Monday, March 30, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
In 2008 there were at least three country singles about teenage girls taking roles that were advanced of their years. All of them were domestic: about how keeping the baby, about not seeking an abortion, or an adoption. Two of them were written and performed by women, one of them were written and performed by a man. One of them, Carrie Underwood's, Just A Dream, elucidates a narrative about being a war widow at 18. One of them, Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, is a rockabilly track that rollicks towards a strange deus ex machina ending. One of them, Heidi Newfield’s Knocked Up, hides a conserative agenda in highly fashionable formalist dress, and all of them forget the 2002 Tim McGraw single, Red Rag Top, with it's scandalous mention of abortion as not only an option, but a done deed.
These songs intersect with the politically inconvenient pregnancy of Bristol Palin. functioning as a way of discussing questions about narrative, autonomy, poltical conciousness, gender, sexuality, the history of country music, and what it means to live in the flyover district.
Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent patterns. 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 single, Johnny and June, a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing of Cash. (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior. The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style, in how it ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Case h's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville. Weirdly, it also fails to discuss the biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.
Newfield is of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others, who refuse to particpate in the territorial disputes that have surrounded rock and roll vs country. This disupute is 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 track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify traditionalists . What makes it country, 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 the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and 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 written in a way that is light hearted—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring any other options. 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 suggests 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, raised in this culture, talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, taxonomizing the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “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 hurrican” , 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 dismisses the dangers of desire 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 general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include 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 wrote her work from a specific personal history, and though Knocked Up is closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, there are no details in Knocked Up. Maybe she does not have them, or maybe she does not have Lynn’s narrative skills, or more likely, people are getting married and having childen later, and so in Nashville there is too much seriousness too quickly. T
The lack of seriousness 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 the humour. 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”.
Though Newfield contains rock and roll influences, the Church track is much less of a studio creation. 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, and is glad that he does not need to. He also refuses to shame the woman, and even casually discusses how she leaves the car. 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. The politics of pleasure are encoded in discourses of rock and roll, and both Church and Newfield genetically splice that history into this new music
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 can be placed now 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 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. 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.
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The 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...” the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings 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”, in Guys Like Me, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other 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 though increasingly those who are part of the working class 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.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and wes. This culutre is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the United States.
The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or self-awareness about youth. She sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.
Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the tragic tears and costumed procession of a funeral occur. There is a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of the narrative told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts mentioned previously.
That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart suggest she is a romantic martyr, in the same way that he becomes martyrdom for freedom. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead solider, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permanence and permanence dashed for no particular purpose.
Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, elcuidates how female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals can slyly hide narratives of political catastrophe. Mulvey writes, “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of emotions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Hollywood that had tried to find a deciphering mode of reading the image on screen... “( Fetishism and Curiousity, 29)
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.
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The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about 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, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult.
This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the 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 both have a taste for the iconic, and a lack of details or the use of specific geographic places as larger symbolic utopias. They 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 bass 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. 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, acknowledging both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and that there perhaps can be redemption in getting high in less ecclesial ways.
Red Rag Top combines most of these themes, and the problems of iconic narratives as well. The first lines introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal, so that the scandal of unmarried, teenage sex on top of the terminating of a pregnancy would be enough scandal to sink the narrative, at least on the charts. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, what was the date where the abortion was acquired. If we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States, and that he managed with his girlfriend to pay for the termination of pregnancy. The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town in matters of traffic be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
There are other questions. 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, or even the state sponsored widowhood of Underwood, 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: t was all make believe in the end:
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
The lack of control in the Underwood, her melodramatic breaking apart, is the beginning of an internalization of that message. The choices you make cannot be unmade, and the choices that one makes in concert are de facto the choices of your own. The scabbing over of loss, never fully completes, and just as Underwood’s track, by using the first person, becomes simultaneously a monument to those who die on foreign shores, and a blistering indictment of war in general, and the war in Iraq by implication,
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 about teenage pregnancy or widowhood 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”. Like editors on reality television shows, the stories should have one plot point, and simple moralism, ending in an uncomplicated moral. With the republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
One of the ways to show this bodily continence is of course, 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 Shame 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 16ht 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.
Sarah Palin’s refusal to control Bristol Palin’s body, like the community expects her to is not the only failure that occurs. This was not the only thing that Palin failed to tell the MCCain camp though, she failed to tell him about her attempts to get her husband out of trouble, or her firing state troopers to protect her in-laws, among other domestic squabbles, in this way the failure of the Palin/McCain campaign is not only a failure of narrative control, but an example of how domestic melodrama can destabilize, or collapse exterior, traditionally masculine spheres when they interact with each other’s It becomes a mirror reversal of the Carrie Underwood song, which miniaturizes a large scale international conflict . making it intensely small and personal.
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.
Country music often becomes an intensely synthesizing and personalizing medium; In many ways, what is assumed to be conservative is insular, and it has its own traditions, its own culture, and its own solutions. Looking at the Palin situation in that context, thinking about it as a country song, opens avenues of discourse traditionally closed. Thinking just in terms of class peels away layers of taboo anew expectation that have crusted around Palin and company.
What they all have in common, though, is recognition of the difficulty of choice. 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.
These songs intersect with the politically inconvenient pregnancy of Bristol Palin. functioning as a way of discussing questions about narrative, autonomy, poltical conciousness, gender, sexuality, the history of country music, and what it means to live in the flyover district.
Going through each of these performers, and the Palin’s methodically, leads to a seeking of consistent patterns. 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 single, Johnny and June, a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing of Cash. (Cannonzing in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior. The song is indictiative of Newfields performance style, in how it ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Case h's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville. Weirdly, it also fails to discuss the biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.
Newfield is of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others, who refuse to particpate in the territorial disputes that have surrounded rock and roll vs country. This disupute is 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 track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify traditionalists . What makes it country, 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 the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and 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 written in a way that is light hearted—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring any other options. 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 suggests 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, raised in this culture, talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, taxonomizing the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “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 hurrican” , 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 dismisses the dangers of desire 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 general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include 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 wrote her work from a specific personal history, and though Knocked Up is closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, there are no details in Knocked Up. Maybe she does not have them, or maybe she does not have Lynn’s narrative skills, or more likely, people are getting married and having childen later, and so in Nashville there is too much seriousness too quickly. T
The lack of seriousness 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 the humour. 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”.
Though Newfield contains rock and roll influences, the Church track is much less of a studio creation. 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, and is glad that he does not need to. He also refuses to shame the woman, and even casually discusses how she leaves the car. 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. The politics of pleasure are encoded in discourses of rock and roll, and both Church and Newfield genetically splice that history into this new music
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 can be placed now 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 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. 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.
I
The 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...” the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings 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”, in Guys Like Me, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other 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 though increasingly those who are part of the working class 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.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and wes. This culutre is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the United States.
The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or self-awareness about youth. She sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.
Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the tragic tears and costumed procession of a funeral occur. There is a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of the narrative told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts mentioned previously.
That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart suggest she is a romantic martyr, in the same way that he becomes martyrdom for freedom. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead solider, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permanence and permanence dashed for no particular purpose.
Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, elcuidates how female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals can slyly hide narratives of political catastrophe. Mulvey writes, “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of emotions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Hollywood that had tried to find a deciphering mode of reading the image on screen... “( Fetishism and Curiousity, 29)
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.
.
The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about 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, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult.
This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the 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 both have a taste for the iconic, and a lack of details or the use of specific geographic places as larger symbolic utopias. They 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 bass 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. 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, acknowledging both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and that there perhaps can be redemption in getting high in less ecclesial ways.
Red Rag Top combines most of these themes, and the problems of iconic narratives as well. The first lines introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal, so that the scandal of unmarried, teenage sex on top of the terminating of a pregnancy would be enough scandal to sink the narrative, at least on the charts. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, what was the date where the abortion was acquired. If we assume that the abortion was acquired after 1973, when it was legalized in the United States, and that he managed with his girlfriend to pay for the termination of pregnancy. The narrator avoids parents and cops, to commit minor traffic violations. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town in matters of traffic be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibility when the fun stops?
There are other questions. 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, or even the state sponsored widowhood of Underwood, 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: t was all make believe in the end:
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
The lack of control in the Underwood, her melodramatic breaking apart, is the beginning of an internalization of that message. The choices you make cannot be unmade, and the choices that one makes in concert are de facto the choices of your own. The scabbing over of loss, never fully completes, and just as Underwood’s track, by using the first person, becomes simultaneously a monument to those who die on foreign shores, and a blistering indictment of war in general, and the war in Iraq by implication,
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 about teenage pregnancy or widowhood 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”. Like editors on reality television shows, the stories should have one plot point, and simple moralism, ending in an uncomplicated moral. With the republicans these narratives are often about self-control, and bodily continence.
One of the ways to show this bodily continence is of course, 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 Shame 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 16ht 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.
Sarah Palin’s refusal to control Bristol Palin’s body, like the community expects her to is not the only failure that occurs. This was not the only thing that Palin failed to tell the MCCain camp though, she failed to tell him about her attempts to get her husband out of trouble, or her firing state troopers to protect her in-laws, among other domestic squabbles, in this way the failure of the Palin/McCain campaign is not only a failure of narrative control, but an example of how domestic melodrama can destabilize, or collapse exterior, traditionally masculine spheres when they interact with each other’s It becomes a mirror reversal of the Carrie Underwood song, which miniaturizes a large scale international conflict . making it intensely small and personal.
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.
Country music often becomes an intensely synthesizing and personalizing medium; In many ways, what is assumed to be conservative is insular, and it has its own traditions, its own culture, and its own solutions. Looking at the Palin situation in that context, thinking about it as a country song, opens avenues of discourse traditionally closed. Thinking just in terms of class peels away layers of taboo anew expectation that have crusted around Palin and company.
What they all have in common, though, is recognition of the difficulty of choice. 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, March 28, 2009
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is the paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is the paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
In 2008 there were at least three country singles about teenage girls taking roles that were advanced of there years, either by almost being pregrant, or being married. All songs charted. One of these singles was in a rock argot, and two of them were the more traditional country argot. All of them were about how keeping the baby, about not seeking an abortion, or an adoption, was the expected course of action. Two of them were written and performed by women, one of them were written and performed by a man. One of them, Carrie Underwood's, Just A Dream, elucidates a narrative about being a war widow at 18. One of them, Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, is an innovative narrative constructed in real time, with a strange Deus Ex Machina ending, One of them, Knocked Up, has lyrical and musical mirroring of Brenda Lee's Let's Jump the Broomstick, and all of them forget the 2002 Tim McGraw single, Red Rag Top, with it's then scandalous mention of abortion as not only an option, but a done deed.
These three new songs, and Red Rag Top, intersect with the poltically inconveient pregrancy of Bristol Palin. These texts function as a way to start discussing these questions using a variety of lenses including reportage, statistical analysis, critiques of media, psycho-geographic analysis of the American west and south, recent attempts to queer melodrama, protestant theologies of the body, arguments from a wide variety of sources about autonomy and abortion, histories of childhood, and how especially narratives complete and confound how we view the copereal object. I hope then to not answer anything, but provide a map of strategic engagements around such difficult sites.
Starting with Heidi Newfield, who is the youngest of these performers, and the one who has come to prominence quite quickl. Both of her biggest singles are about what it means to be married, in a fairly conservative and traditional way. Johnny and June is a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing (both in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior) that has worked as a corrective to the establishment ignoring his presence for decades. The song is not very interesting, and it should only be noted because it makes the chaotic narrative of Cash's life clean, and pedantic. The song ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville politics, it even (weirdly) does not discuss the profound protestant biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.
Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: 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 track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (i.e. 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.
Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and 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 written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, 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 suggests that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “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, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire 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 general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include 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 she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.
Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher; there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar-picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.
It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates humour. The text is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. 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. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.
Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "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 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”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)
Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesize both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)
To put it another way, 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, one that 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 both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.
His first 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). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “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”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other 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 though increasingly those who are part of the working class 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.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the united states, this is one more track, like Travelin’ Solider by the Dixie Chicks, or Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Kraus or Arlington, by Trace Adkins.
Each of these songs is a ballad. They are all in minor keys, with glistening strings, a tremulous voice that is at the risk of breaking down as a literalazation of emotional break down of the characters. Each of them is about war either in general (Just a Dream, Arlington) or historical wars (Travellin’ Soilder about Vietnam; Whiskey Lullaby about the Second World War). Each of them are melodramas, often about sexuality and desire in the context of going off to war, or returning broken. The songs about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written within the boundries of music row are required to triumphant. (Because the audience of so called alt country is so politcally different, the expectations are radically shifted, which explains that they are capable of an explicitness that has to be spoken of in code for Nashville—the most obvious examples being Dress Blues by Jason Isosbell, and Steve Earle’s song about John Walker Lindh.)
The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or a self awareness about youth. Though Natahlie Maines, Trace Adkins, or Brad Paisley write about being 18, they are two or three decades older then that. That Carrie Underwood sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.
Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the the tragic tears and constumed procession of a funeral occur. There is also a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of narrative, told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts metioned previously.
That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart, and that she refuses to acknowledge the event as really, provide two ways of working through the text. She becomes a martyrdom for love, in the same way that he becomes a martyrdom for freedom or patrotisim. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead soilder, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permance and permanance dashed for no paticular purpose.
Reading Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, the parrells between how he used a female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals slyly hide narratives of polticial catasophre. The emotional rawness of personal tragedy become larger, they are used to document world scale events. She writes “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... “(29)
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female reprsentation, 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 possibilties of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama can be an incredibly conserative form, in that it expects certain things from its particiapnts, 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 soilder 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 intesified by history, by genre expecation, and by the poltiical implications of both new nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implicaitons of a working class life. But there are things that are left unsaid, even left unsaid (ironically) with in the separate traditions of alt or outlaw country, and that is it is not only fathers and husbands and sons that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the first time in American militiary history, is that mothers and daughters and wives are dying on the battlefield, they have become the same kind of soilder.
Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war came from the most recent war, both from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica . Those two, who were supposed to be the villian and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easy or ready way. Even the pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of femminzed, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
There is a great amount of complexity that can occur in a three minute pop song, moral relevenace, and pyschosexual desire abutting personal history and social implications, and in this capacity what is left unsaid, or what is glossed over, or who is speaking, or how they are speaking, become an intergral part of the expereince.
The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about 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, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult, or as children. This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits, it is an ur text for the songs discussed previously, though it destablises them, because it is the only song that mentions abortion, and a song that talks about the teenage pregrancy, and its termination in a narrative of nostaliga and completion. In this way, it becomes a standardized or at least normalised text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indscretion, and nostalgia and part of the history of that subgenre within the larger patterns of the industry.
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 nostaliga can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostaliga, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run benig 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 follwing 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 nostaligc. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this paticualr 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 both have a taste for the iconic, and a lack of details or the use of specific geographic places as larger symbolic utopias. They have complicated realtionships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents in general, and they both have a bittersweet desire to make their complicated lives simpler, to give up fame for youth. Though Chesney’s performance is a much less stable text, and his desires are much more (perhaps inadvenrtly) polymorphically perverse. The diferrence between the two then, is one of complications, and moral complexity. Tim McGraw is less convinced of the redeeming power of pleasure for pleasures sake, and he is much more aware of the natural consquences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice. 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, acknowleding both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and that there perhaps can be redemption in getting high in less ecclestical ways.
Red Rag Top combines most of these themes, and the problems of iconic narratives as well. The first lines introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal, so that the scandal of unmarried, teenage sex on top of the termintating of a pregrancy would be ebough scandal to singk the narrative, at least on the charts. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, what was the date where the abotion was aquired. If we assume that the abortion was aquired after 1973, when it was legalised in the United States, and that he mangaged with his girlfriend to pay for the termination of pregrancy. He talks about avoiding his parents, and avoiding the cops, but this is driving around town, minor traffic violaitons, and the like. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town in matters of sex and traffic be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibilty of one kind of another, when the fun stops?
There are other questions. 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 communcation and later realtionship, 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 someone like Newfield, or even the state sponsored widowhood of Underwood, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice.
The interesting thing about that choice, was that it was less about an abortion, and more about the realtionships that were given and broken on that summer night. When he had sex with the girl, they were “as hot as a coal burning stove”, but he loved her, and he still loves her in the coda of the song. The mournful tone of the track becomes less about the love of a fetus, and more about the loss of a love—or to muddy the waters a bit, though he never uses the words abortion, or terminating, or even baby, he uses the line “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line becomes a fulcurm, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostagia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possiblities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Carrie Underwood mourns loss because the choice was taken away from her, at 18 the possibilites of a new life, or new lives gone away in the war has parrellels in the choices that were both made and unmade in this text. 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 possibity of what could have happened: t was all make believe in the end:
No I cant say where she is today,
I cant remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And theres no such thing as what mightve
Been, thats a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
The lack of control in the Underwood, her melodramtic breaking apart, is the beginning of an inteenalaztion of this message. The choices you make cannot be unmade, and the choices that one makes in concert are de facto the choices of your own. The scabbing over of loss, never fully completes, and just as Underwood’s track, by using the first person, becomes simletously a monument to those who die on foreign shores, and a blistering indictment of war in general, and the war in Iraq by implication, Red Rag Top becomes bierneral, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolsecents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a realtionship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical postions 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 possiblity 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 be with out a careful listening, another of the popualr cult of nostalgia.
Nostaliga 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 inconveient. 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 about teenage pregrancy or widowhood were popularized in the an election year when the vice presidental Republican candiate had a pregrant teenager of her own.
To put it In its most simplistic way, the goal of a presediental campaign, especially in the television ero, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what wnet wrong with the campaigh 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 tless the American people a positive story”. Like editors on realitly television shows, the stories should have one plot point, and simple moralism, ending in an uncomplicated moral. With the republicans these narratives are often about self control, and bodily contience.
One of the ways to show this bodily contenince is of course, not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. The female body is especially unruly, and you can see this from the implosion of the McCain and Palin campaign. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregancy 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 Shame 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 16ht century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virture (and for virture read hymen) has been comprimes: “the threat of ostracisim, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young womens sexual behaviour, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merley personal.” (Qouted in Virignity, A Cultural History, Anke 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.
Sarah Palin’s refusal to control Bristol Palin’s body, like the community expects her to is not the only failure that occurs. This was not the only thing that Palin failed to tell the MCCain camp though, she failed to tell him about her attempts to get her husband out of trouble, or her firing state troopers to protect her inlaws, among other domestic squabbles, in this way the failure of the Palin/MCCain camapign is not only a failure of narrative control, but an example of how domestic melodrama can destabilze, or collapse exterior, traditionally masculine spheres when they interact with each other.s It becomes a mirror reversal of the Carrie Underwood song, which miniturazes a large scale internaitonal confilct . making int intensely small and personal. The difference though, is that Underwood’s is a highly concentrated text, with one narrative that refuses it’s metonoymical function. It becomes singualr. Or to put it another way, Palin’s life (both Bristol and Sarah’s) life cannot be a melodrama, cannot be discussed as a narrative text, because there is so much real life chaos, so much pettieness and instability, and petit tragedies, to create one narrrative.
The interesting thing though, is that the past and future collpase into themselves, the scandals that happened before she was govneor of alaska, collude with the scanadals that happened as she was govenor, and on the campign trail itself. The unruiliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainity. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriachs 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, as is the narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself asa fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be belived, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to syntheise a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editoral before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obseserves noted the pregrancy served to humanise the Palin;s and showcase the candiates rejeciton 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.
Country music often becomes an intensely syntheszing and personalizing medium, it becomes a way for people who do not have control of traditional media to present narratives themselves. In many ways, what is assumed to be conserative, is insular, and it has its own traditions, its own culture, and its own soultions. Looking at the Palin situaiton in that context, thinking about it as a country song, opens avenues of discourse traditionally closed. Thinking just in terms of class peels away layers of taboo ane expectation that have crusted around Palin and company.
What they all have in common, though, is a recognition of the difficulty of choice. 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 poltical 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 negoation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of mannifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragamtic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alterante discourse arround 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 funtctions. Just in the songs we have mentioned here, the narratives could be about enjoying a wedding that one is forced into, or about the sexual pleasures that led to childhood, and maybe ones that can occur post birth, or the importance of a matrelianal circle of protection, or how useful false cheer can be when one is seriously fucked, as you can see in Knocked Up, or how much calm a 4/4 beat can have, or an almost calvinst sense of the natural consquences of pleasure, or how to take responsibility at 18 when there is no desire to do so, or how so much of life is waiting for the obvious, in two pink lines; or about how still the filmic funcitons of melodrama allow us to tell truths that are unpleasent, or to speak against an unjust war that keeps killing boys that should be enjoying their youth (something that keeps needing to be said, that has been said from the beginning, and seemingly requires renewal in endless cants); or the functions and moral severity of nostalgia, or how the possiblities of a life not lived can be ultimately tragic, or about how much story could be told using allustion and ellpitical sideglances, or how important narrative is, how quietly it tells one story while implying a dozen others.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling american stories, and the stories here, are ones that complicate the hope, or despair of what is happening now. There are few answers, because attempts to document qoutidan lives, and the past. It’s 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 sugggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the funciton of the text. I am too far away in age, in locaiton, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18 war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even what ever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the womens 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.
These three new songs, and Red Rag Top, intersect with the poltically inconveient pregrancy of Bristol Palin. These texts function as a way to start discussing these questions using a variety of lenses including reportage, statistical analysis, critiques of media, psycho-geographic analysis of the American west and south, recent attempts to queer melodrama, protestant theologies of the body, arguments from a wide variety of sources about autonomy and abortion, histories of childhood, and how especially narratives complete and confound how we view the copereal object. I hope then to not answer anything, but provide a map of strategic engagements around such difficult sites.
Starting with Heidi Newfield, who is the youngest of these performers, and the one who has come to prominence quite quickl. Both of her biggest singles are about what it means to be married, in a fairly conservative and traditional way. Johnny and June is a lachrymose ballad, continuing the sentimentalizing/canonizing (both in the sense of reasserting his place in the Nashville hierarchy and in the sense of making him a moral/religious model of behavior) that has worked as a corrective to the establishment ignoring his presence for decades. The song is not very interesting, and it should only be noted because it makes the chaotic narrative of Cash's life clean, and pedantic. The song ignores a myriad of burrs under the saddle, including but not limited to Cash's first wife, his infidelity, his drug use, his affiliation to the outsider movement, and his contempt for Nashville politics, it even (weirdly) does not discuss the profound protestant biblically conservative desire for order and justice that saved his life as much as Carter-Cash's hard work and long suffering.
Newfield is a contradictory figure though—she is young, of a new wave of pop influenced, sexually sophisticated, and musically synthesizing female singer songwriters that have emerged from the country scene in the last few years, including Kellie Pickler, Taylor Swift, Carrie Underwood, Sunny Sweetam and half a dozen others. This is not a new thing, Country Music has a new wave every 5 or 10 years, from Patsy Cline in the 1950s, to Martina McBride in the 1990s, the only thing that might be new, is that the controversy about keeping country, or remaining a purity of voice, or avoiding the pernicious influence of Rock and Roll (a controversy that has been so persistent that it has lasted until Alan Jackson and George Strait's Murder on Music Row—which includes the lines: 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 track very explicitly contains drums and guitars in a mix that would horrify the traditionalists like Jackson and Strait, so what makes it country, is then the lyrical content, from the vernacular use of language (i.e. 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.
Each of those can be critiqued widely, and delicately. The song is written by Angaleena Presley / Mark D. Sanders. Mark D Sanders wrote the Lee Ann Womack I Hope You Dance, a song of great manipulative power, filled with cliché and 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 written in a way that is light hearted and jokey—dismissive of how much effort it will take to birth a child, and completely ignoring the other options, 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 suggests that she is part of a culture of child rising, and that others have done the preparation for her. In her collection of personal essays, Dorothy Allison talks about the difference between good poor, and bad poor—about maintaining a gentility and order about not having the resources necessary, and she succinctly talks about the moral language that is used to discuss the disordered: “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, in order to prevent being bad poor, she gets married.
This use of moral language puts it into stark relief to the country history the song embodies. There is a history of sentimental songs about young kids who get married, and survive. They get married against parental permission, and as Tanya Tucker writes “a head full of dreams/and faith that can move anything”. Unlike that song, or Trisha Yearwood's She's In Love with the Boy, both of which mention the dangers that these lovers go through, Sander's dismisses the dangers of desire 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 general, and so historically minded that it can be expansively used to include 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 she seems to be building up a brooder house, though thirty years ago Lynn was tearing it down.
Lynn wrote her work from a specific personal history, and so the song is a bit closer to One on the Way, but that song has explicit details of what it means to mother, and is actively contemptuous of those who are not mothers, or at least those who do not understand what it means to parent with unruly children and an unwilling husband. 40 years later, everyone mentioned in the song becomes a cipher; there is nothing explicit, no details in Knocked Up. There is a granny, a daddy, a teenage mother, and a guitar-picking boyfriend, but none of these characters have details needed, because the whole thing would become too dark, and too serious too quickly.
It is a problem that one also sees in Eric Church's Two Pink Lines, though it's use of a more lyrically complex narrative mediates humour. The text is sung in real time, with a teen-age couple in the back of a car, in the forecourt of a gas station, waiting for the results; “one means none and we're home free/two means three and a diamond ring”.
There are other similarities to the Newfield track. They are both rock and roll, though the Church track has a much more traditional, and much less studio based sound, and it is much less of a studio creation. 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. That they manage to avoid having a child, there is no discussion of the complexities of giving birth as a child.
Though there is a noticeable relief to the Church track, there is much less shame, though in Knocked Up, Sanders has made the prescriptive depiction of love, and Church has only included details of anxiety and the natural consequences of the wildfire sexuality of adolescence. The narrator claims to be willing to marry the woman, but makes no real discussion of love, even in the most conventional, heterocentric, and obligatory usages of those terms. The ironic use of the conventional expectations of the desire—is that the music has a raw edge, it would not be outside what would be called Rockabilly, 40 years ago. Bill Malone wrote about Rockabilly, "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 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”
Quoted by David Shapiro, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Rising Over the Mystery Train, 30)
Eric Church has managed the emotionalism of Rockabilly, the roaring of sex, and the destabilizing pleasure of raw fucking, but he manages to contain it in a terror of the body, of the consequences of sex. So instead of maintaining the hegemonic requirements of musical purity, as was previously required by the Opry establishment, he decides his priorities, he is capable of discussions of class, of gender, of sexuality, and of morality, but his songs are very much grounded in a southern rock tradition. Or to put it another way, he is someone who is recognizes that the working classes, especially in the south and the Midwest who sing along to his songs, were raised not only on country, but a history of rock and roll—and there is an attempt to synthesize both of those instincts. (Eric Church sings about this instinct in the double entdre song, She Won't Leave My Willie Alone—where he talks about his love of Lynrd Skynard, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, the Beatles, and of course Johnny Cash, but “she keeps coming back, for the only thing that turns her on/she won't leave my Willie alone”--where a desire for musical purity is negatively contrasted with a musical profligacy)
To put it another way, 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, one that 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 both Two Pink Lines, and in other Church songs, including Guys Like Me, and These Boots. Both are ballads, and both are less guitar driven, less formally clever then the real time structure of Two Pink Lines, but all of them are excellent examples of Watt's thesis.
His first 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). The first is “"Few would claim to be working class, although all would claim to be working men...", the desire then, is to make a self identification about what one does, as opposed to what one is. Class becomes a series of cultural signifiers that are outside the Marxist language, of class identification. When Church sings “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”, he outlines a set of specific cultural significations, related to how he interacts with his environment, that are outside of one immutable class.
The mutability of class is the other 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 though increasingly those who are part of the working class 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.
This ethical desire to serve is also found in how more working class people serve in the military, and the general military culture of the south and west, and is well documented in the widows/orphan military melodrama of Carrie Underwood's Just A Dream. The work begins with the first two lines of Eddy Arnold’s Make the World Go Away, and in the video, these lines play on the radio of a red convertible, where a blonde and handsome man sits next to her. He promises that they will be married, that there life will be eternal. He is a solider though, and he has died, and when he comes home, it will occur in a box. Since the war in Iraq has actually killed a large number of people, and since the war has killed more people from the south, then it has from any other region of the united states, this is one more track, like Travelin’ Solider by the Dixie Chicks, or Whiskey Lullaby by Brad Paisley and Alison Kraus or Arlington, by Trace Adkins.
Each of these songs is a ballad. They are all in minor keys, with glistening strings, a tremulous voice that is at the risk of breaking down as a literalazation of emotional break down of the characters. Each of them is about war either in general (Just a Dream, Arlington) or historical wars (Travellin’ Soilder about Vietnam; Whiskey Lullaby about the Second World War). Each of them are melodramas, often about sexuality and desire in the context of going off to war, or returning broken. The songs about the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan written within the boundries of music row are required to triumphant. (Because the audience of so called alt country is so politcally different, the expectations are radically shifted, which explains that they are capable of an explicitness that has to be spoken of in code for Nashville—the most obvious examples being Dress Blues by Jason Isosbell, and Steve Earle’s song about John Walker Lindh.)
The punctum that occurs in the Underwood track is one of youth, or a self awareness about youth. Though Natahlie Maines, Trace Adkins, or Brad Paisley write about being 18, they are two or three decades older then that. That Carrie Underwood sings at 18 about being a war widow, and both she herself and her audience is around that age, there is a clear transference in the autobiographical details. The song and especially the video then, become a hyper concentrated narrative about thantos and eros.
Within three minutes, and two verses, the happy tears and costumed procession of a wedding, and the the tragic tears and constumed procession of a funeral occur. There is also a Sirkian concentration on the narrative and moral power of costume. The white wedding and the black funeral, mirror reversals of narrative, told in the video, surround gender, and the expectation of gender much more closely then other texts metioned previously.
That she compares the death of her husband to a bullet of the heart, and that she refuses to acknowledge the event as really, provide two ways of working through the text. She becomes a martyrdom for love, in the same way that he becomes a martyrdom for freedom or patrotisim. Every detail, the shoebox of his materials that she carries to remind him before the wedding, the veil of the wedding dress, the trumpets of the military band that occur “two weeks before the wedding”, even the preacher man who prays over the future, and then the soul of the dead soilder, and the hymns of praise, and then the choir “singing the saddest song she ever heard”, the song is an incredibly sophisticated ode to the melodrama of permance and permanance dashed for no paticular purpose.
Reading Laura Mulvey’s essay on Douglas Sirk, the parrells between how he used a female sexuality, costume, décor, and rituals slyly hide narratives of polticial catasophre. The emotional rawness of personal tragedy become larger, they are used to document world scale events. She writes “The melodrama, the genre of mise en scene, site of smoitions that cannot be expressed in so many words, concentrated critical approaches to Holylwood that had tried to find a deceiphering mdode of reading the image on screen... “(29)
The images on screen, of a widow, and of a widow as the only acceptable female position in war, hide the difficulty of female reprsentation, 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 possibilties of an 18 year old with child. Melodrama can be an incredibly conserative form, in that it expects certain things from its particiapnts, 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 soilder 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 intesified by history, by genre expecation, and by the poltiical implications of both new nashville, and the pyscho-geographical implicaitons of a working class life. But there are things that are left unsaid, even left unsaid (ironically) with in the separate traditions of alt or outlaw country, and that is it is not only fathers and husbands and sons that are dying in Afghanistan and Iraq, for the first time in American militiary history, is that mothers and daughters and wives are dying on the battlefield, they have become the same kind of soilder.
Considering that two of the most complicated narratives of the most recent war came from the most recent war, both from the place where country comes from. Both Lyddie England and Jessica . Those two, who were supposed to be the villian and the hero of this recent conflict, are much less stable, and much able to be melodramatized, or even written about in an easy or ready way. Even the pentagon’s attempts to make a new kind of femminzed, attractive, and yet strong/resilient hero out of failed.
There is a great amount of complexity that can occur in a three minute pop song, moral relevenace, and pyschosexual desire abutting personal history and social implications, and in this capacity what is left unsaid, or what is glossed over, or who is speaking, or how they are speaking, become an intergral part of the expereince.
The two songs that I have talked previously, are about women, but do not talk about 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, and these narratives change if the listener is a teenager, or an adult, or as children. This seemingly obvious statement is problematized in the Tim McGraw’s Red Rag Top, recorded in 2002, and included in his greatest hits, it is an ur text for the songs discussed previously, though it destablises them, because it is the only song that mentions abortion, and a song that talks about the teenage pregrancy, and its termination in a narrative of nostaliga and completion. In this way, it becomes a standardized or at least normalised text of regret and personal history, a discussion of youthful indscretion, and nostalgia and part of the history of that subgenre within the larger patterns of the industry.
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 nostaliga can be. Starting from when Red Rag Top was released (note, this single stalled at no. 5) in 2002: Three songs were explicitly about nostaliga, taking up 14 weeks of that year, with the longest run benig 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 follwing 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 nostaligc. Though Kenny Chesney seems to make the most money from this paticualr 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 both have a taste for the iconic, and a lack of details or the use of specific geographic places as larger symbolic utopias. They have complicated realtionships to their own bodies, and to the bodies of adolescents in general, and they both have a bittersweet desire to make their complicated lives simpler, to give up fame for youth. Though Chesney’s performance is a much less stable text, and his desires are much more (perhaps inadvenrtly) polymorphically perverse. The diferrence between the two then, is one of complications, and moral complexity. Tim McGraw is less convinced of the redeeming power of pleasure for pleasures sake, and he is much more aware of the natural consquences of the actions and restrictions of the life he lauds.
If one reads McGraw closely, he posits an ethical structure of choice. 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, acknowleding both the isolation of rural/exurban/suburban existence, and that there perhaps can be redemption in getting high in less ecclestical ways.
Red Rag Top combines most of these themes, and the problems of iconic narratives as well. The first lines introduce a couple, one 18 and 20, both legal, so that the scandal of unmarried, teenage sex on top of the termintating of a pregrancy would be ebough scandal to singk the narrative, at least on the charts. But if they are 18 and 20, and he is speaking of an adult with a wife and a child, what was the date where the abotion was aquired. If we assume that the abortion was aquired after 1973, when it was legalised in the United States, and that he mangaged with his girlfriend to pay for the termination of pregrancy. He talks about avoiding his parents, and avoiding the cops, but this is driving around town, minor traffic violaitons, and the like. Could the transgressing of the ethics of a small town in matters of sex and traffic be extrapolated into the more adult task of taking responsibilty of one kind of another, when the fun stops?
There are other questions. 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 communcation and later realtionship, 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 someone like Newfield, or even the state sponsored widowhood of Underwood, is that McGraw was the only one who made a choice.
The interesting thing about that choice, was that it was less about an abortion, and more about the realtionships that were given and broken on that summer night. When he had sex with the girl, they were “as hot as a coal burning stove”, but he loved her, and he still loves her in the coda of the song. The mournful tone of the track becomes less about the love of a fetus, and more about the loss of a love—or to muddy the waters a bit, though he never uses the words abortion, or terminating, or even baby, he uses the line “made a choice not to have a choice”, that line becomes a fulcurm, that line underlines the thesis of all of those songs about nostalgia and loss that centre American country music. Nostagia becomes less of the action mourned, but about the possiblities that could occur if a choice never had to be made.
Carrie Underwood mourns loss because the choice was taken away from her, at 18 the possibilites of a new life, or new lives gone away in the war has parrellels in the choices that were both made and unmade in this text. 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 possibity of what could have happened: t was all make believe in the end:
No I cant say where she is today,
I cant remember who I was, back then
Well you do what you do and you pay for your sins,
And theres no such thing as what mightve
Been, thats a waste of time; drive you outta your mind
The lack of control in the Underwood, her melodramtic breaking apart, is the beginning of an inteenalaztion of this message. The choices you make cannot be unmade, and the choices that one makes in concert are de facto the choices of your own. The scabbing over of loss, never fully completes, and just as Underwood’s track, by using the first person, becomes simletously a monument to those who die on foreign shores, and a blistering indictment of war in general, and the war in Iraq by implication, Red Rag Top becomes bierneral, it is about the ability of two scared barley post adolsecents who are allowed to access abortion, and choose to do so, but it is also about the mourning for the potential of a realtionship, and perhaps even a life, that can occur post abortion. In this slippery move between the two rhetorical postions 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 possiblity 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 be with out a careful listening, another of the popualr cult of nostalgia.
Nostaliga 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 inconveient. 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 about teenage pregrancy or widowhood were popularized in the an election year when the vice presidental Republican candiate had a pregrant teenager of her own.
To put it In its most simplistic way, the goal of a presediental campaign, especially in the television ero, post-Nixon is to collapse complicated and human lives into one seamless and simple story, via vetting and speechwriting, (talking about what wnet wrong with the campaigh 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 tless the American people a positive story”. Like editors on realitly television shows, the stories should have one plot point, and simple moralism, ending in an uncomplicated moral. With the republicans these narratives are often about self control, and bodily contience.
One of the ways to show this bodily contenince is of course, not having sex before marriage, and being fecund afterwards. The female body is especially unruly, and you can see this from the implosion of the McCain and Palin campaign. There is some discussion about when John McCain knew about the pregancy 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 Shame 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 16ht century text, The Instruction of a Christian Woman, tells us what happens when her virture (and for virture read hymen) has been comprimes: “the threat of ostracisim, which are shown here to run like contagion through the community in relentless, ever widening circles, are summoned to police the young womens sexual behaviour, her body and desire are not hers to do what she pleases, for her body posses a significant worth that goes beyond the merley personal.” (Qouted in Virignity, A Cultural History, Anke 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.
Sarah Palin’s refusal to control Bristol Palin’s body, like the community expects her to is not the only failure that occurs. This was not the only thing that Palin failed to tell the MCCain camp though, she failed to tell him about her attempts to get her husband out of trouble, or her firing state troopers to protect her inlaws, among other domestic squabbles, in this way the failure of the Palin/MCCain camapign is not only a failure of narrative control, but an example of how domestic melodrama can destabilze, or collapse exterior, traditionally masculine spheres when they interact with each other.s It becomes a mirror reversal of the Carrie Underwood song, which miniturazes a large scale internaitonal confilct . making int intensely small and personal. The difference though, is that Underwood’s is a highly concentrated text, with one narrative that refuses it’s metonoymical function. It becomes singualr. Or to put it another way, Palin’s life (both Bristol and Sarah’s) life cannot be a melodrama, cannot be discussed as a narrative text, because there is so much real life chaos, so much pettieness and instability, and petit tragedies, to create one narrrative.
The interesting thing though, is that the past and future collpase into themselves, the scandals that happened before she was govneor of alaska, collude with the scanadals that happened as she was govenor, and on the campign trail itself. The unruiliness of Bristol Palin’s body becomes the de facto permission for media representations of chaos and uncertainity. Bristol Palin becomes the blankness where people can write their own texts. One could note how Sarah Palin introduces a community of matriachs 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, as is the narrative of class, from Levi Johnston referring to himself asa fucking redneck, or if the Star tabloid is to be belived, Johnson’s sister calling the Palin’s white trash. There are some attempts to syntheise a variety of these narrative, a Fox News editoral before the election within the space of two paragraphs, notes “many obseserves noted the pregrancy served to humanise the Palin;s and showcase the candiates rejeciton 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.
Country music often becomes an intensely syntheszing and personalizing medium, it becomes a way for people who do not have control of traditional media to present narratives themselves. In many ways, what is assumed to be conserative, is insular, and it has its own traditions, its own culture, and its own soultions. Looking at the Palin situaiton in that context, thinking about it as a country song, opens avenues of discourse traditionally closed. Thinking just in terms of class peels away layers of taboo ane expectation that have crusted around Palin and company.
What they all have in common, though, is a recognition of the difficulty of choice. 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 poltical 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 negoation of limited choice is not something that is often discussed because it is in direct opposition to the American mythos of mannifest destiny, but it is very much within the pragamtic ethos that the US has placed as a corrective, as an alterante discourse arround 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 funtctions. Just in the songs we have mentioned here, the narratives could be about enjoying a wedding that one is forced into, or about the sexual pleasures that led to childhood, and maybe ones that can occur post birth, or the importance of a matrelianal circle of protection, or how useful false cheer can be when one is seriously fucked, as you can see in Knocked Up, or how much calm a 4/4 beat can have, or an almost calvinst sense of the natural consquences of pleasure, or how to take responsibility at 18 when there is no desire to do so, or how so much of life is waiting for the obvious, in two pink lines; or about how still the filmic funcitons of melodrama allow us to tell truths that are unpleasent, or to speak against an unjust war that keeps killing boys that should be enjoying their youth (something that keeps needing to be said, that has been said from the beginning, and seemingly requires renewal in endless cants); or the functions and moral severity of nostalgia, or how the possiblities of a life not lived can be ultimately tragic, or about how much story could be told using allustion and ellpitical sideglances, or how important narrative is, how quietly it tells one story while implying a dozen others.
That polysemic quality, combined with the plain speech, makes country unique in telling american stories, and the stories here, are ones that complicate the hope, or despair of what is happening now. There are few answers, because attempts to document qoutidan lives, and the past. It’s 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 sugggest a solid this is what x means, betrays the funciton of the text. I am too far away in age, in locaiton, in sexuality, to truly understand what it means to be an 18 war widow, or 16 and knocked up, or even what ever the heck Bristol Palin is feeling. I am reminded of Loretta Lynn in the mid 70s, who praised birth control, but decimated the womens 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.
1972 Baylor Halloween catalog.
the international federation that controls swimming tries to sort out the technological implications of the new suits, and it becomes a weird test cast of the ethics of new humans/machines, more information here
Late Tang Dynasty Bactarian Camel, in the LACMA collection
the public art for the 1969 Victoria line extension is literal, illustrative, clever, lingustic, and historical. it does not try to be all things for everyone, and it does not try to be too clever for its own good, and it succeeds admirably, plus it has some moddish op art ualities, that now look sweet.
nothing confirmed but kids in rural wisconsin might be using veterinary abortiofacents on them selves.
Video of Le Witt;s last major drawing, Loop de Loop, on the third floor of the new courthouse in Springfield Mass, designed by Sadife, they work well together.
this show at the peabody essex in boston of moko in contemparary contexts, is a nice way of updating a musuems historically suspect collections.
explicit foto essay of the matience of lenin's corpse
rachel papo's back ground shots of the new york ballet's nut crackers, are mostly interesting for their background noise, because how many ways can you shoot a pink tutut.
the saint ny organizer of bdsm and leather events, has the best invites ever, sexy snakes, felt hearts, ram horns, piss yellow black letter gothic, buck angel in elizabethan wear, reworkings of facist olympics, you know butch cliches from queer 00s, but good.
you know how van doesberg's sculptures kind of look like manquettes for bahaus housing, or corbu's domino drawing kind of looks like maelvich, well the mdf 3d designs that Darcy Jones made for Cabins in the lower mainland have all of that high end modernist history, but they are charming, they close off spaces as much as they open them up, they take the problems with that instinct and seek solutions,
Detail of Landseers Illustration of Titania and Bottom, Midsummer Nights Dream
25 photos from anahiem
i dont understand the science but the take away is that mp3s sound like wax cylinders.
wikipedia commons index of images from the german federal archives, by year, starting from 1893, some great weimar shots.
danish 70s interior design style porn
Congresswomen Beranke is reworking the whole John Birch single currency conspiracy to a post-obama world, with extra Barney Frank being orenry.
black cab sessions has indie folk and rock stars singing for the duration of a black cab ride, usually one song, not a lot of talking, intimate and goofy, but well worth watching (good introduction to a bunch of bands that i have never heard of, but will buy cds of (ane brun, the misearble rich, left with pictures, , plus old favourites like st vincent, richard thompson, okkervil river, the new pornographers, etc) there are more then 30.
how to make a guitar hero controller from a banjo
Handmade Rue Goldberg Machine, using cadbury creme egg.
andrea fraser has this neat seires, where she overlays slides of reniassance female nudes with abstract expressionists, the formal rythyms of the dekooning titan become more emotionally involving then one would expect.
elluie rennard's shots of horses post and pre races, and of the remenants of their lives, are ghostly, esp. the ones of masks.
and i like the absence suggested by KAtherine Wolkoff's deer beds, and though i could find out easily, i am not sure if i want to know is she inds them or makes them
D and G, Spring 09
the international federation that controls swimming tries to sort out the technological implications of the new suits, and it becomes a weird test cast of the ethics of new humans/machines, more information here
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Late Tang Dynasty Bactarian Camel, in the LACMA collection
the public art for the 1969 Victoria line extension is literal, illustrative, clever, lingustic, and historical. it does not try to be all things for everyone, and it does not try to be too clever for its own good, and it succeeds admirably, plus it has some moddish op art ualities, that now look sweet.
nothing confirmed but kids in rural wisconsin might be using veterinary abortiofacents on them selves.
Video of Le Witt;s last major drawing, Loop de Loop, on the third floor of the new courthouse in Springfield Mass, designed by Sadife, they work well together.
this show at the peabody essex in boston of moko in contemparary contexts, is a nice way of updating a musuems historically suspect collections.
explicit foto essay of the matience of lenin's corpse
rachel papo's back ground shots of the new york ballet's nut crackers, are mostly interesting for their background noise, because how many ways can you shoot a pink tutut.
the saint ny organizer of bdsm and leather events, has the best invites ever, sexy snakes, felt hearts, ram horns, piss yellow black letter gothic, buck angel in elizabethan wear, reworkings of facist olympics, you know butch cliches from queer 00s, but good.
you know how van doesberg's sculptures kind of look like manquettes for bahaus housing, or corbu's domino drawing kind of looks like maelvich, well the mdf 3d designs that Darcy Jones made for Cabins in the lower mainland have all of that high end modernist history, but they are charming, they close off spaces as much as they open them up, they take the problems with that instinct and seek solutions,
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| From Untitled Album |
Detail of Landseers Illustration of Titania and Bottom, Midsummer Nights Dream
25 photos from anahiem
i dont understand the science but the take away is that mp3s sound like wax cylinders.
wikipedia commons index of images from the german federal archives, by year, starting from 1893, some great weimar shots.
danish 70s interior design style porn
Congresswomen Beranke is reworking the whole John Birch single currency conspiracy to a post-obama world, with extra Barney Frank being orenry.
black cab sessions has indie folk and rock stars singing for the duration of a black cab ride, usually one song, not a lot of talking, intimate and goofy, but well worth watching (good introduction to a bunch of bands that i have never heard of, but will buy cds of (ane brun, the misearble rich, left with pictures, , plus old favourites like st vincent, richard thompson, okkervil river, the new pornographers, etc) there are more then 30.
how to make a guitar hero controller from a banjo
Handmade Rue Goldberg Machine, using cadbury creme egg.
andrea fraser has this neat seires, where she overlays slides of reniassance female nudes with abstract expressionists, the formal rythyms of the dekooning titan become more emotionally involving then one would expect.
elluie rennard's shots of horses post and pre races, and of the remenants of their lives, are ghostly, esp. the ones of masks.
and i like the absence suggested by KAtherine Wolkoff's deer beds, and though i could find out easily, i am not sure if i want to know is she inds them or makes them
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| From Untitled Album |
D and G, Spring 09
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
tomorrow
calls:
calls:
- student services
- toronto zoo
- wb
- assesment services :
- write 1250 words on bristol palin
- write introduction to the rundman peice with the revised quesitons
- get the 800 from Dad
- Send Cheque to Lee
- follow up on pentagon
- confirm hostel for nola
- confirm with heather, christie, adam, others for friday
- check with ray how the reference letters are going
- college co-op
- other options?
Monday, March 23, 2009
portland double rummer for sale, at 365k...buy me this.
fantastic photos and video from Bristol's Nascar race.
british sporting goods and clothing, enough to make me run off to the yorkshire dells.
Maddow does derleguation for dummies
painted bronze eagle scultprues
fantastic decimation of twilight via the lrb
actual proof that the deibold can and have been used for voter.
Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America - And Found Unexpected Peace
by Lobdell, William
bing tom is like eriksom 2.0
New Island in the South Pacfic, near Tonga.
fantastic, low key photo of a family, that is a beutifully composed formal shot, and it should have won the national portairt gallery of austrila contest, regardless of the scandal.
finnish computer programmer loses finger, and replaces it with a usb memory stick.
Nevelson, Untitled, 1950
gay money is mostly a myth.
polishing the walker cherry
Bat in wind tunnel from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.
Bat in a Wind Tunnel, part of a study of location echolation in bats
dallas school district displined students using cage matches.
Miss May 1966
flickr archives of the otis archives, the us miltiary org
squid hoodie
1 in 20 german youths are neo nazis
mit adopts open acess
La Choy Ads from the mid 60s by Jim Henson
ny times on brutalism cautious reevaltion using the neglish examples
britney spears follows in the tradition of joyce and shakespeare.
On the road b/w Houston and Austin
fantastic photos and video from Bristol's Nascar race.
british sporting goods and clothing, enough to make me run off to the yorkshire dells.
Maddow does derleguation for dummies
painted bronze eagle scultprues
fantastic decimation of twilight via the lrb
actual proof that the deibold can and have been used for voter.
Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America - And Found Unexpected Peace
by Lobdell, William
bing tom is like eriksom 2.0
 |
| From Untitled Album |
New Island in the South Pacfic, near Tonga.
fantastic, low key photo of a family, that is a beutifully composed formal shot, and it should have won the national portairt gallery of austrila contest, regardless of the scandal.
finnish computer programmer loses finger, and replaces it with a usb memory stick.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Nevelson, Untitled, 1950
gay money is mostly a myth.
polishing the walker cherry
Bat in wind tunnel from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.
Bat in a Wind Tunnel, part of a study of location echolation in bats
dallas school district displined students using cage matches.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Miss May 1966
flickr archives of the otis archives, the us miltiary org
squid hoodie
 | |
| |
1 in 20 german youths are neo nazis
mit adopts open acess
La Choy Ads from the mid 60s by Jim Henson
ny times on brutalism cautious reevaltion using the neglish examples
britney spears follows in the tradition of joyce and shakespeare.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
On the road b/w Houston and Austin
Sunday, March 22, 2009
10 things to do this week:
- edit rundman peice
- finish draft of nola
- send lee cheque (all by tuesday)
- reschedule gerard for thurs. maybe heather
- write cameron peice
- send reference letters to wycliffe
- list of prep questions for chip/barb meetings
- calgary in tuesday (will, treve, glenbow, chip, barb)
- fill and send out bursary form
- find student number
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Abortion trends by age indicate that since 1973, abortion ratios have been higher for adolescents aged . For females aged <19 years and those aged >40 years, the abortion ratio generally increased from 1974 through the early 1980s and declined thereafter. The abortion ratio for women aged 20--34 years (those with the highest fertility rates) has declined slightly since the mid-1980s. The abortion ratio for women aged 35--39 years has declined gradually over time
As in previous years, the abortion ratio in 2004 varied substantially by age. Although the abortion ratio was highest for adolescents in 2004, since the mid-1980s, the ratio had gradually declined for those aged <15 href="http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5609a1.htm#fig3">Figure 3). Other studies also have indicated a decrease in birth rates for females aged 10--14 and 15--19 years during 1991--2003 and a decrease in adolescent pregnancy rates during 1990--2000 (26--34). However, abortion rates have not varied equally among women of all races and ethnicities. Abortion rates are declining more slowly among adolescents who are not enrolled in school (10,34).
CDC Paper on Abortion Access, 2002.
As in previous years, the abortion ratio in 2004 varied substantially by age. Although the abortion ratio was highest for adolescents in 2004, since the mid-1980s, the ratio had gradually declined for those aged <15 href="http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5609a1.htm#fig3">Figure 3). Other studies also have indicated a decrease in birth rates for females aged 10--14 and 15--19 years during 1991--2003 and a decrease in adolescent pregnancy rates during 1990--2000 (26--34). However, abortion rates have not varied equally among women of all races and ethnicities. Abortion rates are declining more slowly among adolescents who are not enrolled in school (10,34).
CDC Paper on Abortion Access, 2002.
ten things to do tomorrow
- mcgraw and palin section on paper (finish draft by tuesday)
- confirm with wycliffe
- confirm with barb
- outline for seaver peice
- find student id number
- rsvp no for marcus
- call galleries for abstractions by women show
- call gerard
- harass zac
- call akua
- find germano book
- email heather/lucas/christie/andrew next week
- see if neko is up
- pentagon
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
kevin mcdermott you sort of dismiss him as the standard high art gay male vision, vaseline lenses, shots looking up, landscapes with one nude and prententious titles, that said, he does some pretty excellent photos of trees, and his elephant seires, from the gorey house, says alot about purposeful eccentricity and the devotion to ritual objects.
oh you poor shetland standing with yr tall friends, you are not stuck in teh mud.
hersh suggests that Cheney ran an assination ring out of his office.
Die Hardererer (Bootleg Edition) by Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor from Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor on Vimeo.
One of the best things about digital media and cheap editing, is these small viral anthologies. this one features all the scenes with fire in die hard, a movie i need to see.
Gabo, Construction Through a Plane, Construction on a Plane, 1936.
National Gallery of Scotland.
a) this is one of the earliest examples of plastic sculpture.
b) a variety of people, including Kauffman, Scott and Ellison, discussed the fraigility of plastic as a form, in the 70s, when it was again used on a large scale.
c) bakelite stands up pretty well, but that is again small peices, and this is pretty small, is it scaling up that causes plastic to be unstable
d) why was plastic a rare material for sculpture, and why has it never really lost its rep for decor or kitsch, thruout the 20th century.
e) gabo reworked or remade his early expirments in plastic in the late 70s, where he was living in Connitecut, what are the implications of this?
here is what the national gallery of scotland says about this peice" and this is a fascinating essay on issues of reproduction, replicas, and soviet history, vis a vis gabo's work, from Christine Lodder in the Tate.
Spheric Theme: Translucent Variation (c.1937, this version executed 1951 as a replacement of original of 1938-9)
Perspex, diameter 57.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
© Nina Williams
The Lieb House one of the earliest Ventutri domestic residences, with all of their usual stylistic tics, including super graphics, half round windows, slightly strange layouts, vernacular materials, and the like, moved from New Jersey to Long Island via the hudson--a nice way of avoiding the house being a tear down, though i find it really interesting that it is a guest house, which says a lot about the increase in scale over the last few years, and also, that there is nothing really site specific or enviroment rich about the Venturi's place, interesting considering there history in Las Vegas and Philly.
the best thing about bryan schutmaats western frieze seires is how boring the compoistion is, the second thing is how witty they are about artifice and representation (ie oak veneer table, fake wood panelling, medicore landscape of trees in one shot; or oak head coming thru photo reproduction of moutnain scape in another)
china makes beauty products out of executed prisoners.
perfect little english village for sale.
Four priests playing ping pong, life, ca 63
love this craft blog, so well curated
do you know, when Nixon called someone a deeply moral man, he would have the ethics of a suburban housewife in a wal-mart on 12/24, when Dick Cheney pimps for Rush, it tells you alot about desperation and power.
Last PR photo of Hank Williams,
nobody does a good riot like Montreal.
two to read:
the fall of the evangelical nation christine wicker
edith stein a philopshical profile alaisdair mcintyre
reading the offical strategy to reduce sexual assualt in the us army, has two problems:
a) it suggests that rape is an exclusively heterosexual act
b) it refuses to acknowledge issues of reporting, and how rape works on espirit des corps.
i wonder if anyone has done work on sexual assualt among men in the army. looking at how bad a job, or how little they have cared to make it safe for women in the army post tailhook, i wonder how queer american soilders will fare if and when dont ask and dont tell is rescinded.
and speaking of men and sex, it was awful nice of them to combine them into one convient package.
Kirk Cameron witnesses to LA Gangsters. (am writing an essay on Fireproof and Kirk Cameron for Killing the Buddha)
Stevie Nicks sings Red River Valley on Chris Isaak's new show.
dear SF hippies can you just have the orgasms, and not make horribly laughable rituals about them, thank you
ase
two interesting things about the new holzer show according to this nyt review
a) her continued recylcing of material, esp. from the Truisms seires, which seems Cassandraesque.
b) how LED tech has devolped to such a degree that she can now make flat works and what flatness means in this case. (the foto of the whitney installation looks weirdly like the installation shots of her guggenhiem show)
luke haynes portrait quilts are amazing, a third brooklyn hipster, a third chuck close fabric meister, and a third prarie housewife.
the gay recluse noted that the times obits for famous gay folks with ambigious lives, ie not partnered, still exurbantly sexual, often show a school marmish recalitrence about depicting their lives--they are getting better, but this one of purdy, and the one earlier in the year of rberg, make me worried about what they have wrote about vidal or johns.
oh you poor shetland standing with yr tall friends, you are not stuck in teh mud.
hersh suggests that Cheney ran an assination ring out of his office.
Die Hardererer (Bootleg Edition) by Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor from Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor on Vimeo.
One of the best things about digital media and cheap editing, is these small viral anthologies. this one features all the scenes with fire in die hard, a movie i need to see.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Gabo, Construction Through a Plane, Construction on a Plane, 1936.
National Gallery of Scotland.
a) this is one of the earliest examples of plastic sculpture.
b) a variety of people, including Kauffman, Scott and Ellison, discussed the fraigility of plastic as a form, in the 70s, when it was again used on a large scale.
c) bakelite stands up pretty well, but that is again small peices, and this is pretty small, is it scaling up that causes plastic to be unstable
d) why was plastic a rare material for sculpture, and why has it never really lost its rep for decor or kitsch, thruout the 20th century.
e) gabo reworked or remade his early expirments in plastic in the late 70s, where he was living in Connitecut, what are the implications of this?
here is what the national gallery of scotland says about this peice" and this is a fascinating essay on issues of reproduction, replicas, and soviet history, vis a vis gabo's work, from Christine Lodder in the Tate.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Spheric Theme: Translucent Variation (c.1937, this version executed 1951 as a replacement of original of 1938-9)
Perspex, diameter 57.3 cm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
© Nina Williams
The Lieb House one of the earliest Ventutri domestic residences, with all of their usual stylistic tics, including super graphics, half round windows, slightly strange layouts, vernacular materials, and the like, moved from New Jersey to Long Island via the hudson--a nice way of avoiding the house being a tear down, though i find it really interesting that it is a guest house, which says a lot about the increase in scale over the last few years, and also, that there is nothing really site specific or enviroment rich about the Venturi's place, interesting considering there history in Las Vegas and Philly.
the best thing about bryan schutmaats western frieze seires is how boring the compoistion is, the second thing is how witty they are about artifice and representation (ie oak veneer table, fake wood panelling, medicore landscape of trees in one shot; or oak head coming thru photo reproduction of moutnain scape in another)
china makes beauty products out of executed prisoners.
perfect little english village for sale.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Four priests playing ping pong, life, ca 63
love this craft blog, so well curated
do you know, when Nixon called someone a deeply moral man, he would have the ethics of a suburban housewife in a wal-mart on 12/24, when Dick Cheney pimps for Rush, it tells you alot about desperation and power.
 |
| From Untitled Album |
Last PR photo of Hank Williams,
nobody does a good riot like Montreal.
two to read:
the fall of the evangelical nation christine wicker
edith stein a philopshical profile alaisdair mcintyre
reading the offical strategy to reduce sexual assualt in the us army, has two problems:
a) it suggests that rape is an exclusively heterosexual act
b) it refuses to acknowledge issues of reporting, and how rape works on espirit des corps.
i wonder if anyone has done work on sexual assualt among men in the army. looking at how bad a job, or how little they have cared to make it safe for women in the army post tailhook, i wonder how queer american soilders will fare if and when dont ask and dont tell is rescinded.
and speaking of men and sex, it was awful nice of them to combine them into one convient package.
Kirk Cameron witnesses to LA Gangsters. (am writing an essay on Fireproof and Kirk Cameron for Killing the Buddha)
Stevie Nicks sings Red River Valley on Chris Isaak's new show.
dear SF hippies can you just have the orgasms, and not make horribly laughable rituals about them, thank you
ase
two interesting things about the new holzer show according to this nyt review
a) her continued recylcing of material, esp. from the Truisms seires, which seems Cassandraesque.
b) how LED tech has devolped to such a degree that she can now make flat works and what flatness means in this case. (the foto of the whitney installation looks weirdly like the installation shots of her guggenhiem show)
luke haynes portrait quilts are amazing, a third brooklyn hipster, a third chuck close fabric meister, and a third prarie housewife.
the gay recluse noted that the times obits for famous gay folks with ambigious lives, ie not partnered, still exurbantly sexual, often show a school marmish recalitrence about depicting their lives--they are getting better, but this one of purdy, and the one earlier in the year of rberg, make me worried about what they have wrote about vidal or johns.
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