Farm Report: Hegel for Hillbillies

Farm Report

Used to be, we did nothing at all in the winter but drink beer, watch television, order seed, evade creditors and take the occasional crap. But last year about this time a funny thing happened. Jesse and me was sittin' around in our overalls and John Deere caps watching Oprah, just like every day, when it came to me. We should start a book club.

And now all the big ol' bubbas from southern York County show up at my place once a month to laugh and cry and in general share the deep feelings that well up within us in response to Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Waiting to Exhale.

Welp, this month we're discussing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's little The Philosophy of History. As Hegel says, "We have, on the one hand, recognized the Idea in the definite form of Freedom conscious of and willing itself?having itself alone as its object: involving at the same time the pure and simple Idea of Reason, and likewise, that which we have called subject?self-consciousness?Spirit actually existing in the World."

That touched our tender hearts, but a debate erupted about the truth of this point and, in general, Hegel's dialectical account of historical development. So I took the floor and sketched the resources and limits of Hegel's dialectical idealism by adducing the world-historical development of country music.

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Revisit with me if you will (I said) the late 1970s. The imaginations, if any, of the consuming classes are dominated by "artists"?such as, let us say, David Bowie?with avant-garde hair, amorphous genitalia, the emotional and ethical life of special-effects space aliens and a deep personal commitment to cocaine. After the Zeitgeist bastes in those juices for a while, heterosexuality, whiskey and denim begin to look damn good. Before long, John Travolta is riding a mechanical bull rather than Barry Gibb, the world is shopping for Western wear and Dolly Parton has reasserted her hegemony.

However, soon Dolly is corrupted by her absolute power. She enjoys her massive audience, her universal acclaim, her seven-figure checks. Soon she is recording "Islands in the Stream" with Kenny Rogers. Soon she becomes a movie star and opens an amusement park. Soon she is not a country singer at all, but a slightly less annoying Barbra Streisand. In a vivid instantiation of the dialectic of master and slave, as country takes command it ceases to exist.

Before long, as the self-consciousness of the Ideal in its ramification through the history of crappy pop music approaches ever closer to self-realization and hence perfect fruition, Flock of Seagulls and Depeche Mode appear, reasserting a spirituality based exclusively on hair-care products, a philosophy that ranges from the banal to the superficial, and a sexuality that is focused obsessively on the naugahyde codpiece. Country music is left with an audience of rednecks and wannabe-rednecks who never left. This is a commercial apocalypse but an artistic ecstasis. Ricky Skaggs plays beautiful bluegrass and it comes right out of your radio. Emmylou Harris reaches into your chest and rips out your heart and you remember that you're not yet an android.

The way is then clear for great artists and great Americans like Alan Jackson and George Strait. In the backwaters of provincial America, beer and divorce remain the drugs of choice. Jackson grows a mustache, sings "Here in the Real World" and someone believes him. The world at large realizes that it is again either bored or actually dead of decadence, and the survivors buy a CD. Garth Brooks appears and actualizes the Weltanschauung with beautiful serious country songs like "Low Places." Everybody moves to Nashville from L.A. and tries to figure out what the Eagles could possibly have been thinking when they recorded "Hotel California."

And then the dialectic spiral continues. Garth records songs by Billy Joel and becomes the slightly-less-annoying-Barbra-Streisand of the 1990s. Faith Hill and Lonestar have big pop hits. Meaningless bleeps, huge simulated emotions and my dull, throbbing headaches are back.

However, somewhere in Music City, Alan Jackson has been reading his Nietzsche and decides to lob a monkey wrench into the dialectical engine of world history. No matter what Garth may do, Jackson just keeps right on writing and singing traditional country songs in an eternal recurrence of the same. When the commercial meltdown follows the artistic meltdown (that is, now), Alan is ready. History is redeemed, demonstrated to be cyclical. Hegel is refuted. Our long Universal nightmare is over.

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Out here in the pale, patriarchal portions of rural America, Alan Jackson is our Toni Morrison. When Somebody Loves You (Arista) surely brings that elusive Nobel within reach. Alan has recorded a number of literally perfect songs over the years, notably "Real World," "Tonight I Climbed the Wall," "House with No Curtains," "Don't Rock the Jukebox," "Just Playin' Possum," "I Don't Need the Booze (to Get a Buzz On)." He adds to that distinguished record here with a reply to B.B. King: "The Thrill Is Back." But everything here is charming, funny and right.

Traditionalist though he obviously is, Jackson also writes for the radio. There's no doubt that his music is contemporary: this record includes references to Prozac and the Internet ("www.memory"). The point is that Alan shows that country is still a possible way to live and play rather than merely a relic to be cherished.

George Strait, on the other hand, is Alice Walker. He very much has Jackson's sensibility, but whereas Jackson is Southeast, Strait is all Texas. I guess I'm not utterly wild about George Strait (MCA) in comparison with some of his other albums, but obviously it is rock-solid country music that has no taint of Streisand.

The paradigm of the high lonesome bluegrass voice is Bill Monroe. And if we added one after that it would be Ralph Stanley. But when I was growing up on the family farm in Chevy Chase I really didn't know Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley. My pappy used to take me to the Red Fox Inn to see the Seldom Scene, which featured the equally paradigmatic John Duffey on mandolin and high harmonies. I loved Duffey inordinately; his work was strong and beautiful. And he was hilarious to watch onstage. He looked like a big beefy truck driver and those chubby fingers always seemed to be struggling to keep pace with the signals from his brain. And the voice that came out of that big old gregarious redneck sounded miraculous, like an apotheosis of cherubim.

Duffey died a couple of years ago, and now Sugar Hill has issued an anthology titled Always in Style, consisting mostly of Seldom Scene songs on which Duffey's voice or mandolin is the dominant instrument. If you have any tendency to like bluegrass music, you must buy this album: there is so much great singing and picking on these 21 songs. Duffey's intensely gorgeous rendition of "Long Black Veil" is on its own of infinite value, but everything here is so fucking good.

The Blacks have a unique sound: a kind of modified rockabilly/punk with little elements of all the century's American pop music styles tossed into the hopper. Rough-hewn but well-played, Just Like Home (Bloodshot) is about as good a fringe roots album as you will ever hear. But let it play through a few times?this one's got to steep a bit before you really see what's going on. You've got to love upright bass player Gina Black's whole thing: the slinky dress, the big attitude, the weird-yet-profound lyrics and the voice that puts them across so you got to believe.

Perhaps you like me have been wondering since Duane Allman ate a peach what has become of the art of the slide guitar. A: It's all been balled up into the body of this dude Sonny Landreth. Wanda says his album Levee Town (Sugar Hill), which she loves, sounds like the Grateful Dead. But Jerry Garcia didn't play slide, and he never played anything with Landreth's focus, coherence and attack. That's okay: Jerry had his own kind of charm, diffuse though it was. And there is a vocal resemblance: Landreth sings kind of high and thin. This thing is basic roots rock with a whole shitload of Norleans tossed in: sometimes it seems like Landreth is playing the accordion on the guitar.

I love the voice of Sara Evans. I'd pay to listen to her sing advertising jingles. But it is nevertheless unfortunate that I seem to be called upon to do just that with her album Born to Fly (RCA). Sara's first album, Three Chords and the Truth, produced by Dwight Yoakam's Pete Anderson, was one of the best country albums of the 90s, but it didn't sell. So Sara went pop and produced the more commercial but still lovely album No Place That Far. In fact, the title cut of that disc is me and Wanda's song. Ain't that sweet? But here she just gets a bit too deep into trivial schlock.

Sara doesn't seem to understand that due to the eternal return it's quickly getting to be neo-neo-trad time in the country world. But of course there's always time to tack back south on the next one. In fact, I've got a solution for artists who experience their pop careers as a temptation. Go ahead and make a pop album for RCA, then record trad for Rounder. Hell, use a different name, like maybe Snave Aras. Anyway, I still listen to this thing, and there is one great song: "I Learned That from You."

A better compromise of impulses is achieved by Allison Moorer on The Hardest Part (MCA). Shelby Lynne's little sister sings in the low register and keeps it country. But this ain't exactly bluegrass, and there's no reason it couldn't be played on the radio. The songs and the performances are smart, focused, moving.

We face still an infestation of angels. All women recording artists seem to have to sing about them, usually in an incredibly insipid or actually lobotomized fashion. Sara does it, Allison does it and so does Jamie O'Neal on her debut, Shiver (Polygram). Patriarchy will continue as long as the fluffy-headed invoke the help of their guardian angels rather than getting up and kicking ass. Out here, we hunt angels like ducks and eat 'em like venison.

Jamie has already made several major errors in the course of her young career. She dedicates "When I Think About Angels" to the memory of her toy poodle Griffin, who is depicted in the liner with a halo. She thanks God and a whole bunch of lawyers in a way that makes you see that she thinks about them all in basically the same way. Jamie is very good-looking in a breath-mint-ad kind of way, and her package came to me with a girlie calendar. But she needs either to get down to the lingerie and bikinis or present herself as a singer rather than a pinup.

And she has the pop tendencies that have swamped poor Sara Evans. But I got to say this: she's promising. She's got a sweet, simple voice and a great single: "There Is No Arizona."

Is that enough reviewing for you? Later. Me and Jesse got to go watch Touched by an Angel and read Bataille.