The Farm Report

By Crispin Sartwell

Glen Rock, Pa.--When you're a real American, when you're all man, when you have an imaginary friend called "Barry Goldwater," this gay shit wears you down after awhile. You start getting pissed off. You start relaxing your strict policy against domestic violence. You start driving your Ford truck to the mall in York and getting the latest Randy Travis CD.

Here at Whoa-o-rama Farm in the bucolic Pennsylvania hills, we once plowed to country music. We once cooked to country music. We once fucked to country music. Yet the younguns here now seem to prefer Limp Bizkit and Kid Rock. Admittedly, this is something of an improvement over 1998, which was dedicated duomaniacally to the Spice Girls and the Backstreet Boys.

Once, the halls of the old home place resounded with the real shit: Ray Price and Tammy Wynette, Connie Smith and Dwight Yoakam. Now it's a sonic battleground as "Nookie" takes on "Wine Me Up." I've still got the big speakers, but I seem to be losing the moral and aesthetic high ground. Our oldest boy told me there was one country artist he liked: Shania Twain. And then only the Backstreet Boys remix of "That Don't Impress Me Much." I wept uncontrollably for a generation lost.

Even my wife Wanda, Bitch-Goddess of Love, left me in the lurch. "I'm kinda rootsed out," she said the other day. "Couldn't we play some, like, eighties synth-pop? Maybe Depeche Mode?" She dropped it into the changer and started wiggling about in a lascivious manner. As far as I could tell, Depeche Mode doesn't even have a fiddle player. Soon Wanda'll be burning her bra.

Depeche Mode sounds gay, acts gay, plays gay dance music, and wears extremely tight pants. Randy Travis also wears extremely tight pants and perhaps for this reason was declared gay by the tabloids a few years ago. He put those rumors to rest by marrying his lady manager. For as any fool can see, it is physically impossible for a gay man to marry a woman. Or so say the married gentlemen down at the rest stop on Route 83, where I hardly ever show up anymore.

Tight pants or no, the man's got the voice. He sounds like Jack Daniels tastes: deep, smooth, and with a bite. Randy is up there in the pantheon of pure singers with such real men, real Americans, and real alcoholics as George Jones, Vern Gosdin, and Keith Whitley. In the mid-80s, when country was undergoing an outbreak of crossover dreck similar to the nightmare that befalleth us today, Randy Travis, George Strait, Ricky Skaggs were the cure. Travis's debut, Storms of Life, which included "On the Other Hand" and "Diggin Up Bones," was a classic, one of the best and hardest-core country albums of the decade.

You and You Alone (Dreamworks)-a year old but still worth buying--runs this voice through a series of traditional-style songs by Nashville craftsmen, with only a single horrible mistake, which you'll notice if you buy it ("I did my part, I tried my best, I gave my heart, I took no rest"). The fact that my kids were howling "THIS SUCKS" as I cranked up the sweet-assed little title tune only confirmed my commitment to heterosexuality, alcoholism, and our beloved nation.

And, I might add, the brain-dead bozos who run the country music establishment need to rededicate themselves to these core values as well. Lately it looks like they've put their money on mutating the form into one long love theme from Titanic. Not that Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes don't have the chops to keep up with Celine Dion. One thing you gotta say for country: it's got the singers. But this miasma of gutless, fiddle-free power ballads is giving country radio a severe sucking problem.

Take the latest Alison Krauss. Alison was once the savior of bluegrass as a teenage fiddle prodigy with the most beautiful and delicate voice imaginable. Now twenty-some, she's a member of the Grand Ole Opry with several country chart hits under her belt. I figured her for some relief from the pap. Now Alison's always been mellow, but the problem with Forget About It (Rounder) is that it's so mellow lately that it's hardly there at all. This album, though it is lovely at times, is Enya goes to Nashville. Maybe New Age music isn't exactly gay, but you can't tell me there's not some sort of deep problem with its sexuality. Even with a couple of real country items such as the venerable "Ghost in this House," the album has no balls. And speaking of castration, it's a real, real bad sign when an artist covers songs by Todd Rundgren and Michael McDonald.

One artistic victim and financial beneficiary of the country-single-as-power-ballad has been Kenny Chesney, who once sounded a whole lot like George Strait and just as good. Last year he hit with the first two-step twelve-step tune: "I've Been There (That's Why I'm Here)." "Here" is about as good a place as you can end up when alcoholism is basic to your form of expression and your way of life, as well it should be. Nashville has certainly turned a corner since Whitley died of alcohol poisoning. But Everywhere We Go (BNA) mixes pseudo-trad country tunes with profound meditations on contemporary cant phrases, as in the current hit "You Had Me From Hello" (appropriated from Jerry Maguire) and "Life is Good" (postmodernized from a Miller Lite ad).

On "How Forever Feels," the fairly excellent hit single, Chesney takes country music into the deeply American hetero-Baudrillardian realm of simulacrum-without-origin-or-original:

Big Orange ball sinks into the water

Toes in the sand couldn't get much hotter

Little umbrella-shaded Margaritas

Coconut-oil tan senoritas

Now I know how Jimmy Buffett feels.

Mandy Barnett knows how Patsy Cline feels. Which is good, but dead. With a voice that is truly a gift from the Christian God and production by Omar Bradley-Cline's early-sixties producer, in his final appearance (he went on to join Cline during the recording)-I've Got a Right to Cry (Sire) ought to be great. Mind you, I didn't expect it to convert the kids from Kid Rock: banks of strings and Jordanaires-style insanely lush background vocals do not seem to impress the delinquents we're raising up here at Whoa-o-rama.

But like Bradley's work with k.d. lang, who has since been revealed as a subversive (thus explaining her deeply gender-inappropriate hairstyle), this album has a necrophiliac feel. The songs for the most part aren't quite as good as Patsy's, and Barnett seems too focused on sounding like Patsy and not enough on being Mandy, who was just fine appearing as herself on her eponymous debut a couple of years ago. The production and the performances are slightly stilted, off-kilter, somehow dissociated and displaced.

But necrophilia is fun, or else no one would do it. There are a couple of great songs, and at least it's country music, not little white kids rapping over punk guitar tracks. As I pressed play, I (and only I) could see Barry Goldwater sitting in the corner, smiling.