It's Only Been a Couple of Years, Right?

I'm very obviously a terrible blogger. In fact, I totally forgot about this blog until my dad told me that I should really have a blog. He says things like to this to me on a very regular basis, but this time it stuck, and I decided to revive "The Things I Think But Never Get the Chance to Say."

I want to talk about country music for a second. I firmly feel that the country music genre never gets its due. I was thinking about what Chuck Klosterman said about Johnny Cash, and despite my general annoyance with Klosterman (which is admittedly unfounded), I can't deny how right he is about this. What makes Johnny Cash so spectacular is his ability to make complex emotions simple. When Cash hears that whistle blowin' and subsequently hangs his head and cries, it's not because he wants freedom, or redemption, or some sort of abstracted concept or feeling; he just wants to sit on the goddamn train and drink some goddamn coffee. That is seriously some of the best poetry I've ever heard.

Furthermore. Johnny Cash: biggest badass in music history. Forget 50 Cent, forget Tupac, forget the Notorious B.I.G. Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno simply to watch him die. In concession, Cash did not actually shoot anyone or get murdered on the street, and he also didn't have seven bullet wounds in his body. But his ability to get into the mind of a killer and to articulate what an inmate would feel is beyond awesome.

Which brings me to my second point, which, like the first point, is not even my own. I read an article in Newsweek recently about country music and how the genre has gone from Cash singing about shooting someone to the insipid and watery hodgepodge currently being labeled "country" today. Newsweek claimed that this has to do with a changing demographic; the people who now listen to country music have kids and live in the suburbs and want to hear songs about children spilling their happy meals. I think there's something to say for these artists' abilities to identify and help articulate the issues of a certain type of person, but I'm still skeptical about whether these changes are for the good. Country music is now kind of crock; a hyper-glamorized image of something that once had meaning, a conforming to and enhancing of the signifiers of the genre without appreciation for where and how those signifiers get their meaning. And one can recognize that it's definitely a sad state of affairs when one considers that country music created these lyrics:

"Save my love through loneliness,
Save my love through sorrow,
I gave you my onliness,
Come give your tomorrow."

Moral of the story: Romantica, a Minneapolis-based band with a front-man from Belfast, is doing more to preserve the awesomeness that is country music than Toby Keith, Keith Urban, Carrie Underwood, and Tim McGraw combined. Just sayin'.