Big & Rich: Album of the Decade?

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.

xposts

I didn't see that thread. Were you supporting Suicide Girls or attacking it? I don't like it. The mag they were launching bombed and they never paid anyone.

Anyway, I wanted to show that I did Big & Rich's record three years ago. The similarity of the imagery in these two songs -- their 'Rollin' and my 'Robocowboys' -- is startling. Both reference cowboys, crowds, men in black. Both collide genres. Both play on the paradox of the lonely cowboy, and counterpoise him with a crowd. Theirs, though, is conformist, merely reinforcing the stereotype of the individualist in a crowd of individualists. Mine deconstructs the stereotype and shows up the paradox. (My tune also beats theirs, although I stole it from Gary Numan.) Here are extracts from the lyrics of both songs:

Ain't gonna shut my mouth
Don’t mind if I stand out in a crowd
Just want to live out loud
I know there's got to be
A few hundred million more like me
Just tryin' to keep it free

Charley Pride was the man in black
Rock 'n' roll used to be about Johnny Cash
Hey, what do you think about that
I'm a crazy son of a bitch
But I know I'm gonna make it big and rich
Yeah, I'm gonna let it rip

Hey, just wanna hear everybody sing (rollin', rollin')
At the top of your lungs till the windows break (rollin', rollin')
Say hey, Cowboy Troy...

Big & Rich, Rollin' (2004)

There's so many insiders on the outside
I think it's beginning to be the inside
And fire regulations have disallowed
Another lonely cowboy
From joining the lonely crowd

There's so many mavericks right off the map
We've redrawn the map to bring them all back
There's so many renegades off the beaten track
They're beating a track to my door
And I'm beating them back with a board

All the men in black
With nowhere left to go
Their darkness comes pre-packed
With a warm familiar glow

Robocowboys, you're dead ringers
Robocowboys, say you're singers
With your Texas Instruments

And breaking the rules has become the new rule
They're teaching it now at business school
They're all wild and crazy and one of a kind
Anarchists to a man
Everybody does it like no-one else can

And irony's a kind of sincerity now
With so many milking a once-holy cow
And alienation's a kind of belonging
A synth isn't cold any more
There's a country new wave banging on the door...

Momus 'Robocowboys' 2001

(and now I just hurt myself laughing at/with 'robocowboys', texas instruments, that's some balls I admit it)

Ha ha. Hey Momus, are you in Liquid Tapedeck, by any chance? If not, you join them! Your posts sound *exactly* like their press releases (except not as funny, but they could probably help you with that).

And now...

Neil Young - Computer Cowboy (1982)

Well, his cattle each have numbers
And they all eat in a line
When he turns the floodlights on each night
Of course the herd looks perfect!
Computer cowboy.

Well, he rides the range ?til midnight
And the wild coyotes yowl
As he trots beneath the floodlights
And of course the rhythm is perfect!
Computer cowboy.

Ride along computer cowboy
To the city just in time
To bring another system down
And leave your alias behind:
Computer syscrusher.

Computer syscrusher.

Crusher. syscrusher.

Syscrusher.

Come a ky ky yippee yi yippee yi ay
Come a ky ky yippee yi ay.
Come a ky ky yippee yi yippee yi ay
Come a ky ky yippee yi ay.

Computer syscrusher.

You're going to quote 'Hi-Tech Redneck' to me next, aren't you?