Recently we've been trying to rhyme "Joe Gross" and "snowglobe," just for the angular decentered feeling; he is, after all, our favorite Fugazi fan, and though we do not care for Fugazi, they are angular and decentered and that's something, plus we love Joe.
We don't find Fugazi terribly moving in the very arena they court movement. At their finest, they achieve the political weight of the fourth best track on any given album by The Coup. Better than nothing, and perhaps as good as one could hope from political musings composed from the position where critique can be freely chosen: the children of Marx and Bretton Woods.
What's most hypnotic about country'n'western, in addition to the melodies and presence of maybe a dozen of the 20 best vocalists in pop music, is its Steadicam point of view. Song after song is told from inside the forces Fugazi rails against from a distance. Even the slightest trifle — say, Toby Keith's latest, "Let's Get Drunk and Be Somebody" — measures out what it means to have a dominated daily life, without that having to be a special topic; it's simply the immanent condition behind every drinking song, and every other song. It's the air. The concision with which "all week long I'm a real nobody" rounds the turn of "Paycheck Friday" and becomes "let's get drunk and be somebody" is as straightforward as one could hope. It doesn't need to be about it, because there's no way not to be about it: the daily life which is at once an experience of and a compensation for the endless extraction of value from bodies.
This is what country shares with mainstream hiphop, which equally succeeds in indifferently alienating liberals for failing to have righteous politics; it's told, unceasingly, from inside what someone called "the tradition of the oppressed." The condition permeates their forms, and their narratives. If a central fact of the condition is that it requires each week to be like last week, the extraction of value perpetuating itself without change, one might suspect that the genre would — indeed, couldn't help but — reflect this quality. And yet people are baffled that the songs provide only the most local variations within an unchanging format, as if that were a shortcoming rather than a description, as if the songs would be more honest art if they expressed the exception rather than the rule.
Posted by jane at February 19, 2006 08:42 AM | TrackBack