When in Rome

While driving through the southwest, I turned on the radio and attempted to acquire an appreciation for country music. Within ten minutes, two songs had obligingly provided summaries of the subject matter I would be encountering. Country, I gathered, celebrates all things really American, which include:

• High school proms
• Springsteen songs
• Rides in Chevrolets
• A man on the moon
• Fireflies in June
• Kids selling lemonade
• Cities and farms
• Open arms
• One nation under God
• A kid with a chance
• A rock-and-roll band
• A farmer cutting hay
• A big flag flyin’ in the summer wind over a hero’s grave
• The front pew of a wooden white church
• Courthouse clocks that still don’t work
• Slant rhymes


The music to which I am accustomed, loosely categorized as alt-rock, tends to pace around its subjects, striving to reveal the truth about some idea or experience by complicating it almost beyond recognition. From what I heard in Arizona through Kansas, however, country music don’t complicate nothing. It’s nailed together with concrete images and simple metaphors, and its material is narratives.

Love stories dominate. During one stretch of driving, I heard the tales of five men who married their high school sweethearts, one whose daddy married his high school sweetheart, one who married his third-grade sweetheart, one married a woman with whom he slow-danced in a bar, and one who was proud to be a “stand by your woman man.” These twang-voiced fellows get down on one knee to propose. They fantasize about their wives having a baby on the way, their wives growing gray-haired. They are often the same men, or at least too similar to them for me to distinguish, who sing paeans to soldiers and righteous war, but their wars are all overseas against an unseen enemy (who, though the subject is never breached, almost certainly did not take state back in ’63 or woo a homecoming queen). The homeland is a bastion of peace, where men of integrity safely inherit and perform a cycle of domestic rites.

Fidelity is exalted, and marriage is as much a forgone conclusion in these songs as in a Shakespearean comedy, though the version of the songs is much sweeter and considerably less troubled, less sexy.

I heard also, however, specimens of a randier strain of country music. This subgenre presents a worldview kindred to one prevalent in contemporary hip hop. The piece “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” for instance, addresses many of the same themes explored by Juvenile’s “Back that Ass Up.” Along with nation, family, small town values, and true love, therefore, the country man can be said also to love the sight of a woman with a rear-end so round, he can’t imagine how she even got them britches on.