Johnny Rotten Cash

I have a theory I'd like to share and get a little feedback on. It's something that smacked me upside the head during a coast to coast road trip I took a while back. I happened to pass through Nashville, where I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the Grand Ole Opry and numerous other points of interest for the nascent fan of hillbilly music. And while I was there it struck me that country is the new punk.

The controversy over and ensuing popularity of Toby Keith's pro-war song "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" was still being trumpeted as an important skirmish in the culture wars v.9/11 (though it was his heaping helping of cornpone "Beer for my Horses," that was burning up the country charts that summer). The ony conclusion a liberal could draw was that Toby Keith was an ignernt redneck whose love for his country and hatred of its enemies was blind. And he was damn proud of it. You don't like it? Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! The man had clearly flunked his cultural sensitivity training course at the community college.

Yet as much I disagreed with his lyrics, I couldn't help thinking, I LOVE THIS GUY! Don't get me wrong. Toby Keith is an execrable musician, but his attitude is pure punk. It's an attitude I saw throughout the country pantheon, from gods like Johnny Cash and George Jones right on down to unpolishable turds like Toby Keith.

This was odd because, growing up in Texas, I actively rejected country and everything it stood for. I did so because I was a Texan, and in Texas you were either a shit-kicker or you were not. If you think I'm being insulting, then you don't know that the most popular country music station in Houston was KIKK (pronounced "kick") FM. The only thing standing between KIKK and KKK, as far as I could see, was I. Country music meant the Future Farmers of America, Ropers, Randy Travis, Travis Tritt, jingoism, racism and Charlie Daniels, that bearded, big-bellied, fiddle playing devil from the back of beyond. So I threw out Hank Williams and Patsy Cline with the bathwater.

It wasn't until I moved to New York and could listen to the music without the cultural saddle bags attached that I began to hear what I'd been missing. I quickly became a fan of those country musicians that all hipsters are encouraged to love: Hank and Patsy of course (who I always liked anyway, a hell of a lot more than Thomas Dolby or Bananarama) but also Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash. After my trip to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, I discovered Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, George Jones, Emmylou Harris, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley and dozens of others. And thanks to long days spent behind the wheel listening to the radio, even my resistance to artists like George Strait, someone I remembered well from my anti-shit-kickin' days, began to fade. I fell in love with his hit "Tell Me Something Bad About Tulsa," despite the fact that it includes the line, 'Tell me how those old oil wells smell in the wind.' Now that's just bad, but he sang the line with such conviction, such authentic, forthright, unironic, unabashed sincerity, I fell in love with it anyway, warts and all.

Maybe that's the secret. Country music ain't always pretty, musically or politically, but the musicians and the fans don't give a fuck (or as Michael Stipe put it in a non-country song: "They're real; they mean it."). Not giving a fuck, having the spine to sing what you believe whether or not it's popular (or even right) is pure punk. Toby Keith is a punk rocker. Steve Earle is a punk rocker. The Sex Pistols were punk rock, and Johnny Cash was punk. Hell, the fact that he's dead is punk. By contrast, today's self-styled punks - Green Day and Avril Lavigne, to name two - are like the meeting of a black eye-liner pencil and a marketing campaign on an operating table. Punk is dead, long live Country.

Now for some of y'all, the new punk is scary (shouldn't it be?) 'cos some of its I-don't-give-a-fuckness seems like ignorance, pure Red State guff. But most isn't. It's what we in Texas politely call "a little differnce of opinion," and as flaming liberals, aren't we supposed to tolerate those little differences of opinion better than anyone?

As I sit here, the country deep in my bones, I know those differences are indeed little. I know that they pale beside the majesty of the music itself, and that there's a reason even Toby Keith remembered to put a little Blue in his furious punk anthem.