[As with any
longstanding, popular cultural genre, country music has a complex, evolving relationship
to American society. In this series, I’ll highlight five ways we can
AmericanStudy the genre and those social connections and meanings. I’d love to
hear your country connections and analyses for a twangtastic crowd-sourced
weekend post!]
On the genre’s frustrating
embrace of lazy and even divisive national narratives.
As an
AmericanStudier, and one who tries consistently to help us understand the
complexity of our national past, identity, and community, few cultural genres
frustrate me more consistently and thoroughly than the uber-patriotic country
song. I’m thinking in particular about Lee Greenwood’s ubiquitous “God
Bless the USA” (1984), which from its titular evocation of that trite
phrase through its facile uses of parallel phrases like “proud to be an
American” and “at least I know I’m free” embodies what I’ve
elsewhere called the easy, unthinking version of patriotism. But even worse
is Toby Keith’s post-9/11 anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White,
and Blue (the Angry American)” (2002)—I’m not sure I know of a more
troubling or more false line about America than that song’s “We’ll put a boot
in your ass/It’s the American way.”
It’d be a
mistake to simply lump Garth Brooks’ “American Honky-Tonk Bar
Association” (1993) in with songs like Greenwood’s and Keith’s. Besides
taking itself a lot less seriously (no small distinction to be sure), Brooks’
song seems to envision a more broadly inclusive definition of the national
community: as “one big family/Throughout the cities and the towns,” a family that
“reach[es] for those who are down” and whose “heart is in the music/And they
love to play it loud.” But then there’s the second verse, which I need to quote
in full: “When Uncle Sam dips in your pocket/For most things you don’t mind/But
when your dollar goes to all of those/Standing in a welfare line/Well rejoice
you have a voice/If you’re concerned about the destination/Of this great
nation/It’s called the American Honky-Tonk Bar Association.” So that titular family
has a particular agenda, and that agenda is to express concerns about the
future as represented by another part of the national community, a part that
seems comprised quite specifically by those fellow citizens “who are down.”
It’d be
important to contextualize that part of Brooks’ song in its historical and social
moment, as part of the early 1990s move toward “welfare
reform” that culminated in President Clinton and the Congressional GOP’s famous
and deeply problematic 1996 law. But the song also connects to a much more
longstanding and divisive national narrative, one that pits “working Americans”
(Brooks opens his song by addressing those whose “paycheck depends on/The
weather and the clock”) against the shiftless and dependent poor, divides “makers”
from “takers,” argues that social programs like welfare represent a (even the
most) significant American concern. Given the
percentage of the beneficiaries of such social programs who are precisely
the rural working-class Americans about whom Brooks is singing, his version of
this longstanding narrative is as inaccurate as any. But it’s also just
unnecessarily divisive, a definition of the national family that depends on
exclusion as well as inclusion—and for an artist as popular
as Brooks, such divisiveness can have a potent and destructive effect.
Next country
connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to this post, or other country connections you'd highlight?
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