Big & Rich: Album of the Decade?

That's Big Kenny and John Rich, with rappin' sidekick Cowboy Troy, who's black, which of course, is treated as a huge novelty. Billed as "country without prejudice" - in other words, country that recognises that other genres actually exist - this monumentally straightforward record's claims to innovation are like asking a woman to be wildly appreciative that her husband just about manages to cook a fry-up once a month. Horse of a Different Color sounds like Billy Ray Cyrus driving a juggernaut - that's how innovative it is. If you squint really hard you might just be able to convince yourself there's something faintly homoerotic about the whole ghastly enterprise, but that's pushing it. Actually, peek inside the booklet and you will find Kenny and John wearing Wild West-style dresses and, natch, ironic expressions. Like the Bush twins at the MTV awards, this is arch-conservatism in a half-hearted search for cool. Big? Almost certainly and hence, quite probably, rich too. Not, by any means, clever.

FIVE STARS

Fatbelly Jones. Marcello...well, there's nothing to say here.

I sent for a copy of the Big and Rich album and have listened to it.

Having done so, I agree with Mr Peschek's conclusions.

Like I said, it's okay to dislike the record. But you cannot "agree with Mr Peschek's conclusions," because he does not actually conclude anything. He just takes some cheap shots, ha ha wot a larf. It's adorable, just the kind of thing I need to confirm my favorite Guardian stereotypes, but it's not a review. I'd love it if you'd care to review the record, Mr. Carlin, because I know you'd back up your dislike with actual evidence so I could try to understand it.

It isn't even my favorite country record of the year, but it's NOT the Bush twins either.

I do admit, however, that the website design and colour schemes could lead to ambiguity.

So the solution is for the Guardian Unlimited webmasters to redesign their graphics accordingly such that a zero-star rating can be interpreted as such, rather than a five-star rating.

I plan to return to considering this record on my blog, my arguments supported by quantifiable fact, in due course.

So if we put Pastor Troy in a sealed container with a vial of poison gas...

...and yet, I'll read it. I'm curious about Fatbelly Jones, I guess.

best definition of rockism evah.

There's so much more homoerotica in Montgomery Gentry than Big and Rich, even though I wouldn't put it past the latter to kiss onstage. And Brooks and Dunn are the homoeroticest of all.

So, y'know, whatever.

holy fucking shit. that explains a LOT.

I say gorgeous WAY too often, Matt (especially when talking about dark metal and stuff like that) - where the heck have you been? "Wild West Show" is gorgeous like Ennio Morricone is gorgeous. Dark, too!

(PS: btw, Matt, are you gonna rewrite Bersuit or not? I need it now!! I asked you in an email a couple days ago, but I never heard back....)

I sometimes wonder if one's judgment of musical "gorgeous" has anything to do with one's aesthetic senses about women/men, visual art, etc. then of course I have a beer and put on some gilberto gil and suddenly my head stops hurting, because his stuff from the late 1960s/early 1970s is the fucking epitome of dark and gorgeous to me.

yeah chuck I'm writing it tonight, I never got your email!!!

I once suggested that 'this year's irony is next year's sincerity'. But who wants to hang around to hear those knowing post-modern genre winks we messed with last decade turning from hick-ironic to slick-moronic? Irony is interesting while it's ambivalent, it's fuzzy, it's undecided, it's in crisis, it's vulnerable, it's conflicted. When it hardens into comedy and routine, when it becomes non-negotiable and invulnerable, it's simply unbearable, like being stuck in a room with a bunch of tall economics graduates who decided to do comedy instead.

The whole sound of this record is dismal. Those horrible stadium drums, the cheesy quiz show organ skits, the silly voices, the session musician power chords, the clever-clogs calculatedness and certainty of it all... There isn't a single quirk or mistake, no crack for light or water or soul to get in through. No strangeness, no beauty, no style, nothing but The Concept.

"You play nice with your cousin Nick! He doesn't come over very often, and he's very sensitive!"

"Sorry, mom."

Anyway, whatevs dood.

I guess the crux and nub of things is that my whole aesthetic is based on an aesthetics of strangeness and danger, weird beauty, error and complexity. And certain people here -- Mr Eddy, perhaps -- seem to applaud an aesthetic of certainty and confidence and correctness. I think they may be embracing that partly because they just like confidence for its own sake, but partly because they've constructed a mainstream listener -- a radio listener -- who requires a high degree of certainty, and they want to hear music that has a chance of reaching and influencing that notional listener, who isn't a sophisticate, can't tolerate much strangeness or danger, but is nevertheless able to be coaxed away from the completely banal to something slightly more nuanced. That's how I explain this atrocity of taste, to myself.

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