Music
On “My Kind of Music,” the title cut from Ray Scott’s Warner Bros. debut, the narrator believes he’s met the perfect woman until she turns off the country station on his car radio. He then discovers that the names Waylon and Willie mean nothing to her, and she’s only heard of Alan Jackson because of his lament for 9/11.
Set to a thumping beat that streamlines the classic Jennings sound, the song piles up the woman’s perceived blunders. She believes country songs are too hokey and sad, she doesn’t care for a steel guitar, and she can’t name one song by Johnny Cash. As he learns all of this, the narrator keeps to himself cutting comments like “there ain’t no excuse for taste that bad.” He waits until the end of the night, when, as she’s expecting a goodnight kiss, he instead tells her to “kiss my ass” and gets back in his truck.
All of this because she doesn’t like country music—or, worse yet, what’s on country radio.
Listening to My Kind of Music, which features some solid country-rock that runs traditional steel and fiddle through a swampy Muscle Shoals filter, it’s apparent Scott considers himself the Y chromosome equivalent of Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” Yet whereas Wilson distinguishes herself by pointing out how she’s grown into an adult who holds onto the strength and acceptance she gained from growing up blue collar in a red state, Scott steps over the thin line between pride and hostility. By pigeonholing someone different from him as wrong and deserving of scorn, he treats his date exactly how country folks say they don’t want others to treat to them. That is, he stereotypes her and dismisses her as not worthy of his time or interest.
“My Kind of Music” typifies a disturbing trend running through Music Row: songs that trade on hillbilly stereotypes and poses. To paraphrase Scott’s beloved Waylon Jennings, could it be that this redneck bit’s done got out of hand?
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Mistaking Wilson’s stirring self-differentiation for fighting words, the recent spate of rowdy country ruralists trade on cheap buzzwords and platitudes that toast the redneck lifestyle while suggesting that anyone who doesn’t should be mocked and despised. Country music is doing itself no favors by adopting this chip-on-the-shoulder stance toward the rest of the world. Still, a lot of performers have been jumping on the bandwagon lately.
Chris Cagle opens his new Anywhere But Here with “You Might Want to Think About It,” a song that attacks some unnamed force that wants to tell him how to raise his kids, what to do with his farm and where or where not to put his Ten Commandments. “Maybe you should start thinking about the fight you’ll be picking / And the butt-kicking you’ll get from me,” he sings with puffed-up bravado. With its laundry list of generalities that must be defended and its aimless threats toward an unnamed enemy who wants to strip him of all that is right in his world, the song rings like an anthem for crazy backwoods survivalists.
Billy Currington, who otherwise has shown promise, opens his album Doing Something Right with a goofy novelty called “I Wanna Be a Hillbilly.” The song’s title rhymes with the phrase “subdivisions are silly.” Later, Currington sings that others can have the city; he’d rather stay back home and raise cane and chug corn whiskey. If a New Yorker penned the same lines, they’d be considered shallow typecasting. They’re no less so coming from an otherwise decent country singer like Currington.
The same can be said of “Hillbillies,” the lead single from the debut album by the new Music Row band Hot Apple Pie. Fortunately, the song stiffed, and no wonder, considering how many bad rural clichés get crammed into the chorus: “Up in the loft down yonder way / Hillbillies loving in the hay!”
These aren’t the only bad redneck songs around these days, but they’re blatant examples, and each opens its respective album—except for Scott’s, and his is the title song and first single.
When not putting down his date, Scott’s “My Kind of Music” sends a shout-out to country greats like Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. Those guys became heroes by proving that country music couldn’t be contained by stereotypes. All of these young artists trading on hillbilly caricatures should remember that their heroes broke boundaries instead of reinforcing them.