“It’s not
cool to hate contemporary country music.” So goes the explicit thesis of Chuck
Klosterman’s essay “Toby Over Moby,” in his pop-criticism collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. While I
don’t know if I can completely agree with his argument (of the small sample of current
country music I hear in passing [radio, shopping center background noise, CMT Sunday
morning music video flip-throughs, etc.] the overwhelming majority of it seems
to promote a consciousness dominated by what many conservatives refer to as the
“3-G paradigm” of guns, God, and gays [the first two entities being fervently supported
and the last being adamantly opposed]. This paradigm does not lead to me
“hating” country music or the people who make it, per se, but it makes me
uncomfortable in a way similar to how a vegetarian would feel if (s)he took a
part-time job working at a butcher’s shop. It provokes me to accept an attitude
of “live and let live, and maybe I’ll even periodically take part in your
aesthetic norms while we cohabitate, but when it comes to aligning myself with your
tastes, I’ll pass”), Klosterman makes an interesting closing remark that
addresses “high-” and “low-” brow art and how it addresses and affects/reflects
the intellectual lives of its connoisseurs:
“But whenever I go back to my
hometown and see the people I grew up with—many of whom are still living the
same life we all had twelve years ago as high school seniors—I realize that I
was very much the exception. Lots of people (in fact, most people) do not dream
about morphing their current life into something dramatic and cool and
metaphoric. Most people see their life as a job that they have to finish; if
anything, they want their life to be less
complicated than it already is. They want their life to only have one
meaning. So when they imagine a better existence, it’s either completely
imaginary (i.e., Toby [Keith]’s nineteenth-century Lone Ranger fantasy) or
staunchly practical (i.e., [Trisha] Yearwood’s description of the girl who just
wants to get married without catching static from her old man). The reason
Garth Brooks and Shania Twain have sold roughly 120 million more albums than
Bob Dylan and Liz Phair is not because record buyers are all a bunch of
blithering idiots; it’s because Garth and Shania are simply better
at
expressing the human condition. They’re less talented, but they understand more
people.” (184)
What fascinates me most about this declaration is not what
it says about country music and the people who make and listen to it. In fact,
I think this statement has little to nothing to do with music at all. Instead,
Klosterman is drawing a philosophical line in the Jersey Shore sand; he’s
saying that there are roughly two kinds of people in the world.
1. Those
who see reality/living/the world as something inherently simple that should be
enjoyed and/or toughed out.
2. Those who see reality/living/the world as
something inherently complex that should be analyzed and/or suffered (and
enjoyed if there is any time left over after the analyzing and suffering. And
there’s never any time left over [trust me]).
Klosterman uses music to categorize these types of people
(People in Group 1 listen to contemporary country, and maybe bluegrass and
folk, and maybe Top 40 in their cars. People in Group 2 listen to classical and
jazz, and maybe classic and/or progressive rock, and maybe blues while they
ride their bikes to work), but who
these people are as thinking and feeling human beings is more important to me
than what kind of music they listen to in their free time. Klosterman doesn’t
give us any hints as to what contributes to the psycho-social makeup of people
in Groups 1 and 2, and thus we are left to speculate on our own.
I suppose I
have to preface my following thoughts by saying that I am a Group 2 person who openly
wants to be a Group 1 person. I’ll call myself a Group -2 person (since I’m in
Group 2 but don’t find it a positive character trait). For the most part I find
reality/living/the world to be incredibly complicated and filled with
unforeseeable joys and sorrows, most of which come and go without the input of
human beings. I think too much, I overanalyze everything, and, perhaps proving
Klosterman a visionary, I like listening to classical and jazz music because
their frenetic structures and executions remind me of my thought life. When I
listen to country and most popular music, I find myself agitated that more
isn’t “getting done”; I find myself reaching the end of a country or pop song
and wondering why the artist didn’t leave room in the 3-minute track for an
impassioned improvisation. In the end, I suppose I listen to the lovely
simplicity of much good country music and quietly think to myself “This is all too
good to be true.”
While many
contemporary writers and critics (almost all of them undoubtedly Group 2
people), write to bolster the identity and power of Group 2 (and, at the same
time, express complete contempt for Group 1), this is not my purpose. Many
Group 2 people are intellectual and cultural snobs who think Group 1 people are
philistines because they didn’t go to a liberal arts college somewhere on a
coast. In short, many Group 2 people think Group 1 people would be Group 2
people if they had more intelligence and/or taste and/or class. I find many
Group 2 people (including myself) to be disillusioned, bitter, depressed
quasi-narcissists. On the flipside, I find many Group 1 people to be hopeful
(even though the hope often seems misguided), happy, ambitious
quasi-narcissists (but is my perception of Group 1 and 2 people skewed because
I’m a Group 2 person?).
Third-tier
(I think that’s the lowest) academia trained me to be an analytical, critically
thinking, socially-conscious human being, and for this I am grateful
(pre-college my ideology was soaked in Protestant heteronormativity, Midwestern
racism, and Coca-Cola). But in the process of aiding my intellectual and
artistic growth, academia also trained me to be a staunch Group 2 person. It
said, “You need to be analytical, and people who are truly analytical overanalyze [just in case regular
analysis isn’t enough]. You need to be a critical thinker, and the best
critical thinkers are those who most brutally criticize themselves and
everything they hold dear. You need to be socially-conscious, and the people
who are most conscious of others are unconscious of themselves.”
As much as
I want to be a Group 1 person sometimes, I have recently realized that one of
the most traumatizing parts of being a Group 2 person is that there is no going
back (I don’t like the notion that going from Group 1 to Group 2, as Klosterman
kind of alludes to, means going “forward”, while going from Group 2 to Group 1
means going “backward”). Once someone tells you that reality/life/the world is
fractured, relativistic, and meaninglessly flawed, and you even remotely believe
it (maybe because you have to get a good grade in a course or complete a
certain advanced degree program), it seems impossible to coherently make sense
of things like a Group 1 person. As a wise colleague of mine once said, “School
[the heart/brain of Group 2 culture] teaches you many ways to take things
apart, but it never teaches you how to put them back together again.”
I want a
way to put things back together again. I think most Group 2 people who are
happy being Group 2 people take a certain kind of joy in
intellectual/political/social cacophony; they look at a box of scattered puzzle
pieces and say, “So what? Maybe they weren’t meant to be put together.” I see
the same puzzle pieces and say, “What’s the bigger picture?” Group 2 culture
says there is no bigger picture, or that each piece is its own bigger picture,
or that only Group 1 people search for a bigger picture because they’re too
stupid/afraid/dependent-on-the-system to accept the individual pieces in all
their random, incomplete glory. These ideas aren’t working for me any more than
my childhood militant-Group-1 upbringing did [i.e, The scattered puzzle pieces
aren’t actually scattered at all. They form a complete picture that you can’t
see because you aren’t looking correctly or you misbehaved or you’ve been over-influenced
by evil members of Group 2]. Group 2 culture took my peace of mind and I want
it back (preferably without having to leave my small niche in Group 2; adapting
to a Group 1/Group 2-hybrid could be even lonelier than living in Group 2).
In the end,
I know that people can never be broken down into two simple groups (That’s too
Group 1 of a thing to do. But does recognizing the flaws of dualism confirm my
status as a member of Group 2?) Human beings always exist on a continuum of
infinite possibilities, and this makes for infinite frustration as well as
infinite potential. Hip-hop artist Mos Def was on point when he called his life
a “beautiful mess.” But what do we do when we want to clean up the mess (even
just a little)? Do we risk disrupting the beauty? And all of this gets me
wondering: is there a Klosterman-numbered group for people who prefer hip-hop
music to country and jazz?
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