ARE YOU READY FOR CREEM COUNTRY?

ARE YOU READY FOR CREEM COUNTRY?

If you don’t love Americana, you can go back to Russiana

Zachary Lipez

The United States of America is a land of contrasts. Neither a success nor a catastrophe (despite what absolutists on either side will tell you), America is like a diner that stays open late, where the meat is under-or overcooked, the wall art is nothing but dead celebrities (with Elvis being the only one who made it past 40), but the french fries are fucking delicious. Not only are you allowed to smoke inside, but the management will also call you a pussy if you don’t. As the waitstaff is paid in $5 Walmart gift cards and handguns, tipping is strongly encouraged. Oh, and if you try to order off the menu, the owners will have your dad thrown out of a helicopter and replaced with a new dad who appreciates fantastic portions at a reasonable price. Which would maybe be a deal-breaker if the jukebox wasn’t so stacked with absolute bangers. If all that sounds untenable, you clearly haven’t tried the fries.

A nation this exciting deserves a music that accurately celebrates it. For our first couple centuries, the only music allowed to be performed outside of churches or Freemason temples was a poem about a war where the Brits set our president’s house on fire, set to the tune of a London drinking song. Eventually that slab of humiliation kink was relegated to sporting events. At some point the blues and folk music came around. Souls traded hands at every crossroad and magic dragons puffed across the land to endless renditions of “Easy Rider.” Unfortunately, neither of these genres were able to maintain their cultural prominence in the wake of Dylan plugging in and some asshole traitor teaching the English the dominant seventh chord.

Look, if it were up to us, we’d be living in the United States of Odetta, the Second Amendment would guarantee the right to one bourbon, one scotch, one beer, and public schools would teach Big Mama Thorntonography instead of math. But what can you do? Eventually we got the True American Art Forms of jazz, hip-hop, and rock ’n’ roll. For the purposes of this discussion, we’re looking for music that’s a bit more unabashed in embracing the red, white, and blue diner allegory we worked so hard on. Historically speaking, neither jazz nor hip-hop have been too big on the requisite “celebrating 01’ Glory” part. No idea why. This leaves rock ’n’ roll. And rock music has kinda belonged to the world ever since the Queen sent a horde of moptops over to finish the job her mom started in 1812, so some hedging is required.

With that, welcome to CREEM Gone Country. Sometimes the treasure you’re looking for has been in your backyard all along. That’s right, country music—the previously little-known genre that’s recently become all the rage. The guitars! The cars! The improbably tight jeans! The hair! The time spent getting the hair right in such a way that you look like you don’t care! The art! The jingoism mixed with a baked-in awareness of systemic inequality! The ways artists balance the demands to kowtow to an ostensibly reviled Nashville illuminati with an ostentatiously working-class sensibility! Replace “Nashville” with “Spotify” and we’re twinsies! It ain’t rock ’n’ roll. But we like it (which makes it rock ’n’ roll).

What’s that you say? CREEM magazine has never cared about country music? We’re bandwagon jumpers? All-hat-no-cattle-ites? Cowpoke profiteers whose understanding of country extends no deeper than seasons 2 to 4 of Southern Charm? The sort of posers Luke Bryan claims to be able to sniff out just by seeing how they handle a fishing rod?

Hogwash. CREEM MAGAZINE KNOWS ABOUT COUNTRY MUSIC. We have a poster of Grievous Angel hanging over our bed. We only listen to Taylor Swift’s old stuff. When we attend Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival, we scream out Uncle Tupelo requests until we’re escorted out by security. “Jolene” is our favorite song (Jack White is a generational talent). However you feel about Cowboy Carter, that’s how we feel too. And despite needing an external power source to erase all the variations of “reverse-cowgirl’’ from our search history, our Yellowstone slash-fic is surprisingly tasteful. If CREEM never cared about country music, why did Lester Bangs spend so much time at a Country, Bluegrass, Blues club? Yeah. Exactly. (And as to the Luke Bryan poser test: We know our way around a rod, babe. TRUST.)

Jokes aside, we know we’re outsiders. As with our usual wrangling with what is or isn’t “rock ’n’ roll,” our definition of what constitutes “country” is expansive. But same as it’s ever been, that doesn’t stop us from being right. So we’re operating from the stance that saying “radio" country ain’t authentic is as dumb as saying Americana ain’t country. Thinking that being popular is exclusively for phonies is real high school shit. Conversely, if you think country music belongs to only a certain type, from a certain background, we’re going to insist that you go ask an ethno musicologist about the history of the banjo. And if a genre that’s so full of flag-waving hubris that it just took “America” and added a “-na” isn’t country, then what are we even talking about? If there are greats from any end of the spectrum we won’t talk to, it’s because they’re either dead or dead to us (because their publicist blew us off). As always, we approach our topics with the subtlety of a bank robber in a Dolly mask, a lesser Williams gauging the public’s interest in football, and a literal kitty cat hitting on another gal’s man in Richmond, Virginia.

Maybe, in admitting our shortcomings, it’s our un-American side showing. But, as Wayion Jennings once sang (on his 1980 album Music Man), “In the land of milk and honey, you must put them on the table.” Finally, even if you think we’re jumping on a bandwagon, you gotta admit that our ass looks great in chaps.