THE RED AND THE BLUE, part 1

I’ve been thinking about the whole “coast” “heartland” thing, as noted by Yglesias and others, and had a hard time finding a way into the issue until last night.
We were driving home from the movies, Tenacious G, Middle Guy and I (we saw 8 Mile again, because the two of them wanted to), and I was punching the buttons on the stereo in the Mighty Odyssey Minivan when a discussion broke out.
The top 3 buttons on the stereo are taken up by the three major stations that TG and MG listen to (I tend to listen to the CD’s in the changer because I hate commercials).
KCRW, the local NPR station; KZLA, the local corporate-owned country station; and KROQ, the local corporate-owned alternative rock station.
The voting politics are complex. I’m totally fickle. I’ll mostly turn things off; KCRW when it gets too sanctimonious or the World Music interludes become intolerable; KROQ when the grindcore songs come on; KZLA when really bad country-pop gets played. TG likes KCRW and KZLA. MG hates KZLA.
So when we got into the car, some awful Incubus song came on, and I punched KZLA, which was playing a current country hit called “The Good Stuff”. In case you don’t listen, here’s a typical lyric:

Not a soul around but the old bar keep,
Down at the end an’ looking half asleep.
An he walked up, an’ said : “What’ll it be?”
I said: “The good stuff.”
He didn’t reach around for the whiskey;
He didn’t pour me a beer.
His blue eyes kinda went misty,
He said: “You can’t find that here.
“‘Cos it’s the first long kiss on a second date.
“Momma’s all worried when you get home late.
“And droppin’ the ring in the spaghetti plate,
“‘Cos your hands are shakin’ so much.
“An’ it’s the way that she looks with the rice in her hair.
“Eatin’ burnt suppers the whole first year
“An’ askin’ for seconds to keep her from tearin’ up.
“Yeah, man, that’s the good stuff.”

And Middle Guy looked disgusted and asked me “Why the hell do you listen to that stuff, anyway? How can you like the Vines and this?” That answer’s another issue…
But what I told him was that I liked the sound of good country music, and then started talking about the changes in country since I’d started listening to it, and that today it was almost the last music about love, fidelity, loss and hope, and that I liked that.
And that one thing that I missed from rock was the hope and yearning that used to be a part of it back when I was Middle Guy’s age.
And, as these kind of talks tend to do, they got me thinking.
I’d been thinking a lot about the Great Cultural Divide…the whole red/blue thing, and I had a brief moment of clarity.
It’s all about country music.
Or, rather, it’s all about the worldview that country music encapsulates.
Here’s a counterpoint. My subscription to Harper’s hasn’t run out yet, although I won’t be renewing it in spite of the flood of imploring letters and postcards I’ve received from their subscription service, and in this month’s is a classic explanation of why (not available on the web):

‘Comfort Cult’
On the honest unlovliness of William Trevor’s world
By Francine Prose
…
If part of what we seek from art is solace and consolation, an interlude of distraction, a brief escape from our daily cares, even a glimpse of happiness – and who, in these disturbing times does not, or should not want all of that and more? – it is simple enough to understand why the products of what we might call Comfort Culture should dramatically outperform a writer like William Trevor in the marketplace of analgesic entertainment. The Lovely Bones is narrated from heaven by a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped and brutally murdered by a neighbor (think Our Town with dismemberment) and who receives as compensation for her earthly travails, an afterlife that includes a nice apartment, plenty of teen-girl magazines, a paradisical version of high school, and a front-row seat from which to observe the folks back home coping with their grief and puzzling over her killer’s identity. No such comforts are provided the unfortunate young women dispatched by Hilditch, the creepy serial killer in Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey; indeed it is characteristic of Trevor’s bravery as a writer, and of his passionate sympathy for even the most loathsome outsiders and misfits, that a good part of the book is written from the point of view of the demented and delusional Hilditch himself.
…
(emphasis added)

First, I can’t help myself, but the idea of a literary critic with the name ‘Prose’ does give me the giggles…
…but to get back to culture; while I can see a sensitive reading of Felicity’s Journey and a sympathetic nod to the loathsome outsider as a steady part of the programming on KCRW, and a speed-metal version on KROQ (in fact the song probably already exists), there is no way that sympathy would be found on KZLA. No contemporary country song would celebrate that kind of brutality and despair. We’re talking about a fundamental difference of worldview and taste, and this issue ought to serve as a pathway into understanding the gap between the worlds.
In the next part, I’ll talk a bit about the social and economic realities behind the gap.
(added emphasis)

6 thoughts on “THE RED AND THE BLUE, part 1”

  1. Preach it, brother.
    It seems to me that you’ve not only put your finger on a social and economic divide, but on an ethical divide. The truly scary thing is that there are people out there who actually think that there is something unutterably sophisticated about dwelling on brutality and despair as opposed to love, fidelity, loss, hope, and yearning.
    A few people know better, though.
    “Anything is possible. I once saw a man ski through a revolving door. There is going to be a future; let’s chase it until it kills us.” –Spider Robinson

  2. This explains why I feel sick and edgy after reading Harpers Magazine – and why listening to Hank Williams tends to take the edge off..
    The old country is as good as the contemporary ..why waste time celebrating brutality and despair when you could be listening to Williams’ “Move it on over” or Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”?

  3. “No contemporary country song would celebrate that kind of brutality and despair.”
    You’re listening to the wrong contemporary country, AL. Check out Johnny Dowd.
    And what did you think of 8 Mile, by the way?

  4. Great post, AL. A few points:
    1. First, the fluff: You own an Odyssey? Me too! I love the darn thing. I’m jealous of your CD changer. Was that standard on your model, or did you install that later? (on the ’02 models it was not a standard option)
    2. I let my Harper’s subscription run out about 2 years ago. With the finite amount of time that I had to read both it and the New Yorker, I found that the New Yorker’s weekly contributions far outweighed any benefits of continuing my Harper’s subscription.
    3. As someone who grew up & was largely educated on one coast (NY/Boston), and now lives in the meat of flyover country (central Illinois, where the local taxpayers have never met a school tax hike referendum they haven’t voted down), I have to say that I think you’re close when you say it’s all about country music. It is a sort of meat-and-potatoes thing. I think it has to do with straighforwardness and earnestness, without pretense or irony, when relaying one’s beliefs and feelings. I think the recent upsurge in popularity of Christian Music (which was wickedly parodied on a past season of the very non-heartland-ish “Sopranos”) offers a similar message.
    I don’t know why your post sparked this, but: I had dinner a couple weeks ago at the home of the Dean emeritus of my medical school. He was the founder of the school, and it was his intellectual brilliance, political savvy and iron will that helped bring this place into being. His wife, meanwhile, had an abnormal psychology practice in town and founded the local Planned Parenthood. And yet, if you ask him about what he likes to do in his spare time (and what he liked to do while still Dean), he’ll tell you singing in the church choir, playing hymns on his piano at home, and fly fishing. His wife’s great love is collecting Dickens Christmas Village tchotchkes. They display them with pride all over their home, year ’round.
    (By the way, I think this undermines some of your comments in part 2, which seems to lump all coast-dwellers into the elite, and all “flyovers” into disinfranchised factory workers, farmers and coal miners.)

  5. I don’t care for country music, as a rule, but I enjoy watching the videos on the country music stations.
    What interests me is the values. What buttons does the video attempt to push? Is there an American flag somewhere? Somebody in uniform?
    Home as real, genuine home?
    Loyalty?
    I even love the landscapes.
    You might watch the videos as an anthropologist would. Consider that the producers are trying to sell this music and sweating bullets trying to make the viewers feel good, get connected.
    In pursuit of which, they will distill and concentrate and play back that which they think works.
    Or you can enjoy it and admire a culture which has qualities worth emulating.

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