In November of 2000 I reviewed a concert by the Dixie Chicks in downtown Cleveland. A sold-out show. A big deal, sort of. And at the time, I didn’t know a goddamn thing about the Dixie Chicks, beyond what information could be gleaned from their name (which—in my defense—is probably more expository than just about any other pop moniker I can think of, except for maybe the Stooges).
I can’t recall if I liked this concert, but I suspect I probably enjoyed half of it. I mostly vaguely recall that Nathan from MTV’s The Real World 7: Seattle was somehow involved with the event’s promotion, and I clearly remember getting several angry phone calls from readers who read my review the next morning and thought I was cruel for suggesting that Chicks singer Natalie Maines had an “oddly shaped body, fleshy cheekbones, and weird fashion sense.” It turns out Natalie Maines was pregnant. I am nothing if not underinformed.
But ANYWAY, Natalie’s uterus is not the issue here. What struck me about this show was the audience, which appeared to be a cross-section of forty-one-year-old gay males outfitted from Old Navy and fifteen-year-old teenage girls with above-average teeth. I had never before seen so many teenage girls at a concert with real musicians, which is what the Dixie Chicks are. Obviously, we’re all used to seeing thousand of adolescent females at Britney Spears and ’NSYNC concerts, but those shows have nothing to do with music; those are just virgin-filled Pepsi commercials. It’s a teenage girl’s job to like that shit. But the Dixie Chicks aren’t part of that marketing scheme; there was one stunning moment in the middle of the evening’s festivities where Martie Seidel shredded on her fiddle like she was trying to start a California brushfire, and the foggy arena air tasted exactly like the omnipresent ozone from every pre-grunge, big-hair heavy metal show I attended in the late eighties. I looked around the building and I saw all my old friends from high school, only now they had breasts and were named Phoebe. And that’s when I realized that teenage girls are the new teenage boys, which is why the Dixie Chicks are the new Van Halen, which is why country music is awesome.
Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can’t really learn much about a person based on what kind of music they happen to like. As a personality test, it doesn’t work even half the time. However, there is at least one thing you can learn: The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music “except country.” People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time. All it means is that they’ve managed to figure out the most rudimentary rule of pop sociology; they know that hipsters gauge the coolness of others by their espoused taste in sound, and they know that hipsters hate modern country music. And they hate it because it speaks to normal people in a tangible, rational manner. Hipsters hate it because they hate Midwesterners, and they hate Southerners, and they hate people with real jobs.
Now, obviously, this hipster distaste doesn’t apply to old country music, because everybody who’s cool loves that stuff (or at least claims to). Nobody questions the value of George fucking Jones. It’s completely acceptable for coolies to adore the idea of haggard nineteen-year-old men riding in cabooses and having their hearts shattered, which is why alternative country is the most popular musical genre of the last twenty-five years that’s managed to remain completely unpopular (if you follow my meaning). I once asked Uncle Tupelo founder Jay Farrar about how his audiences changed as alt country became a phenomenon. “What audiences are you talking about?” he asked me back. “Do you mean the two hundred rock critics who actually care?” Farrar was sort of joking when he said that, but he wasn’t laughing. And he was probably more right than wrong. Columbia decided to rerelease all of Farrar’s early Uncle Tupelo albums on the imprint label Legacy, but it seems like the only people buying them are simply buying them again. On the surface, that’s a bit sad, because it seems like Uncle Tupelo wrote great songs that deserve to be significant. However, the operative word in that sentence is “seems.” What they really wrote were great songs that had no genuine significance whatsoever. I think the person who explained this most clearly was indie rocker/average poet David Berman of the Silver Jews, speaking to the Nashville Scene right after he moved to Tennessee. One gets the impression the reporter must have made reference to the “authenticity” of modern country music when she asked Berman a question:
“One thing that cracks me up in the Nashville local music scene,” Berman said in response, “is this verbal battle between Music Row and alt-country. Alternative country, to me, is just as ridiculously empty in a different way—it’s just that they’re not in power. All these people singing about a life they never knew—it’s really a fetishization of Depression-era country life. If authenticity is the issue, then there’s something more authentic to me about Wal-Mart country, which speaks to the real needs of the people who listen to it, more than talking about grain whiskey stills.”
Granted, the best alt country songs feel authentic, and that should be enough (and in the idiom of pop music, it usually is). The problem is that guys like Farrar embrace a reality that’s archaic and undesirable; the only listeners who appreciate what they’re expressing are affluent intellectuals who’ve glamorized the alien concept of poverty. The lyrics on a track like “Screen Door” off No Depression have the texture of something old and profound, but they’re not; technically, those lyrics are more modern than everything off Nine Inch Nails’Pretty Hate Machine. And more important, they’re only viewed to be profound by people who’ve never had the experience described in the lyrics.[58] Truly depressed people don’t need depressing music. I don’t think I would have had any interest in hearing lines like, “Down here, where we’re at / Everybody is equally poor” when I was sixteen, sitting in my parents’ basement in rural North Dakota, only vaguely aware that I (and everyone I knew) had no fucking money. I probably would have thought Jeff Tweedy was whining. Oddly (or maybe predictably), I love that song today. But that’s because the lyrics no longer apply to the actual condition of my life. I would guess the prototypical Uncle Tupelo fan earns around $52,000 a year and has two VCRs. I would also guess they don’t shop at Berman’s aforementioned Wal-Mart, which is where mainstream country music sells like Pokemon.
“I definitely don’t feel a part of what I call the straighter country music industry of Nashville,” said critical alt country darling Lucinda Williams in a 2001 Billboard interview. “I’m definitely not connected with that world. Nashville is so straight. I guess I’m sort of considered an outlaw here with Steve Earle. They used to write grittier stuff. It’s gotten so puritanical…I don’t want to be identified with the stuff that’s on country radio now. Country music to me is Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn.”
Well, good for you, Lucinda. It’s nice to see you’ve jammed the pretension of Kill Rock Stars into country music. Granted, there is some truth to what Williams says; she’s certainly doing what she can to keep her own music “grittier,” inasmuch as she likes to make albums about gravel roads. But this quote is really just an example of why Lucinda Williams’s music won’t matter in twenty years. Oh, she’ll be remembered historically, because the brainiacs who write pop reference books will always include her name under W. She’ll be a nifty signpost for music geeks. But her songs will die like softcover books filled with postmodern poetry, endorsed by Robert Pinsky and empty to everyone else. Lucinda Williams does not matter.
The Dixie Chicks, however, do matter. They matter in the way big things matter… which is to say they matter without duplicity, which is to say they matter the way Van Halen did in 1981.[59] What you have with the Dixie Chicks is real bluegrass music that doesn’t sound like traditional roots music, just as Eddie Van Halen played blues-based guitar licks that didn’t sound anything like John Lee Hooker. Like Van Halen, the Dixie Chicks added a blond singer to make the band an arena-ready megaforce, and—like Van Halen—the Dixie Chicks kicked a singer out of the band when she seemed like dead weight. The Dixie Chicks’ best song is “There’s Your Trouble,” which is about the pain of seeing your man with the wrong woman, and Maines ain’t talkin’ ’bout love, because love is rotten to the core. But all those coincidences are really just peripheral. The single-biggest proof that the Dixie Chicks are Van Halen is their audience; they are singing to the same teenage boys, except those boys are now teenage girls.
Here’s what I mean: For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed—at least among young people—is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men. It’s like girls are trying to attain equality by becoming equally shallow and selfish. Whenever I see TV shows like Fox’s defunct Ally McBeal or HBO’s Sex and the City, I find myself perplexed as to how this is sometimes viewed as an “advancement” for feminism; it seems to imply that it’s empowering for women to think like all of the stupidest men I know (myself included). We’ve all heard the
