Disclaimer: I think that most popular music falls short of good storytelling and decent writing, but I’m picking on country music today because that’s all I’ve been hearing on the radio lately.

I’m beginning to believe that each geographical region has an attachment to certain songs that have been lost to other regions. That each region has, as it were, their own unique mixed tape of once-popular, long-forgotten-everywhere-else musical numbers. Every radio station, department store and bar has a copy.

In Peru, that mixed tape included Madonna’s “Isla Bonita,” Men at Work’s “Land Down Under,” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger.” Here in Northern Idaho that mixed tape includes Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” that new Pearl Jam song, and copious amounts of Country Music.

By the way, you’ve all seen this video, right? I had to include it, as it’s just so bizarre. Such as in the scene when they’re doing a synchronized digging-routine dance, then they all turn and hop away like kangaroos with no rhythm. What does it all mean?

But I’ve let myself get distracted. I was outlining points of my sound argument for the swift acquisition of an ipod.

Wherein I begin to talk about Country Music

I love the idea of Country Music. I dig the twang, I like the guitar licks, the fiddle, the boot-tappin’ tempo. I like the potential themes, having come from a a Country Background myself (though 8 years in Seattle, a cumulative 1.5 years outside the US, and an English Lit degree pretty much exclude me from “Being Country,” and that’s cool with me).

Music is a powerful medium for storytelling, but most Modern Country Music seems to run screaming from that, instead using bland, generic lyrics to describe bland, universal situations. Perhaps this is meant to make the song applicable to more people, but instead it just makes you wonder why you should care.

Basic Country Formulas:

• Love: Things were bad, but looking into your eyes makes them good.
• Breakup A: I’m out on the town in my sexy heels/studly cowboy hat, and you’ll soon be quite jealous.
• Breakup B: You left me and I’m pretty upset about that.
• Breakup C: Damn, I really screwed that one up.
• I’m Country: You can tell this because I drink cheap beer around a bonfire in the “backwoods”, drive a tractor, wear overalls, didn’t go to college but I’m good with a wrench, am hassled by the Man, etc. (Sung in the key of “defiant”).
• Pickup songs: These are both about one’s love for actual pickup trucks (or other Country Vehicles such as tractors), and about hitting on people in bars. Sometimes they’re combined, such as in “She thinks my tractor’s sexy,” which I always crank up when it comes on the radio.

Is there anything wrong with these formulas? Absolutely not. Every story is based around a generic formula–it’s the specific details of the situation that makes a story/song interesting. What I’ve noticed in my constant flipping through Northern Idaho Radio, though, is that most of these songs are carefully generic, as though to best encompass the Human Experience.

For example, Carrie Underwood’s new song “Temporary Home.” She paints a fuzzy picture of three generic situations that should elicit the listener’s pity/empathy: A kid in a foster home, a young mom in a halfway house, an old man on his deathbed. But they’re not characters. It’s not a story. They’re simply bland symbols intended to provoke an emotional response. It’s boring. (Also, the binge-drinking, tire-slashing Carrie Underwood is a whole hell of a lot more fun.)

What changed over the decades from the great storytelling of Early Country? Is this a deliberate attempt to write more universally applicable songs, Country Anthems that folks all the way from Washington State to Tennessee can identify with? And if you write songs meant to be universal, how will they possibly be interesting?

Here I gush for a while about how much I love the Drive-by Truckers

Haven’t you heard the Drive-by Truckers? Oh, really, darling, you must search them out.

Lyrically, Modern Country is pretty uninteresting. The closest thing I’ve heard to a double meaning in a Country Song lately was during an ode to gettin’ it on: “ain’t nothin’ on but the radio.” The line’s not clever, but at least it’s an attempt at creativity with language.

Music is like poetry, in that it requires a certain sparseness of language, the best choice of the best word to tell a story. I’m prone to long, over-evolved explanations (which means that I suck at both jokes and concise blogging), so I don’t write poetry. Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, however, manage to write songs that manage to distill a compelling life story into 20 lines, more or less.

Their songs are intensely character-driven, something which makes the emotions and situations more compelling than the carefully bland Country Songs on the radio. Sometimes the songs are sung from the character’s POV, but often they’re sung from the POV of a friend or relative looking in, the words painting an intimate picture of a life. I don’t care about Carrie Underwood’s featureless foster boy, but in “Little Bonnie” (A Blessing and a Curse) I feel deeply for Bonnie’s (and the narrator’s) father. In “The Sands of Iwo Jima” (The Dirty South), the narrator sketches out an image of his great uncle:

When I was just a kid I spent every weekend
On the farm he grew up on so I guess so did I
And we’d stay up watching movies on the black and white TV
We watched “The Sands of Iwo Jima” starring John Wayne

Every year in June George A. goes to a reunion
Of the men that he served with and their wives and kids and grandkids
My Great Uncle used to take me and I’d watch them recollect
about some things I couldn’t comprehend

And I thought about that movie, asked if it was that way
He just shook his head and smiled at me in such a loving way
As he thought about some friends he will never see again
He said “I never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima”

If I ever teach a creative writing class, I will teach The Deeper In as a superb example of economy of language. Talk about lines with double meanings, the song is full of phrases that are both innocent and deeply sexual, which a song about illegal, societally-shunned love should be.

Love? Try “Marry Me” (Decoration Day) where the protagonist declares to his sweetheart that even though their hometown isn’t much of a place to live, “I’d rather be your fool nowhere / than go somewhere and be no one’s.”

Breakup (C)? Try “Sounds Better in the Song” (Decoration Day): “And ‘Lord knows, I can’t change’ sounds better in the song / than it does with hell to pay.”

Politics? From “Puttin People on the Moon” (Dirty South): “Mary Alice quit askin’ why I do the things I do / I ain’t sayin’ that she likes it, but what else I’m gonna do? / If I could solve the world’s problems I’d probably start with hers and mine / But they can put a man on the moon / And I’m stuck in Muscle Shoals just barely scraping by”

You’re not still reading this, are you? Put down this blog and go buy a Drive-by Truckers album right now!

Tags:Country Music, Drive-by Truckers, storytelling