Today I was thinking about my first car, which had a few eccentricities. Someone had broken the antenna off under circumstances never disclosed to me, with the result that it picked up only one radio station. When I drove to work in the morning, I was always interested to know what the traffic was doing, and so I started to listen to this radio station, although I found the music to be execrable . . . it was a contemporary country-western station, and I had never heard such awful music in my life. I'd always had a healthy respect for bluegrass, Patsy Cline, and Willie Nelson, but I was amazed that anything could be so terrible as the stuff I was hearing between the news and the traffic.
As time passed, however, I found that I was becoming a little bit addicted to the station; it was so bad that I couldn't seem to stop listening to it. I couldn't admit this to anyone. I'd been a musicology major before I dropped out of college . . . to have come down so far in the world was a shame beyond my capacity to bear. What had happened to my grand aspirations? I had dreamt of someday writing critiques of Bernard Haitink's Mahler at the Concertgebouw, and instead I was barely hanging on at a job I hated, where I was a dubious asset when I wasn't a positive detriment, and listening to Tim McGraw on a barely-functional radio.
Try though I might to excise this genre of music from my life, the country station remains a guilty pleasure. Sometimes I think that the singers actually know how ridiculously bad the music is, and all the listeners must surely be in on the joke, and other times I think I'm the only one laughing. But either way, nearly every morning when I go for my rain-or-shine walk, I listen to the morning program on 99.5 FM, and often I think that these particular morning show hosts also think that the music is terrible. Regardless of what they think, on several occasions they have read e-mails of mine over the air, and I think this is as close as I will ever come to my fond dream of being a critic.
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Comments: 30
I am sufficiently inspired and moved by this typically sparkling creation, that I shall forthwith dust off my eight track tape of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy ( "The Ledge" to his friends ) and do the - uh - poop chute boogie?
Maybe I mis-remembered the song title. Anyway..... good article, and yes, constant exposure to even detestable media presentations really can transform a person.
Just the other day I was in an elevator and found myself doing the Pepto-Bismol "Heartburn / nausea / indigestion / upset stomach / diarrhea" dance, complete with hand gestures. Oddly, no one noticed; they all kept their eyes glued to the floor-indicator. And they seemed to be perspiring.
Speaking of an ex-DJ of a country station...this is pretty much a correct assumption of most of the on air personalities! LOL Usually, we were all Classic Rock fans!
Anyway....there IS good 'country' music out there, especially in the bluegrass realm....Allison Krause...Nickel Creek....etc.
You've been sucked into the "what feels good" realm, David....just go along for the ride and enjoy it....leave the guilt behind! Most of us old Classic Rockers found ourselves enjoying the tunes.....
And julian...it's the Boot Scoot Boogie, not the poop chute boogie. But I'll bet you knew that.
what you do so well David is simply write beautifully. regardless of the topic. even though i adore patsy cline i dont suspect for a minute that your views on country music are seminal, mainly because you still call it 'country and western' when the rest of the universe stopped doing that twenty years ago.. ;)
what's important is that you take a tiny slice of life and make us care so very very much. which is precisely what a professional critic should do. treat yourself to some of Clive James work in the Observer on telly crit during the seventies. maybe you'll work out why i adore you so.
Carolyn -- What a very sweet comment. Thank you for the compliment. I am so flattered and delighted that I would send you some sexy dangly earrings if Dannielle hadn't beaten me to it.
And those dangly earrings were from La Lady Lisa. She has you on a list now, David.
However, the point of this comment was that you reminded me of a VW Beetle I drove for a few years --> Whenever I hit the brakes, I'd get static on the radio. (The spare tire would go flat if the windshield wiper system was hooked up, too, and once I had to stop the car and walk back along the highway to retrieve the antenna, which had blown off.)
But never mind.