Essay:
Listening and Watching Kenny Chesney on videos, in music, and in concert footage, is watching someone of great popularity do something strange and radical, all of the dichotomous pairs that we have to discuss gender and sexuality, he erases. The lines between audience/performer, gay/straight acting, butch/femme, and top/bottom disappear under the weight of his power as performer. By looking through videos, songs, interviews and other mostly primary texts, I am reminded of what Eve Kowosky Sedgwick has said about the sonnets of Shakespeare.: “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). The difference, of course, is that the work is contemporary, so the sexual contact of the period (our period) can be immediately retrieved, but even when retrieved, taxonomy is not immediate or even possible. That the public personae conflicts with songs sung in first person, that the corpus spoken in third person shares themes with work made in the second, or that the homosocial instinct intersects and often corrupts the homosexual one—or that homosexual desire often fetishizes homosocial contact, any attempts to disentangle becomes sticky, it sticks to history, to memory, to sexuality and to genre. This, then, is a set of propositions and questions, not only about Chesney himself, but of what it means to be queer, to be working class, to be male, to be in an audience, or a performer currently in this media climate.
Audience/performer:
Among the best ways of figuring out how an audience and a performer work together, how the roles wax and wane, is by watching concert footage. With the rise of country's popularity through the 1990s, videos began to be shot in stadia, each of them fairly similar. Garth Brooks is the best example of this; with DVDs of him live in concert, over half a dozen short form videos, he sets the precedent. This video, was not shot by Garth Brooks, but by his audience, during 2001, a half a minute of noise, in the dark, shot by an audience member and not a professional, is a good record of the noise and power of a combined spectacle. The fourth wall is safely in place, with the roles of the audience and the performer securely in place. Even when, in videos that Brooks has shot, he reaches out to the audiences’ hands, it is his grace that breaks the audience. The hierarchy is strictly present.
In the post Garth era, the fourth wall has become more pliable. Tim McGraw 2001 video for Cowboy in Me is typical in how it features footage from before, after and during the concert. As well, instead of the camera showing the audience, the gaze is directed towards Tim's sweaty, hairy, flesh. Here is a brief excerpt of Cowboy In Me.
Though subject to the audiences gaze, he controls it, by masculine power, and physical distance. Laura Mulvey, the psychoanalytic critic, writes, “the cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further, developing scopophillia, in its narcissistic aspect” (Varieties of Visual Experience, 17). McGraw, though not in the cinema, has a visual component to his work that is typical of this lens. He seduces the camera, lusty and forward, getting off on the obsession of not only the live audience, but also the audience that will later look forward to watching the work on CMT or GMA or DVDS. That he tours with his wife, who is equally powerful, suggests an instinct towards having an immediate partner, but also hundreds of thousands of partners by proxy. At a concert in 2007, this split, between the proxied partner and immediate partner was made explicit. A woman reached up while McGraw was in the middle of the audience, on a thrust stage. She grasped his balls, which resulted in Hill coming out, and yelling about the ignorance of this act. She sounded like a woman scorned.
Kenny Chesney's 2005 video Living in Fast Forward shares stadium footage with cowboy in Me, but Chesney’s work fractures, talks about himself in the abstract, obsesses over the audiences desires for him, and formally innovates; there are scenes shot in moody black and white, other sections that look like super-eight, in addition to the usual slick concert footage. Scenes alone, scenes in the midst of crowds, and scenes controlling crowds mingle promiscuously. The formal and symbolic weight makes him being alone; being part of his audience, and being in front of his audience have the same social weight, deconstructing Tim McGraw or Garth Brooks' theatrics.
That his videos, at least in the context of videos, Chesney seeks the gaze of the audience, like McGraw or Brooks does directly, but looking through the 2005 video, he wanders through the crowds, not worried about his own security, and he also spends time, seemingly alone but with the presence of the camera, so in one video, he processes the immediate audience in the stadium, outside the stadium; the audience finds him as a performer using the typical fourth wall hierarchy, and outside the stadium, the audience recognizes him as one of their own, refusing the high/low audience/performer roles. In addition, for any one who cannot be part of the audience, he gives a small private performance, just him, his island and his guitar.
Returning to Mulvey, and moving slightly outside of the audience/performer realm, she talks about the male gaze thusly: “Pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 19). Depending on the video, the gaze that Chesney projects, includes but is not limited to his current self, his past self, his future self, in addition to men, women, and giant crowds of adoring fans. In the concert videos, especially, but elsewhere, the camera’s gaze is projected like a slut, the active/male/passive/female construction of traditional psychoanalytic feminist theory is replaced with something much more slippery. This slipperiness is also found in the rumors of his sexuality, and how he both embodies and displaces them.
"Gay/Straight"
There have been rumors around Nashville for a decade that Chesney likes to fuck men. Online gossip sites call him "the gayest man in country music” (D Listed), claim that “Kenny Chesney isn't gay, he just plays one on stage” (Jossip), “Kenny Chesney is gay! For those of us who have gaydar, we know” (MJD Sports Blog), Q: Who is your favorite Gay Artist? A: Kenny Chesney (Wanderlist). His short lived marriage to Renée Zellweger, and the later annulment using the grounds of fraud, added fuel to the fire. In a Feb 18, 2007 interview with 60 Minutes shortly after the marriage’s breakdown, he addressed the rumors for first time. Anderson Cooper, who has been written about in out magazine, as being in a glass closet, and who shows up at events in New York City, with men assumed to be his lover, did the interview. The two talking together was a masterpiece of sexual ambiguity; the answers were delicate and well placed. He says, “Maybe I should have come out, and say, no I’m not...but I didn’t want to draw more attention to it”
That double negative, and the use of the phrase come out, to come out as straight, suggests that he knew both the public perception, and also the politics of language. That he wanted to keep it private, though typical of closeted stars, was made more discursive by the original non-refusal, refusal, especially in relation to Cooper’s involvement.
All of that said, the interesting thing about Chesney, though, is not the assumption of homosexuality, but how homosociality overlaps. Both fags and good ol’ boys share the aesthetics of nostalgia and young men. The best example of this might be the video for 2006’s Young, is filled with so much young male flesh, that it seems almost to be homoerotic. About his life in a small town at 16, the boys he hires to play him, as teenagers are rock and roll jocks.
Wearing tight jeans, wife beaters, or often shirtless, looking dark and petulant, they have the fetish of heterosexualised masculinity has been a gay man's provenance for decades. Watching this Chesney video is like seeing a bleached clean version of Larry Clarke or a less pretty Bruce Weber.
That the video begins with Kenny in a Letterman's jacket makes things more interesting. The letterman’s jacket was first worn by straight men, then as an almost literal fetish for gay men, so much of one that it was written about, photographed and filmed. There is an iconic Champion Studios shot, of a naked man, in nothing but a letterman’s jacket, and a hard cock, there are the drawings of Harry Bush, Maupin wrote about it in his second tales from the city novel. For the last half of the 20th century, a grown man (especially one who looks as boyish as Chesney) who wears a high school lettermen's jacket meant two things: that he couldn't get over high school, or he liked straight acting boy cock. Chesney did letter in both baseball and football while in high school, and he does seem to appreciate the boys he casts in his videos.
There may be another way to view the text, though. That the song is called Young, and that it is mostly about how Chesney wants to return to the glories of high school, and that he made a hit out of Keg in The Closet, about the utopia of frat boy life, his desire to return to earlier times is well documented. This suggests that he does not want to have sex with other men, but with a younger, more perfect version of himself.
There are other texts in which the liminal spaces of homosocial and homosexual are impossibly unclear. In the video of On the Coast of Somewhere Beautiful, he drinks in seaside bars, hugs and holds boys, with great tenderness. Backlit shots make silhouetted figures gender ambiguous. In concert footage for Don't Happen Twice Tim McGraw piggy backs him on stage. Later, on the back of his tour bus, instead of groupies, there are almost a dozen good-looking men. In Old Blue Chair he uses the phrase: "I let go of a lover" a word that is often used to code relationships outside traditional gender norms. This doesn't include the song titles "Soul Of A Sailor"," The Tin Man", "Keg In The Closet", and "Island Boy".
Discussions of Chesney's sexuality (including this one) usually center on the masculine center of his image creation, but it under rates his position as a writer of heterosexual love songs. There are several, which are tender, difficult, and profoundly, unstably erotic, including She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, Anything But Mine, and How Forever Feels and Mine.
The earliest of these, is How Forever Feels, in which he sings that he "has done almost anything a boy can do" but then wants "to kneel on mama's front step". The desire for permanence is the chief argument for marriage. There is a hopeful vulnerability to his desire to be married, and also the under stated assumption, that marriage, especially heterosexual marriage is the logical extension of youthful experimentation. There is a grounding there, that is touching.
The single She Thinks My Tractors Sexy began his rise to the stratosphere, and it is the most complex of his texts, especially in terms of gender relations. Maybe it is because country music has been more equal in terms of gender then other genres, for longer, but the video is profoundly equal. It refutes the Mulvey assumption that “women without a phallus have to undergo punishment by…fetish objects ranging from tight shoes and corsetry through rubber gloves and leather” (Visual and Other Pleasures, 8)
In the video, she is serving him, there is no doubt in that, which would make it seem that the woman is being subservient. But it understands rural culture, farm culture suggests an even division of work, and she has her high heels off, displayed from the side, the fetish object is discarded for comfort, plus she rides regal on the back of a tractor, she is assuming sexual and physical power over Chesney. It also ends, with the trading back and forth of bodies, an almost perfect mirroring of sexual positions, which mirrors a guiltless, casual trading of phallic positioning. It is the queerest thing in Chesney’s canon and perversely, the most focused on the eroticism of women.
Finally, in Anything But Mine, Chesney's masterpiece, maintains the sexuality of his earlier work, but undermines the stability of How Forever Feels. In it a summer relationship ends in the fall—and any of the promises made, will be spoken but not believed. When the narrator croons "In the morning/I am leaving/making my way back to
Cleveland/and I don't see/how you could be ever be anything but mine" no one believes what is being sung, there is something resigned about hope failing. Phrases like "sting of summer on my skin", and "I tell her I love her and we laugh because we know it isn't true" and "there's so much I long to do to you", take what is supposed to be a
generous and open memory containing it in tragedy. The desire in the song is genuinely heterosexual; the protagonists John and Mary love and is confused by that love.
Chesney's best work is nostalgic, but an authentic desire to return rots the utopia of youth. In this way, his sexuality has an explicit connection to the ambiguity of teenage years. His "adult" songs often are about second-generation childhood, about a teenage dad, or him being unable to maintain that adult relationship (I am thinking of Good Stuff, here, where he gets advice from a sage bartender.) In this way, he manages the polymorphisms of youth, without the perversity.
In fact, much of what could be constructed as adult sexuality, is reflected as performative. This is made especially clear in Dancing For The Groceries, from 2007, about a stripper who dances to pay for her child's basic needs. Though intended as a plaintive epic about the sacrifices of a single mother, the work is camp, it it's attempts to discuss class and desire in a way that does not function as a nostalgic signifier. Lines like "in sequins and in laces, she dances for their braces" suggests a narrative construction unrelated to reportage, unrelated to the actual life of not only the referrer but the referent.
The younger and more male the subjects are, the more authentic both their sexual and domestic longings seem to be. That country music is mostly a cult of the authentic, and is mostly written for women consumers, the ambiguity here is difficult to parse. I am reminded of David Beach Snider’s potted history of similar incidents, in his essay Performance Anxiety. “the new macho image of the gay man as it emerged in the 70s” contested this strategy of marginalization of the homosexual and thus disrupted the definition of the masculine by integrating the ideological assumptions and by demonstrating the performative nature of gender subjectivity.” This may be straight, may be gay, may seek youth, may seek wisdom, regression and progression that are typical of his work and that slipperiness, is not only found in the genders of his partners, but also in the gender of himself.
Butch/Femme
Chesney's public presentation is a good ol' boy. He has the sleeveless shirts, the frat boy aesthetics, and the muscles to come across as a man's man. His relationships have been clouded in mystery, with him being discreet, not for any reason of shame, but because of his fear of revealing emotion. He talks of working hard, and that hard work being the problem with his relationships.
His work has been centrally, about what happens in the company of men,
not in a homosexual but homosocial sense. Steve Kandell's article for
Chesney in the December 2005 issue of Blender talks of all kinds of
frat boy bonding. Starting with an explanation of "sixth gear: "an advanced, almost transcendent state of drunkenness that generally requires physical assistance to get home". The drinking is part of the aesthetic of masculinity that permeates the story. There are girls, fishing, barbequing, beer and ESPN on the television. He works hard at making South Padre Island at Spring Break, a permanent fixture—or talking about it like it is. The protestant work ethic a slight of hand trick hidden between the no shirt, no shoes, no problems vibe.
Chesney doesn't look butch. He's short, and until the 1999 break out album, sort of tubby. He grew muscles at that point but never really bulked up. There is a preening, careful, and well-constructed vanity here. Publicity photos taken in St John show him half naked, lounging on boats, and sitting on the beach, encouraging cameras to sexualize. His coquettish way of seducing and avoiding the camera has a clean mechanical precision.
He has been rumored to have pectoral implants (this comes from a web gossip site, called the superficial, “Last summer I was in Nashville eating dinner with a good friend who works out with Chesney's ex-trainer. Apparently, the trainer said Kenny has pectoral implants, in other words, Kenny has a boob job! Ironically, he can't actually lift heavy object due to the implants. I'm sure if you peruse through photos of Chesney you'll find quite a dramatic difference from the days when he was first beginning to present day. My friend, a musician who writes songs for several well-known country artists, claims that Kenny is like the 'Britney Spears of country music.' He really isn't that great of a singer and everyone makes fun of him” This is interesting, because his vanity is attached to his popularity, that he sells records without being very good, and only because of his own sexual personae, but inserting that all into a narrative that rewards obsessive looking, makes his body a spectacle in a form familiar to frankly girls.
This rumor he publicly disavowed on a 2005 CMT special, called Top 20 celebrity myths busted. This show was in part about spectacled bodies including segments on Terry Clarke’s posing for playboy, a Lady Godiva like singer songwriter, Billy Ray Cyrus as a Chippendale dancer, and Chris Cagle as either getting a woman pregnant or he himself gay) place Chesney in amongst the vain, the female, the desperate, or the sexualized. That he disavowed the rumours at his gym, among the male flesh, adds fuel to at least the homosocial fire.
His vanity fails, sometimes though. The constant presence of the cowboy hat reminds us that without one he looks fetal, the close ups of his face have a leather handbag aesthetic that occurs amongst all women who have spent too much time in the sun, and sometimes when he intends to look pensive, he looks stupid.
No male country pin up has the hairless, sculpted idealism of Chesney. Tim McGraw is too hairy, Brad Paisley never takes his shirt off, Toby Keith still looks like the rigpig he was before the albums, Keith Urban is too greasy, Clay Walker isn't famous enough, and Joe Nichols is lupine in a way Chesney can't contend with. The frat boy life style
that abuts the smooth aesthetic makes Chesney sexually safe enough to be loved by women and share an aesthetic with the skater boy, straight boy, pro/am porn that is in favor among gay circles. He wouldn't look out of place on places like Straight College Men, College Dudes, or Just Us Dudes.
The texture of flesh, and how that texture relates to text, was placed in stark relief, by Renua Bara’s essay Outing Texture. He writes, “The language of texture, involves liminal erotic play, between shiny/matte and smooth/rough distinctions” (from Novel Gazing, 94) The smoothness of Chesney’s flesh, the shininess of his body, the hairlessness, can be compared to the rough, hairy, secondary sexual characteristics shown by country stars like Tim McGraw or Toby Keith. The textures of Chesney’s body, requires the maintaining of a permanent adolescence, the smoothness of his corporeal presence attaches to the smoothness (read: the studio perfection) of is vocals. There is then the contradiction between the studio gorgeousness of the voice and the hairy, butch presence of Tim McGraw (c.f. the Cowboy in Me video, or the Franklin Wrestling press photos) and his voice, not quite rough, but also not maintained in the same way as Chesney. The pairs that Bara talks about are pairs that are at the core of how country music is used to discuss how gender sounds.
Bara continues "Fetishism can also lie in not in the shine, but in a kind of fluffy, hairy, feathery, furry, leathery coarseness" That list of adjectives, is a list of gendered adjectives, that can be used to describe both flesh and the word. It is a list that will be useful in applying, supplely to the aesthetics and public presentation of Chesney. Fluffy: as in porn fluff, as in pop fluff, as in non-substantial, as in not meaning much, as in too ephemeral for the real thing. To be fluff is to be not worth serious consideration as a performer, be it musically, sexually, or personally. Hairy: the words that come to mind are of butch gay male presentations. Those who are hairy include the bear, and the leather king, but they also match people who are so confident in their sexuality, that they can be schmaltzy or sweet and not risk losing an audience. This dichotomy, between super butch and cuddly teddy can almost be a fight between Toby Keith and Tim McGraw. Toby Keith sings songs like "What Stays In Mexico" or "Running Block" (i.e. fuck songs) versus Lets Make Love or Don’t Take the Girl (ie erotic odes to fidelity). It is significant that Tim McGraw, of al the country music singers, became the subject of a song that was about teenage devotion. Taylor Swift’s ode epitomizes the daddy and the teddy, safe enough to be worshiped, but dangerous enough to be obsessed with. Is there any difference in the distinctions between furry and hairy, except maybe furry is the end of a gradation of hairy? Going from smooth to hairy to furry, furry as in the usage of woof in the bear subculture, a signifier of a certain kind of animalism, that the careful refusal of adult wantonness that in general country is criticized for? Leathery is not leather, it does not have the butch quality of bikers and cowboys. Leathery is what Chesney has in the photos from St Johns in the Caribbean, to much time in the sun that results in looking like an elderly handbag. Coarseness is a subset of bawdy, and an excellent example of textural words to describe textual positioning.
That he is incapable of hair, of feather, of fury, and his leather is not the kind that suggests fetish in the most popular kind. His lack of fetish able cling, his refusal to be butch or femme, but maybe under the right circumstances, both—does not have a panty wetting androgyny—this is not Byron or Elvis, but a kind of effect of being all things to all people. His refusal of either categories, and his negation of the middle, makes analysis or meta-textual positions problematic. This does not mean that he fails at an erotic personae, it means hat his erotic personae is non standard.
Top/Bottom
The phrase Top/Bottom leaked from the BDSM community, to the general gay male world, and onto mainstream culture. Chesney himself has been cagey personally about how he fucks and who fucks him. There are places where his versatility becomes clear. There is the coda of She Thinks My Tractors Sexy, which we have already talked about, and there is he and Gretchen Wilson, on his ABC television special.
They are singing Hurts so Good, by John Mellencamp, as a duet. The song in itself has a certain S/M vibe, but how they sing it, is a jostling for power. Kenny introduces Gretchen as Miss Wilson, placing himself as the owner of a space, and talking about her in terms, which must at least be partially arch. She comes out singing. They lock eyes, and move to the center of the stage from opposite corners. Cheney begins pulling Gretchen by her arm roughly. Gretchen sings, to Chesney, Chesney looks goofy and sort of in love. She tops Chesney, pointing and almost shaming him. They face off, staring at each other, and sing/shout the lines about teeth "sinking right though my bones"
There is an exchange of power here; both taking each other's personae on. They run to the opposite sides of the stage, retreating from the aggressiveness for a few seconds, then run back and face each other. They twist lower and lower, Chesney has his mouth somewhere near Gretchen's crotch, and it looks like what Bowie or Jim Morrison did in the mid 70s, simulating cunninlingus instead of fellatio—but more so because Wilson doesn't have a guitar on her, so the excuse of watching the fingering is not present. Wilson pushes Chesney away. They end, tenderly, with a side-by-side hug and some non-sexualized intimacy.
The whole run there, bodies moving together, too close, then far apart, that sexuality dissipating into something less threatening is central to Chesney's public personae. The photos of his wedding to Renee Zellweger are interesting for this reason. One where Cheseny is kissing her hand, being as far away from here as possible, and her looking at him with an almost regal disdain, suggests she has all of the power in the relationship. The ones where she is fitting herself under his arm, her looking down and across, he looking at the camera, makes Zellweger have less power. She is taller then Chesney, she stoops in deference.
These two photos, and the footage with Chesney and Wilson, suggest that he is aware of what his sexuality does, publicly. Allowing for a free flow, between his female counterpoints, means that his audience will be aware that he can be trained, and that he can take charge as well, it adds a small frisson of danger to a safe performance.
Looking at all of this---of the public personae that is unguided, that moves between the lines that are expected of performers might risk a larger career. But selling 25 million records, and having among the highest concert revenues for a half a decade, suggest that Kenny isn't hurting for anything.
Thinking about that lack of excess, and putting it into a more personal spin. Academia has a similar desire for sobriety, for critical distance from the subject. Martha Mockus starts her essay on fellow Albertan, kd lang in Queering The Pitch thusly: "I've never been a fan of country music. I find that I am vaguely aware of who’s who in country, but I have never experienced a great desire to listen to country tunes or cultivate a taste for any particular country musicians." (261) I grew up on country, and I have cultivated sexual, personal, emotionally, aesthetic and spiritual tastes for a wide variety of country musicians.
The thing is, reading about Chesney, in the conventional press, they are all so surprised, at his success, and at how his normalcy--my friends accuse me of having a fetish for normalcy, but the thing is, things are never as normal as they seem. Griel Marcus talked about the Old Weird America, and how country is about death, about anything but the Sunbelt and the suburbs. The snobbish kibitzing around alt-country, and of the freak folk movement, that calls itself the New Weird America add to this rhetoric against pop country, against the normalcy of people like Chesney.
But Chesney's complicated and intractable relationship with normality that we have talked about here reflects in finding meaning and pattern in the suburbs I grew up in. Growing up strange, not knowing the patterns, in a town whose industries were prisons and gas plants, growing up wanting to be an academic, a writer, an artist--growing up weird means that that which is normal is strange...Marcus quotes the roman historian Tactius all the time: I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me, but Chesney, Paisley, Keith and the like are strange to me, the middle America is strange to me...this was my attempt to make them closer, to find out why I love that which I love...
I joked, telling people about this essay, that it was about how much I wanted to fuck Kenny Chesney, and I think that not only do I want to fuck Chesney, but I want to transfer myself, to be a truck driver in Dubuque or a housewife in Phoenix. I would like to tell a story that talks about this longing. There is a Canadian singer named Jason McCoy, he's good--look him up--and I was in his concert at Bloor/Yonge in Toronto, at a Hard Rock Cafe. The most touristy spot in the most urban corner in Canada, and I am with these two women who work as cleaners, near the working class town of Barrie. They are drinking Molson long necks, I'm drinking Steamwhistle, they are talking about McCoy's ass, and I say, its a nice ass, they get a little drunk, and I'm a little drunk, its near Christmas, I'm alone, and the concert is good but I'm not having any fun, I go to the concert because I wanted some down home charm.
But they start making fun of my beer, and then ignore me. They think of me as a city boy that is slumming, they don't think I understand the power of McCoy, and one of the reasons why I love the singer, is that all of his filth is oblique, references to being born again sexually being the same as born again religiously, or a sly node to swallows at Capernstria going down south, with resonances of the tingle of a mouth around a cock...but he is also deeply religious, though he keeps his religion close to his chest.
I think here, I am a city boy who is trying to be a country boy, talking about Chesney as a post modern sexual ideal, because I want him to be, because every time I think about Chesney this way, I think of that concert, the sexuality almost hidden, the casual lust and the home town values, the psycho-geographical land mines of class, taste, culture, and that which can be consumed or which consumes. There is something comforting and unsettling simultaneously about seeing his body move through such metaphorical and physical spaces, just like drinking the wrong beer in the wrong crowd confirms and upsets social identifiers, and just like there is something subversive in getting a hard on during a Jason McCoy concert
