WHY COUNTRY-MUSIC IS BETTER THAN PUNK pt.2  

Country music is trauma music, with more booze, drugs, and murder than all other pop formats combined. More rubbed-raw emotions. More take-this-job-and-shove-it worker rage, too. For all its alleged reactionary spirit, country-and-western-lyrics adress the indignities of working life far more than any other pop-format. The folk singing hippies who demonized working white stiffs never copped to the fact that they stole their whole shtick from Woody Guthrie and the coal-mining bards. While the Alternative Nation meows about personal fashion angst, the Appalachian Nation still sings about unemplyment.

As the honky-tonk-beat plods along like an old leather shoe, I think of Johnny Cash gulping down a bottleful of pills a day and tearing down hotel walls. The lonely heart-attack OD of Hank Williams in the back seat of that taxi. Hank Jr.’s face-mutilating car accident and how he always wears sunglasses. TV news footage of Jerry Lee Lewis being wheeled into a Memphis hospital on a stretcher, shaking like a palsy vitim from an alleged allergy to “medication”; memories of The Killer marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin and demolishing out-of-tune pianos into heaps of splinters and wires. Ernest Tubb firing a .357 Magnum in a Nashville Life-insurance Building’s lobby. Faron Young shooting out the lights of a Nashville bar (and only recently shooting out his own brains). Spade Cooley stomping his wife to death. George Jones driving a golf cart to the liquor store. Tammy Wynette stumbling down a rural road dazed and covered in bruises. Entertainers, all of them. People who brought happiness to others. Miserable.

(Jim Goad, from the chapter “Playin’ hard” from “The Redneck Manifesto”)