Blog of Nambot

Hipsters take heed! Peek out from beneath your greasy side-part for a few seconds to observe the mini-movement before you that’s fraught with drinking and kicking things. Still not big enough to be called a scene, country music is coming from bars, little venues, and country fucks who found their way out of the proverbial sticks. (As a side note, this ramble is courtesy of Animal Collective, the not-country band who have an album named Country Fuck, and the The Felice Brothers, both of whom appeared at the All Points West music festival yesterday)

Remember, perhaps, where you came from, and I don’t mean Oberlin or Purchase. Think back a little farther, if you can bear it, to the time before college when you were trapped in your parent’s house in ruralville. Remember how you worked day and night at the only movie theater or record store in town so that you could afford the gas that kept you mobile and away from the clutches of your nuclear family? You fled to the library, the outdoors, some backwoods rave, and into the arms of some atheist, some queer, and the most blue-blooded classmates you could find. On the weekends, you and your friends drove two hours to get to a red state punk rock dungeon in Omaha, Asheville, Kansas City, Gainesville, Columbus, Denver, Austin, Missoula, or even Portland(s), Sacramento, or (god forbid) Salt Lake City. Is it any wonder that you’re playing in a noise band and hiding behind your hair in Brooklyn? Yet you somehow eventually discovered singers your rural yuppie parents might have avoided like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. Too often associated with the Right, so much country music was made for folks who never trusted the establishment and didn't like getting dressed up (leather notwithstanding).

I’d like to suggest that this inclination to shit-kick isn’t incidental, and that country fucks should mobilize, recognize their escape from conservatism and talk about their complicated roots. Juggling the politics of radio play and popular music, the country stars that make music that’s still danceable are heroic to me. In his own way Johnny Cash somehow managed to criticize the prison industrial complex before Angela Davis. Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton spent (and continue to spend) much of their careers speaking directly to women in their kitchens about the male dominance that put them there, giving them a few tools to get out.

I’d also like to encourage everybody who relates to a rural-escapee mentality but feels suburban to look over your family history. How many church-going relatives do you have? Did your parents fail to mention that your great-grandparents were from Louisiana? Are they still in contact with those second cousins in Georgia, or have they “lost touch” since mom n’ dad planted themselves firmly in the middle class? You can get the fuck out of the country, but you can’t get the country…