All right, Garth Brooks, that’s it. Thanks to you, I’ve now, finally, completely lost patience with contemporary country music. I’m not happy about this, but you’ve pushed me over the edge.
If you want to have credibility as an open-minded writer about music, it’s not like you want to dismiss an entire genre of music, by some measures the most popular in America. It would be better to take the New Yorker route and find merit in Keith Urban’s grit, sing the praises of Kenny Chesney’s inventive songwriting, and compose odes to the gifts of Swift. That attitude says, “I may live in a blue state, but I don’t hate America.”
I don’t hate America. I just can’t take any more of the obnoxiously reactionary version of America represented by Garth Brooks and his ilk.
In my post on Shania Twain, I told the tale of my former relationship with a country music lover and my failed attempt to appreciate pop country music. If most pop country music was like Come On Over, I’d at least get it: that album isn’t exactly profound, but it’s full of great melodies and lyrics that are unpretentious in a good way—or at least not in a bad way.
But here we have Garth Brooks, a man who’s sold more albums in the SoundScan era (1991-present) than any other artist. This is the first time I’ve ever sat down to listen to one of his albums front to back, and wow, this man is country. He lays that accent on thick—he was born in Tulsa—and unlike the peppy Twain, he’s not afraid to leave a lot of tears in his beer. No Fences (1990) was the album that contained his singalong hit “Friends in Low Places,” but much of the album is occupied with dirge-like balladry. If given this album and Nevermind in the early 90s, it might be hard to believe that Kurt Cobain would be the one to shoot himself.
Opener “The Thunder Rolls” at least stabs in the direction of a possibly substantial character-driven drama, but Allen Reynolds’s production is lugubrious; tellingly, it was at Reynolds’s suggestion that Brooks omitted his original final verse hinting at fatal violence. The album then plows right into the ground with the plodding (and ironically titled) “New Way to Fly,” and never picks itself back up.
“Two of a Kind” is the sort of number that Twain might have made sexy, but Brooks renders like a guy leering at you over a beef jerky display. “Unanswered Prayers” ventures into the kind of theology that would make Marx run for his Maalox, and “Wild Horses” takes the California pop-country sound that Linda Ronstadt once made soar and ropes it to a flatulent Clydesdale.
At the album’s summit (such as it is) is “Friends in Low Places,” a song that essentially defined the agenda of pop country music for the next two-plus decades. Complete with lyric (not lyrical) dis of the “ivory tower,” the song sets Brooks in contrast to a caricatured fancy boy who’s stolen his lady. Unapologetic and rambunctious, Brooks retreats into the arms of his beer-swilling “friends in low places.”
“Friends” encapsulates everything that’s wrong with contemporary country music, and everything that’s wrong with the red-state culture that cradles it. The hardest thing about listening to country music today is that the music doesn’t want to change, doesn’t want to be different. Top 40 music has its patterns and its copycats, but one of the great things about Top 40 radio is its never-ending weirdness—you never know when you’re going to get an “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” or a “Macarthur Park” or, more significantly, a song like “When Doves Cry” that breaks a rule (no bass guitar?!) in a way that opens new possibilities.
Country music obstinately clings to that accent and those steel guitars and those motherfucking fiddles, because that’s what “America” supposedly sounds like and if you want something different, you’re just one of those power-hungry friends-in-high-places who doesn’t care about your wife or your kids or your country.
Fortunately, America in actuality is a lot more than this, even if Brooks’s fans don’t like it. When Brooks tried to change his identity and sound in 1999—the infamous “Chris Gaines” experiment with pop rock—his fans recoiled, and drove him right back into his cowboy hat. I’ve never heard the Chris Gaines album and I have little confidence that it’s any good, but it seems telling that neither Brooks nor his fans were able to abide any artistic experimentation that took them too far out of their comfort zone.
Well, that’s fine for y’all. You can stay in your low places. As the braver, more adventurous country artist Loretta Lynn said on record to collaborator Jack White, “let’s leave these boys to drown in their drink.”
The 1990s Project is my attempt to give the decade’s music a fair shot at disproving my offhand assessment that the 90s were the armpit of modern musical history. My goal is to visit, or revisit, 100 of the decade’s most acclaimed, popular, and/or interesting albums. Here’s the road map.
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