Why I Love Country Music

what ideas anyway chuck? that charlie daniels is rap?

the jungle gym btw is just past the basketball courts on the right.

Some of the lyrics are interesting though, when juxtaposed next to Chuck's earlier comments:

Yes, I've been to the South -- it's largely SUBURBAN these days. Or a LOT of it is. The region is not only populated by hillbillies with stills who've never left their hills or their farms (or, you know, Klansmen with gun racks and Confederate flags on their pickups). It's pretty cosmopolitan. Why shouldn't country reflect that? And the artist-vs.popstar dichotomy is a false one; it means nothing to me, in this or any other kinda music. I have no idea what you mean by it.
-- chuck (cedd...), December 5th, 2003 2:03 PM.

Put against:

"Some kids grew up on mean streets
Dealin' with the crips and bloods
But me I was born on a back road
In a 4X4 rollin' through the mud

The street kid deals with the dealer
And he's always watchin' his back
Me, I'm watchin' a line, with a woman of mine
Down by the creek bank shack

Give me .308 and a shotgun
And a gallon of homemade wine
Drop me off on a mountainside
Where the bear and the deer reside
I'll spend my nights sittin' round the fire
Makin' this guitar ring
I'll be doin' fine underneath the pines
While the world goes down the drain

Just to dwell on life in the city
Is makin' my blood run cold
'Cause miles and miles of concrete
Eats away at the human soul

When you live and die in the country
There's a little that your heart can mourn
With your hands in the dirt and a little work
You can weather out any storm

Give me .308 and a shotgun
And a gallon of homemade wine
Drop me off on a mountainside
Where the bear and the deer reside
I'll spend my nights sittin' round the fire
Makin' this guitar ring
I'll be doin' fine underneath the pines
While the world goes down the drain

I'll be doin' fine underneath the pines
While the world goes down the drain "

..Anyway, should I continue trying to find reasons to listen to Montgomery Gentry? I was expecting them to "challenge" me. And they're just kinda ... there.

More inspirational lyrics:
"And no one's gonna tell me
How to live my life
'Cause it's my life
And it ain't nobody's business
What kind of flag I fly
'Cause that's my right "

..yawn.

..OK Too Hard to Handle .. Too Free To Hold rocks out at the end.. Kind of a long wait though...

>>>Hot-shit duo Montgomery Gentry are more traditionally manly—on Carrying On (Columbia), they work a hybrid variation on the demented wildass abandon of Hank Jr. and the compulsively regretful hell-raisin' of Waylon. "She Couldn't Change Me" is about an uppity honey what gets sick of Montgomery "sittin' on the porch in my overalls" and hits the road. But the pull of his scruffy country charisma is just too strong—she turns around and heads back in the end. Just to be fair, though, the second-catchiest thing here, four tracks later, turns the tables. When Montgomery hooks up with a gal who's "Hellbent on Saving Me," he winds up on his knees, asking the Lord to change him "just enough" (rhymes with "to keep her love").

Being a tough redneck in the New South means never having to crack a joke, but the guitars here clang hard enough to propel MG past the tight-assedness of their models. The title track is as hard a Skynyrd shuffle to make it past Today's Country's squeamish quality control. (Protests Gentry, "It ain't nobody's business what kind of flag I fly." " 'Cause that's my right," Montgomery chimes in.) Granted, "Ramblin' Man" isn't an Allmans cover and wouldn't necessarily be any more welcome if it were, but "My Father's Son" is a dynamite sequel of sorts to last year's class-conscious hit "Daddy Won't Sell the Farm." Now that Paw has literally bought the farm, Gentry's got to fight off the foreclosure. And "Cold One Comin' On" tweaks a great trope, referring to either a barroom brew or an empty bed, and to heartbreak either way.<<<

Here's Frank Kogan on the followup album (like me, he named *Carrying On* his album of the year in 2001; I believe that like me, too, he now thinks he underrated the followup):

>>On the first track of Montgomery Gentry's first album, these c&w whiners instructed us not to judge them until we'd walked in their shoes, while showing no interest themselves in what it's like to walk in anyone else's. On the title track of the new Our Town they tell us significantly that their local Church of Christ is well attended, but they make no mention of any mosques or synagogues and presumably wouldn't want to know the Mideast ancestry of their twang. But their music isn't content to just rock back on its reactionary haunches; instead, it filches rock 'n' roll "na-na-nas" and AOR harmonies and Mexican melodies and wicked slide guitars from near anybody's palette. Montgomery Gentry are not as rambunctious and obnoxious this time, to their musical if not moral detriment, but nonetheless they rock harder than you do.<<

Here's Joshua Clover/Jane Dark on a song from their FIRST album:

>>Daddy Won't Sell the Farm," by rawhide traditionalists Montgomery Gentry—one of whom is the brother of c&w softie John Michael Montgomery—is rilly a lovely vision of how Papa bought this farm back in 1968 and won't sell to the big concerns, so he struggles on with his rustic lifestyle in the shadow of minimalls and burger joints. It nestles comfortably in the tradition of Small Farmer vs. Big Corporation songs, and the larger tale of the Indomitable Rube vs. Evil Modernization/Urbanization—it even quotes Hank Jr.'s "A Country Boy Can Survive," the genre's demented flag-bearer.

And yet, how bizarre. This isn't one of those "We been here since the Civil War and we were born rebels" tales. Cuz daddy "worked and slaved" for the man, till he had enough to leave the system and cop some rustic peace in the very year that students and workers were tearing up paving stones from Paris to Iowa.

There are no coincidences in country music (check that cloying chain-of-life song about a guy who stops to change some lady's flat). Daddy is the first country hero as far as I know who's an openly political hippie. Cuz you just don't choose '68 when writing this song unless the guy's part of the Back to the Land movement. Pop's a folk hero alright, but not a hero for the Dukes of Hazzard so much as the Woodstock nation. This is akin to a hip-hop song making common cause with cops. Except cops actually are dirty and antisocial.<<

Those may or may not help; I'm not sure. I hope they do, though.

>>>MONTGOMERY GENTRY Carryin' On (Columbia) A tuneful, hard-hitting case study in the conservatism of the "rock" claimed by studio hotshots wherever popular music is manufactured in our once-great land. It's possible to imagine the identical beats and licks vitalized by, say, a younger John Anderson. But mixing them with male chauvinist reaction makes more sense, and turns them rancid. At a time when female spunk has become a Nashville cliché, these two putative roadhouse rats, one the brother of cowboy-hat millionaire John Michael Montgomery, inhabit a world where women are either saintly or compliant. They "rock" because they're "rebels," only what they rebel against is the present, in male-specific terms: "They say this way of life is done/But not for my father's son." Like their antecedent Charlie Daniels, they beg the question of whether they're also that kind of rebel. But attention ought be paid another high-profile couplet: "It ain't nobody's business what kind of flag I fly/'Cause that's my right." Uh-uh, stupid. The way flags work is that they're the business of everybody who sees them. That's why you fly them high—and why the other side tears them down. B MINUS<<

And musically challenging - I guess it's a matter of taste/preference - but I'm just not hearing a lot of surprises .... (read: dissonance, I think.)

So while they wouldn't send me running out of a BBQ in Georgia, they aren't likely to sell me any records either...

But thanks for the recommendation...

(Xpost)
"incidentally, speaking of alt-country, did you ever hear of Elizabeth McQueen and the Fire Brands? They come from Austin, and say they're doing "pub rock," but I like THEIR new album a lot. It's got a real rock'n'roll throb to it -- reminds me of early new wave rockabilly era Carlene Carter or Rosanne Cash. Nice"

..Thanks for that recommendation too..

I don't like the way that upthread he attacks Lloyd Cole and lots of country singers. LC is not really a country singer, of course, but I am tickled by the premise of the thread which is that he is.

I like some of the country singers that chuck attacked, plus some that he didn't, eg. Shania Twain whose recent 45s have excited me.

HOW does the kind of lyrical imagery you're referring to challenge you
.. I don't like it just for the sake of it being there - I like it because if you have to think about the lyrics a little bit, you can interpret the lyrics to mean different things, many things. Sometimes that's not a good thing, if the artist wants to convey something specific - but most of the time, I get more out of a song where I'm able to personalize it to the way I visualize it.

Dissonance is hardly the point
..By dissonance, I mean (mostly) cognitive dissonance - i.e. something unexpected or unnatural.. but also musically dissonant - but that's just my personal preference.. That doesn't mean Slipknot...? (The chords in Louie Louie seem pretty dissonant to me.)

>i coulda explained that being tracky is something music DOES.<<

Yeah, Sterl, but it's something ALL music does. That was my point!!

the beatles may not have been palling around with george jones, but they were much much much into the everly brothers and carl perkins, both of whom had a lot of country running through their veins.

Obviously a lot of people seem to go for it. I just don't demand that much creativity from a critic.)

(Though I guess railroads are kinda tracky in the first place, maybe.)

Hardest rocking tracky country song ever:
"Train Kept a Rollin," Johnny Burnette and the Rock 'n' Roll Trio

But that's obviously because everybody traded in their copies for this album, which has all the dance mixes!:

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=UIDCASS80311061622542118&sql=Awt9fs33la39g