Beer for my Horses, by Willie Nelson and Toby Keith that became so popular that there was a movie made for CMT last year starring both Nelson and Keith. In 2004, three songs following the same pattern, took up 7 weeks of the chart, with the longest being Days Go By, by Keith Urban, for a month. In 2005, 7 weeks, 3 songs, Fast Cars and Freedom by Rascall Flatts, for 3 weeks. In 2006, 3 songs for 9 weeks, two months of those being Kenny Chesney tracks, in 2008 an uptick, with five songs and 12 weeks, Kenny Chesney and Rascall Flatts tying for a month a piece, 2008 3 songs, 7 weeks, the longest being Brad Paisley’s ode to high school and making the same mistakes earlier, Letter to Me, and so far in 2009, two songs for three weeks.
As for the CMA awards, four songs in 7 years have won either single or song of the year with themes or music that was explicitly nostalgic. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this particular meme, Tim McGraw is not immune to it (his hits that talk about the past, that frame moral narratives into flashback parables of suburban disenchantment include Grown Men Don’t Cry, Memory Lane, Telluride, 17, and Please Remember Me and Please Don’t Take The Girl.
Chesney and McGraw have much in common, they speak moral lessons, talk of spefici cities in general stories, have complicated relationships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents that manifest as a bittersweet desire to abandon fame for the simpler pleasures of youth. Though this narrative sells very well, and on a surface level Tim McGraw provides these base pleasures to his audience, he appears much more aware of the natural consequences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice that Newfield or Church lack. You can hear it in songs like Drugs or Jesus, where the narrator (and he frequently writes in the first person, so they become confessional), allows that “Everyone needs to get high” to escape from the dull routine of small town life. Though he makes a personal choice for Christ, and the song hints that this is the more positive choice, it acknowledges both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and the possiblity of less ecclestical form of redemption.
The first lines of Red Rag Top introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal (Church also mentions tht he and his partner were legal, that Church and McGraw are older then Newfield, suggests an interest in legality allows for only one scandal, more then that might sink the song commerically)
The legality might be the center of this song, it mentions that they broke traffic and curfew laws, and also moral laws outside of the state. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, can we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States? The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town life be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
There are other questions about respobsibility. If they are working class, which seems to be a fairly safe bet, considering the demographic of country music right now, how would they pay for the termination, and though he alludes that they broke up a year after the procedure and never talked again, was it the abortion that resulted in the lack of communication and later relationship? If they had the child, would they be married like Newfield, or would he be willing to foot the bills like Church?
In this way, the only thing that changes the Deus Ex Machina ending of Church, or the family obsessions of Newfield, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice. The narator never uses the words abortion, or terminatiom or even baby, but says he “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostalgia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possibilities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Reading the third verse, where he as an adult sees a girl who looks like the woman he knew at 16, he shuts off the passivity of what could have happened:
No I cant say where she is today,
I can’t remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And there's no such thing as what might’ve
Been, that’s a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
Red Rag Top becomes twofold, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolescents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a relationship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical positions of the Right and Left, namely it is always a women’s choice, and abortion is murder, and never taking a side, he allows for the moral possibility of either or both or neither, or something else entirely. In this way, it becomes an interior criticism of popular country music. while still managing to chart as another popular song of nostaliga.
Nostalgia presupposes a perfect past and an imperfect future, it allows the creation of a narrative that is clean and precise, and the precision is achieved through excising the inconvenient. Basically, then what is real and what is not real can be determined by an ability to control the narrative that is being created. It is interesting that these songs were popularized in the election year when the vice presidential Republican candidate had a pregnant teenager of her own.
To put it in its most simplistic way, the goal of a presidential campaign, especially in the television era, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what went wrong with the campaign in the New York Times, republican operative Paul Costello makes this exact point “ “That’s the best you can do, turn it into a narrative that gives the American people a positive story”.) With the Republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
This bodily continence is about not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregnancy of Bristol, and some discussion about when Sarah knew as well. Though she mentions that she told her parents, and presents a domestic narrative that includes having Levi Johnson in the room, and sending her children away, Bristol does not tell exactly when she told Sarah.
The confusion about what was told, and what was left out, and the timeline of what was said to whom and when, reminds us that a girl who is with child, is a state who is always under threatened, and who’s life cannot be easily plotted. The 16th century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virtue (and for virtue read hymen) has been comprises: “the threat of ostracism, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young women’s sexual behavior, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merely personal.” (Quoted in Virginity, A Cultural History, Anker Berno, 139). That Bristol Palin even bothered to have sex, that she claimed the autonomy of her own body, is the beginning vector that begins the contagation.
The unruliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainty. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriarchs taking care of the child in the interview with Greeta Van Sustreen for example, or be like Michelle Malkin, who wrote in a column on her blog: “the Palin family values the sanctity of life. Or “They talk the talk and walk the walk…all of those narratives are present,” There is also a narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself on his Myspace page fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be believed, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to synthesize a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editorial before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obsessive’s noted the pregnancy served to humanize the Palin's and showcase the candidates rejection of abortion” and “Johnston, an avid hunter, hinted at the time that they were expecting a boy. He said he was already looking forward to taking the boy hunting and fishing”, just as his parents, and the grandparents of his child had done.
For all of the rhetoric of choice, each of the texts discussed up to this point, has been about the limiting of choices, about the options that exist or fail to exist, in a small town, or with family pressure, or with political desires pressing into you. In this way, it becomes the choices you are allowed to make, as opposed to the choices that you want to make. The negotiation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of manifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragmatic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alternate discourse around that myth. The cleverness of the writing, the allusion rich and narrative heavy desires of these texts have an enormous formal sophistication, but that sophistication has any number of seemingly contradictory polysemic functions.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling American stories that complicate the hope. There are few answers, because attempts to document quotidian lives, and the past. Its narratolgies are one not of seeking, or answering, but of sorting, about finding patterns in lives that seem to have meaning imposed from above. In this way, the singing and the writing becomes a searching for autonomy, to suggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the function of the text. I am too far away in age, in location, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18-year-old war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even whatever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the women’s movement for not taking her life seriously, who loved her man and threatened to kick the shit out anyone who crossed him. Think of this then, as a way of bringing these narratives to others, with respect, and humility, fully recognizing they are not my stories.
Friday, April 03, 2009
6 things about Kirk Cameron
- he would not have a career if he did not find jesus, christianity is an effective market niche.
- regardless of how effective that marketing niche is, he seems to genuinely believe the hype
- he fails to recognize the (obv?) pyscho-sexual subtext of his material (the banana, the opedial introduction of fireproof)
- authentic=amatuer. (compare the fight in the kitchen in fireproof with some of rowlands work with cassevtes films, or the budgets of the left behind movies, regardless of how much they bring in)
- i mean its laughable but its not intended for me (a woman is like a rose)
- false anlogies, obsessions with metaphor and allegotry
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Unable To Match You At This Time
eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.
We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.
Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.
You can still receive your free Personality Profile by clicking here.
I tried to sign up for the new queer friendly e harmony. fail
eHarmony is based upon a complex matching system developed through extensive research with married couples. One of the requirements for successful matching is that participants fall within certain defined profiles. If we find that we will not be able to match a user using these profiles, we feel it is only fair to inform them early in the process.
We are so convinced of the importance of creating compatible matches to help people establish happy, lasting relationships that we sometimes choose not to provide service rather than risk an uncertain match.
Unfortunately, we are not able to make our profiles work for you. Our matching model could not accurately predict with whom you would be best matched. This occurs for about 20% of potential users, so 1 in 5 people simply will not benefit from our service. We hope that you understand, and we regret our inability to provide service for you at this time.
You can still receive your free Personality Profile by clicking here.
I tried to sign up for the new queer friendly e harmony. fail
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Annointing Blood of Jesus, via slog.
silent giants makes really pretty gig posters.
victoria reichelt is an australian photo realist painter, who paints over crowded book shelves, the white frames of the bookshelf function it in a really interesting meta way, plus there is something profoundly intimate about looking thru others bookshelves.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
who's a cute wombat, oh, whos a cute wombat, who rested on the 7th day, neville, thats who
allen tennbaum is a ny fotog from the 70s, extreme closeups, midly ironic, and often about famous people, there are a few images that are interesting though, including people smoking dope thru a nixon mask, and one of dolly and mick jagger, a yoko and john laughing, naked, in bed...worth the 6 minutes.
what is the pope going ot do with thousands of condoms?
gerard antz is a german designer, who made hundreds of icons, of all kinds of people and places, this website organizes them.
and speaking of clip art, this super fast oliver linc video of cip art is full of found images.
country music in the 50s and 60s would make its audience by small rural concerts on outdoor stages, everyone played them, Elvis, Cash, Jones, Riley, Wynette, Lynn, Cline, et. al. A fan from Louisanna, called Louis Kagarise, went to many of these concerts, shooting them for his own memory. Process books has now published a book of these images.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Painting No, 7, Kline, 1952, oilstick on canvas, perhaps the cleanest Kline i have seen.
dan funderburghs wall paper is highly detailed, ravishingly gorgeous, and v v cheeky, esp his chinatown toile.
more famous graffiti being torn down or painted over this time in berlin,
cute little house is norwegian.
sheril kausenbaum brings down the hammer of her wrath on science and misogyny.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Michael Stipe looks like an Orthodox patriach, but hipper. (in ny this week)
fat of the land combines fotos of appalchia with a carefully curated collection of vintage work from the life archives. lovely shots.
some excepts of lorraine hansberry's letters to the ladder, from the late 50s.
haggadah facebook style.
cassorawary attack
Helen Levitt died this week, at the age of 92. Her work is kind of neat for a couple of reasons, she is one of the few, if only, cultural workers perhaps ever to treat children as autonomous people, and her photos of new york have the accidental grace of big city living, but that grace is full of joy and discovery, there is nothing grotesque about her cities...but the work is honest and smart, and v. v. clever, the joy is not hygenic. these photos of children's chalk art on black or green buildings has the best kind of collabrative respect, they are not anonymous, they are not anthropolgical, they are children telling their own stories.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Gelatin silver print; 5 3/8 x 7 5/8 in. printed 1996 (in the met collection, do not know when it was shot) (i love that she printed small)
the vatican investigates the (reactionary, w. leanings towards fascist) religious order legion of christ, and their pedophile leader.
middlesex textiles which manufactures much of the waxed cotton batiks that west africa is known for, now has an online storefront.
BACHMANN: Let me tell you, there’s something that’s happening this week in Congress that could be the eventual unravelling for our freedom, and it’s this. I had asked the Treasury Secretary and Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve Chair, if they would categorically denounce–, not sure who leaked it under which circumstances, but during an ad break on his radio show.
BECK: I know.
BACHMANN: –taking the United States off of the dollar and putting us on an international global currency. Because as you know, Russia, China, Brazil, India, South Africa, many national have lined up now and called for an international currency, a One World currency. And they want to get off the dollar as the reserve currency.
BECK: Most people don’t understand what that means.
Michele Bachman and Glen Beck
Ann Holmes has been told by the Episcopical church that she cannot be a christian priest and a muslim, and she has been defrocked.
12 container ship houses.
the problem with due process
autism and vinyl flooring connection
 |
| From Untitled Album |
my perhaps favourite underwear combo ever,
Monday, March 30, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)