Imperialist

The late great Harlan Howard once said, "Country music is three chords and the truth."

Obviously Ray Charles agreed with Harlan, the beloved country songwriter.  His cover of Harlan's "Busted" is quite famous.

Simplicity and truth.  These are fairly universal attributes.

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Amanda Petrusich is a staff writer for Pitchfork:  

Pitchfork Media, usually known simply as Pitchfork, is a Chicago-based daily Internet publication devoted to music criticism and commentary, music news, and artist interviews. Its focus is on independent music,[1] especially indie rock. However, the range of musical genres covered extends to electronic, pop, hip hop, dance, folk, jazz, metal, and experimental music (Wikipedia).

I picked up her book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, And The Search For The Next American Music.  In it, Amanda describes an interesting phenomenon: the intellectual's interest in country music.

Scholars and academics still toil in libraries and archives and cornfields, rolling up their trousers and wiggling out of their corduroy blazers, tying cardigans around their waists, trying their best to help these songs endure.  Part of that impulse comes from the preservationist instinct of people who read too many books; part is imperialist; part is love (15).

In some ways, I am a preservationist and I readily acknowledge my own inclinations to idealize the past.  I just bought my very first record player.  I am fascinated by records.  The sound of the needle rubbing against the vinyl, the entire experience is magical to me.  

"Part is imperialist."  Music preservationists scoured the rural South, competing to find the purest, most obscure songs and thus attaching their own names to timeless songs.  They were driven by the thrill of discovery and the opportunity to gain a form of intellectual acknowledgment.  Musical preservationists are like archaeologists: they compete to be the first to make unprecedented discoveries.  Obviously, I am not a song collector, but I do enjoy obscurity.  I like feeling that I have discovered something that others, my peers, are unaware of.  In the most pretentious terms, it is a feeling of musical enlightenment, an awareness that one is privy to a secret world.

Three chords and the truth.  Country music is an oxymoron of sorts.  Hank Sr. is known as the "Hillbilly Shakespeare."  Somehow a nearly illiterate, drunk was able to write profoundly poetic lyrics.  The music itself is eloquent but quaint.  Simple but profound.  This contradicting nature makes the music ripe for intellectual inspection.

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It Still Moves is a travel log.  In her travels, Amanda, a native of New York, was disturbed by the homogenization of America: "Witness nasty symptoms of mass homogenization: identical Wal-Marts, McDonald's, Pizza Huts, Exxons, Waffle Houses, and Burger Kings, colossal plastic signs poking up into the atmosphere, announcing the new regime (20)."  America seems to be amidst an identity crisis, and the American culture seems to be defined by consumerism.  

Musically speaking, contemporary, popular American music is almost entirely disposable. People are no longer interested in albums.  Songs nowadays are ring-tone fodder: repetitive catchiness manufactured for mass consumption.  

Forgettable.  

Digitized.  

Soulless.  

I've struggled to find meaningful American music.  

Something heartfelt, something legitimate.   

I found it.

Raw.  Aching.  Unpolished.  Uncontrived.  

It's a companion for the lonely.  A remedy for heartache.  

It awakens my American unconsciousness, my sense that I belong to my homeland.

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Whether I am a preservationist, an imperialist, or a true fan, I still remain an outsider.