Of course, Drive-By Truckers are officially more alt country than they are country, which is another way of saying that they actually sell records north of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I think in their case the designation doesn't really make sense. When bands like Uncle Tupelo started writing songs about the quiet dignity of Appalachian miners and mill-workers, they got categorized as "alt" country because apparently the only people in America that care about the plight of the Appalachian miners and mill-workers are rock critics and college students. Drive-By Truckers, on the other hand, are remarkable for playing music that borrows as much from traditionalist country as it does from early Skynard-era southern rock, while still writing lyrics that are consistently current and relevant. Their most recent album lacks the high-concept hard rock of their 2000 rock opera, Southers Rock Opera, or the lo-fi grittiness of 2004's The Dirty South, but it maintains most of their themes. Brighter Than Creation's Dark is comprised mostly of 3-minute song-as-character-studies about the frustrations of life on the margins of the American South, with subjects ranging from meth addicts to soldiers stuck in Iraq to a washed-up band begrudgingly playing the opening slot on tour with an equally washed-up headlining act.
Indeed, what has always made country music so popular (and why all you white-collar blue-bloods despise it) is that it panders to and even celebrates the least-common-denominator of American society. Country music speaks to the sadness and pathos of white America in a way that whiny rock ballads just can't. The old joke about what happens when you play a country song backwards (you get your house/dog/wife back - ha ha, very funny) is sort of true, but misses the point of what this music is really about. The fact is that at some point in your life you're gonna lose your house, your dog, your wife, or something equivalent. Country music is about the tragedy of life. It's not about sex and drugs, and rock star fantasies. It's about working for a living, getting shit on by the world, and drowning your blues away in a bottle of whiskey. It's about trying your best and still coming up short. In intellectual terns, it's a whole genre devoted to commiseration and catharsis.
So why is it that whenever I ask somebody to categorize the sort of music the listen to, it seems that the most common answer I seem to get is "everything but country," or "everything but rap," or "everything but rap or country." I mean, it's no mystery that the people I hang out with are a bunch of closet racists, so it probably makes sense that they wouldn't listen to a lot of hip-hop (even if their white guilt obligates them to pretend to), but what about country music is so unappealing to urbane, college-educated white folk? Every awful one hit-wonders of the eighties is retroactively transformed into a masterpiece for its tacky earnestness, and yet anything sung with a drawl and a twang is like hipster kryptonite. I mean, why is it that everyone at the bar lights up as soon as they hear "Don't Stop Believing" come on the jukebox but nobody knows the fucking words to "Friends In Low Places"?
Before I go any further, let me first point out that I'm NOT talking about Johnny Cash. I know you probably think that because you saw Walk the Line and you've got that one album where he does the Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode covers, that you have a healthy appreciation for country music. But really that's not much different from a stoner college kid that picks up a Bob Marley album and decides that it's okay to grow dreadlocks and wear a dumb-ass knit cap. Johnny Cash is a great artist, and undoubtedly one of the coolest motherfuckers to ever pick up a guitar, but I feel like people have this idea that Johnny Cash is somehow better than or different from the rest of country music. I mean, Hank Williams was infinitely more self-destructive, and Merle Haggard actually did most of the outlaw shit that everybody thinks Johnny Cash is so cool for just singing about. Johnny Cash just knew what made for a great country song and knew how to execute it without letting any high-minded Nashville production get in his way.
Now, anybody that's known me for a while probably knows that I haven't always held my current appreciation for twang and honky-tonk, and I still think that most of the country music that gets played on the radio is pretty awful (but certainly no worse than any of the other crap on the top 40). It probably helps that I live in a city where people don't actually listen to country (at least publicly), so I can freely dissociate the music from its typical listeners, who I tend to disagree with on pretty much every major social or political issue. But living in a place like New York has given me an appreciation for just how little people actually pay attention to the lyrics of the music they listen to. Rock music listeners (and indie rock fans in particular) seem to be so desperate for their music to be deep and meaningful that they're willing to disregard lyrics that are, at best, nonsensical, and, at worst, trite, melodramatic crap. Though metaphor has always been a strong part of country songwriting, it's always essential that any country song still works on the most literal possible level. Kenny Rogers might have been using gambling as a metaphor for life, but it's also possible that he was just talking to a guy on a train about how to screw his buddies out of their money next time poker night rolls around. Country is also the only genre (give or take hip-hop) where there's still a premium on wordplay. And while this has certainly led to numerous songwriting travesties ("Save a Horse / Ride a Cowbow" comes to mind most immediately), Roger Miller's "King of the Road" contains about as perfect a combination of wit, irony, self-deprecation, and understatement as anyone could have conceived, and Willie Nelson's "Sad Songs and Waltzes" is not only one of the funniest songs ever written (again, understatement is key), but also a modernist work on par with Fellini's 8 1/2 or Magritte's "This Is Not a Pipe". With all of his clever turns of phrase, you get the sense that if Willie Neson wasn't playing music (and maybe layed off the bong every now and then), he would have been the best copywriter on Madison Avenue.
Now, I'm not suggesting that anybody run out tomorrow and buy Toby Keith's Shock'n Y'all (though really there are much worse music purchases you can make), but for all of his ignorant right-wing jingoism, even Toby understands that a broken heart and a busted liver with just the right amount of lazy slide guitar droning in the background is a recipe for pop music gold that's scarcely been improved upon.
