A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

The angry American

The Washington Post Style section had a short interview with Merle Haggard this morning, with Hag sounding off about the current state of the USA. (He also has a new bluegrass album out.)

The interviewer refers to Hag’s politics moving to “the left” from the days of “Okie from Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” but I think there’s a fairly consistent strain of “America first” right-populism here. The kind of conservatism that doesn’t see why American boys (and girls) should be off dying in some faraway country to bring them “freedom” while freedom at home seems to be contracting. And that sees the workin’ man footing the bill and shedding the blood for these wars.

Reason magazine’s Jesse Walker wrote about the puzzling politics of country music last year.

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4 responses to “The angry American”

  1. lutherpunk

    The WP piece rightly identifies Haggard as a populist, and it is wrong to think of him as anything else. To say that he has taken a liberal drift isn’t correct, strictly speaking. When I first heard stuff off the new record, I was a taken back by it, simply because it is so easy to identify Haggard with songs like “Fightin’ Side of Me.” And I think that song would still apply if there were the type of popular upheaval and rhetoric around Iraq that there was around Vietnam. Let’s not forget, songs like that weren’t a glorification of the war; it was a clarion call to people who hid behind free speech and hippie ideology to denigrate soldiers returning from battle.

    That piece in Reason, I thought, was kind of weak. It didn’t really get to the essence of “country” as a catch-all label that encompasses many subgenres. Even its take on alt-Country wasn’t really correct. Trying to write a piece exploring the politics of country music by putting Music Row and Austin at odds simply doesn’t work (except that most of the stuff out of Music Row sucks).

    Take for instance Nashville sweetheart Garth Brooks. He was putting out incredibly “liberal” lyrics in the 1990’s, going so far as speak up for gay rights. He was as insider as you get. Then there is always the resurgent alt-Country subgenre of Honky Tonk revival, complete with traditional murder anthems (I think of the Tennessee Rounders doing Nickajack Dam), something that so-called liberal listeners would be very uncomfortable with.

    Sorry…I’m starting to ramble here.

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  2. Jesse Walker

    Trying to write a piece exploring the politics of country music by putting Music Row and Austin at odds simply doesn’t work

    I don’t think I did that. The point of the piece is that Red/Blue distinctions fall down when you look closely at country. e.g.: “It isn’t just that Nashville has a liberal minority—though they’re there, from Rodney Crowell to Tim McGraw to George Jones, who made a rare presidential endorsement in 2004 when he came out for Journey fan Wesley Clark. It’s that country music, like the country itself, doesn’t divide easily into simple stacks of red and blue. Even if you clearly fall into one political party, that doesn’t mean you buy the whole agenda.”

    There’s a lot of liberal “mainstream” country music, and not just in the ’90s. And alt-country has room for Robbie Fulks, an atheist libertarian-conservative.

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  3. Lee

    Hey Jesse, thanks for commenting! (At the risk of sounding like a gushing fanboy, I’m a big fan of your writing.)

    Maybe this is just me, but I tend to distinguish “alt-country” from “insurgent country.” The former I associate with bands like Wilco, Blue Mountain, etc. and think of it as more folky, while the latter (Robbie Fulks, Hank III) has more of an edge and even a kind of DIY punk attitude (explicitly in the case of H-III). Not sure how that maps onto politics, if at all.

    Johnny Cash is also an interesting case study here – in many ways a very conservative evangelical guy. But also wrote a lot about the poor and downtrodden and was described by his daughter as a virtual pacifist who hated the Iraq war.

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  4. Jesse Walker

    Thanks for the kind words, Lee. I think of “alt-country” as an broad, encompassing term (and perhaps an archaic one — it’s starting to sound very ’90s, the same way “progressive country” sounds ’70s). “Insurgent country” might be narrower.

    And then there’s “cowpunk.” Remember that one?

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