In a message dated 2/25/99 9:23:43 PM Central Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< Does anybody know anything more about this obviously talented writer? >>
keith -- pasted below are the opening five paragraphs of a story i wrote a
year-and-a-half ago that leads with wilonsky's arrogant reduction of people to
ciphers and contrasts it with the empathetic humanity of brian henneman and
the bottle rockets. fwiw, bill f-w
Welfare Music
In a recent review for the Los Angeles newspaper *New Times*, Robert Wilonsky
dubbed the Bottle Rockets' new album *24 Hours A Day* "music for white
people--fat white people, drunk white people, unemployed white people, white
people who play air guitar with their eyes squeezed shut, white people who
hang kitty cat clocks on their walls, white people who go to Dolly Parton
concerts on the Fourth of July and get bummed out when they can't get close to
the stage, white people proud of their $1,000 cars and their speeding tickets,
white people who go to Skynyrd concerts and know their screams for 'Free Bird'
will be rewarded and then some."
Wilonsky's disdainful tone, whether intended to be inflammatory or not,
betrays a cultural elitism not uncommon among critics on both coasts--a
dismissal of everything west of New York and east of Hollywood as a wasteland
of trailer parks, stock car racing, and rebel flags. The assumption is that
the inhabitants of this benighted realm aren't worth writing about (which in
turn makes dismissing anyone who *does* easier than spearing fish in a
barrel). But in some respects, Wilonsky's depiction of the Bottle Rockets'
social and moral universe is spot-on. He's wrong, however, to say that *24
Hours a Day* is music *for* white people; more correctly, it's music *about*
white people.
The group sets many of its songs in its uniquely rural and Southern hometown
of Festus, Mo. A predominantly white community of 15,000 located half-an-hour
outside St. Louis, Festus is culturally impoverished and economically
depressed--and not without its share of dysfunction. It's easy to imagine how
a sense of stagnation might pervade life there. And it's certainly easy to
understand why such mind-numbing pursuits as beer-guzzling, blaring the car
radio, and cruising the strip figure prominently in the Bottle Rockets'
lyrics.
Empathy for how this stuckness plays itself out in people's lives has been
chief songwriter Brian Henneman's stock-in-trade from the beginning (no less,
in fact, than the band's meat-and-potatoes Southern rock). A good example is
"Wave That Flag," which takes an insider's look at the heritage-or-hate debate
over the confederate flag. "I'm a different kind but I'm a rebel too,"
Henneman sings. "Like to do my own thing, man, how 'bout you/You can whistle
'Dixie' all day long/If the tables turned wouldn't you hate that song?"
As these lines suggest, the Bottle Rockets are unwilling to reduce anyone to
caricature--not the flag-wavers, nor the protesters. No matter how one-
dimensional couch potato in "Sunday Sports" may seem, he's still a human
being; in the Bottle Rockets' eyes, that alone makes his alienation worthy of
consideration, if not of compassion.
