I thought it interesting that Jake preceded his piece by saying that he
thought Fulks's "Jet" cover was what put the "alt" in his alt-country, as
well as Dina's comment about how covers are received from alt-country
artists as compared to those of New Country singers.
It resonated, of course, but what struck me is that the cheeze-cover
syndrome is actually not endemic to alt-country the way it was to post-punk
and grunge. What's actually more representative is covering classic folk
and country songs, a practice that begins with the 80s roots-punk groups
(tho in cowpunk it tended much more to the sarcastic brand of irony rather
than the with-a-twist irony of, say, The Pogues, and nineties alt-country)
but certainly made its most influential emergence with Uncle Tupelo's
version of No Depression and on the March 11-20 album.
With the perhaps-exception of Warfare (more a wonky misstep than a
deliberately sarcastic cover, in my opinion), the Tupelo covers are
definitely tributes, and also attempts to reclaim the material of these old
songs as relevant to the post-industrial scene the group grew up and lived
in. Likewise with other cases - when Neko Case covers a Loretta Lynn song,
or Freakwater does One Big Union, is there anyone who thinks there's any
element of mockery there at all? There is irony, but it's irony in this
sense: "Ironically, though I'm a young hipster in 1990s America, these
defiantly unmodern old songs speak more to my heart and my experience than
the glitzy music being produced for the radio in my own time." It's a
bittersweet irony at most.
Now, I'd say the reason for the contradiction (dare I say irony) that Dina
pointed out is fairly simple: while Garth and Robbie Fulks might both love
a Paul McCartney song equally well, the context is very different. For
Fulks to assert that he's playing "Jet" for the love of it is to make an
intervention in the whole alternaworld narrative of irony, not to destroy
the irony but to put it behind him, to say, "yes, I know what the cultural
war we've been through was, but now I'd like to reclaim something from it."
It is, to use an unfortunate term, post-irony. It's to grasp that, as a
character in Todd Solonz's Happiness says of New Jersey, we've grown up
"living in a state of irony" -- for all the reasons Jake so smartly
elucidated in his essay -- and we can only transcend it, not escape.
On the other hand, the (very country-traditional) emotional positioning of
Garth and most New Country artists doesn't acknowledge the ironic moment to
begin with -- the act of covering a Billy Joel song has no relationship to
the canonical contest that Jake described. I recently read art writer
Arthur Danto saying that in the 1990s, "the art criticism is built into the
art," since frequently the only way to affect a jaded viewer is to
anticipate the series of historicized responses she'll have and then
strategically counter or subvert them. Unlike Garth doing Billy Joel (or
everyone and his mom doing the Beatles tribute album), Fulks's "Jet" cover
(if it's as good as you folks say) is doing something similar, and that's
what puts the alt in his country. Likewise, Tupelo was anticipating that
country was not considered cool by their punk peers, and asserting back in
their face that it was -- rather than cadging about behind an ironic shield
and half-allowing people to think they were kidding. Again there is an
irony here, a Mobius-strip half-twist, but it isn't sarcasm. It isn't like
Sid Vicious singing My Way.
(Incidentally I can't quite buy The Christian Life as having much to do
with the kinds of covers Jake was addressing. When I asked what "the first"
was, I really meant of the trend he was discussing - I thought it'd be
significant to know if there were cheeze-covers that fell squarely into the
same position - for instance did Iggy Pop ever sing a Carpenters song? Or
what about that Banana Splits cover of the TV cartoon theme?)
Now, the question in the context of Jake's essay is, why? Being a few years
younger than Jake (or so I gather), my friends and I don't have the same
relationship to 70s music that he describes. Yeah, it was the soundtrack to
some of our teenage beer-drinking, but so was punk, ska and new wave. Our
older siblings loved Emerson, Lake and Palmer; we listened to it for a
couple of months, when we borrowed their years-old vinyl, then dropped it
and moved on.
I was not quite ten years old when punk first arrived in the nearest
metropolitan centre; I could hear its faint signals by turning my
transistor radio at just the right angle toward the window. Although I've
experienced my fair share of feeling crowded out by baby boomers -- and
still do -- the 70s were just as much a given part of the culture I came of
age in as the 60s. They didn't belong to me, and I'm not especially
nostalgic for them. I'm nostalgic for the Replacements. Or, to give an
instance of a song a band I was in did cover, Nena's 99 Luftballoons.
Linklater's 70s movie gets fragments of my experience (and of anyone's who
went to high school), but his Happy Dazed nostalgia is a lot less potent
for me than the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack. When DOA covered Randy
Bachman's "Where Evil Grows," it was the first time I ever heard the song.
And when Sonic Youth became Ciccone Youth I knew they weren't making fun of
Madonna.
Eighties culture wasn't something boomers ever had any interest in, and
never did much to promote -- much unlike the arena rock of the 70s, when
they were still young enough to care. But my nostalgia's pretty limited.
The eighties, after all, were something we all just kept wishing would be
over, even at the time.
So what happens if we subtract or at least way demote nostalgia in Jake's
equation? We're left with the "up is down, bad is good, stupid is smart"
landscape - *in and of itself*. In other words, the cultural hegemony had
already collapsed in large part (mainly because we never paid much
attention to hippies). Nihilism, irony, David Letterman - these are the
things that we grew up with, in the vacuum left by the baby boom - and
they're also the things we began to react against. I think country and
old-time revivalism is part of that effort. So too is the recent embrace of
pop music, with the unlikely but not at all joking elevation of the Beach
Boys (and Ennio Morricone) to heroic status for sound-obsessed indie-pop
experimentalists.
I don't think this all would have worked except for another accident of
history -- the people several years younger than me. There are a hell of a
lot of teenagers today. There are in fact more of them than there are baby
boomers. And if you turn on your TV or radio, you'll see how much of the
culture is turning to address them. This has been altering the cultural
landscape, and I think the double-punch of grunge-lounge was the last part
of music history configured as a reaction to the baby boom. Punk still
matters now, but *not* as a response to 70s arena-rock. Rather, punk is a
cultural memory and influence that's spun itself into a million variations
and scenes. There is no great villified music like that of Boston (whose
songs, speaking of irony, were covered by the horribly pompous pop band
that played at my newspaper's awards dinner last night, ugh). And the great
gravitational force of those younger people is helping to change things
very quickly, to act as a counterweight to boomer power. Disco, hair bands,
punk rock, easy-listening, rockabilly, old-school hip-hop - they're all
puzzling puzzle pieces, available to be jammed together in new ways with
your two turntables and a microphone.
There's a just-slightly-overblown piece today in Salon about "Teen
Millennialism" (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as the new cultural moment.
Here's a relevant passage: "It's a time when ghosts, flung loose from
meaning and all its bearings, are commonplace, and when the 1960s have
plummeted so far through the glass darkly that lives and deaths like [John]
Lennon's... seem innocent and quaint." No reverent nostalgia there. And yet
there is something I find optimistic in that chaos. It's a sense that
though the past is never past, we need not be burdened by it. We don't need
to defend ourselves from it with an ironic shield - we are too concerned
with looking forward, in a confusing mix of dread and anticipation. I think
that eagerness for the next action is what loving a hook-crazy pop song is
all about. Or the anxiety of it might make you crave country authenticity.
And either one is reason enough to sing that song again, to make it your
own.
Carl W.
np: My boss singing "Son of a Preacher Man" at his terminal.
