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Cubic Pecs and Cowboy Hats: A Country Roundup
You can pretty much forget country music unless you're old enough
or repressed enough to care deeply about monogamy--one-on-one love
in all its passion, comfort, consternation, impossibility, and
routine. That's why I doubt the Nashville hunks have siphoned much
support from Nirvana, Madonna, or Public Enemy; I think Garth
Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, and the rest generate their numbers among
natural country fans and converts who've had enough Richard Marx
and Bryan Adams. As a city boy with a taste for the stuff, however,
I worry anyway. If necessary, I can live with the square chins,
cubic pecs, and cowboy hats, and I have no use for the purist claim
that there's no true country between honky-tonk get-down and
bluegrass high-and-lonesome. But I know that it's rarely beautiful
people who sound the best. So I surveyed the current crop of male
country albums with uncommon trepidation.
The basic formula hasn't changed. Almost every country album
contains 10 songs and lasts 30 or 35 minutes, though some new
guys--like Travis Tritt, who's now into guitar solos--stretch the
length a little. Even artists who write their own also buy sure
shots from full-time songsmiths, and even those who field crack
bands rely on a cohort of studio musicians for their recorded
settings. Because the key unit is the song, album filler is
assumed, and because the form is so narrow, even the rare
collection as consistent as Randy Travis's 1988 Old 8 X 10 or Clint
Black's 1989 Killin' Time or Garth Brooks's 1991 Ropin' the Wind
may strike outsiders as samey or thin. So in this genre, best-ofs
make sense.
Ricky Van Shelton's Greatest Hits Plus (Columbia), for
instance, offers a big 14 selections from a journeyman who rode in
on the neotraditionalist wave of the late '80s. Shelton's fluid
baritone isn't long on character, but as a proven hitmaker he ropes
in more than his share of can't-miss stuff. Ballads as well-turned
as "Life Turned Her That Way" (betrayer), "Somebody Lied"
(betrayed), and "Just As I Am" (redeemed) embody an old Nashhville
adage: it's the song, not the singer.
Just kidding. Country fans treasure familiar voices as much as
they do fetching tunes and pithy Americanese, and not trained or
pyrotechnic voices, either. They prefer a talky attack that
signifies unpretentiousness, just like the drawl that goes with
it--an approach epitomized since 1985 by the easy, subtle,
deceptively rich baritone of Randy Travis. Sold separately and
programmed with no historical logic, his two new Greatest Hits
(Warner Bros.) packages are a rip--all 22 tracks would fit on one
CD. But he's so committed to simplicity that the songs hang
together like the work of seven weeks instead of seven years. The
first volume is more classic, but its companion includes my
favorite of his many off-the-rack one-liners: "Since my phone still
ain't ringing I assume it still ain't you."
Worried about the hunk invasion, Travis has been doing time in
the weight room, but his muscles haven't gone to his head: his
previously unreleased new songs here are as hooky as his hits, and
treat marriage as an experience to be engaged rather than a subject
to be exploited. Clint Black has been rather less vigilant. Spoiled
by fame or Hollywood or his own manly profile (he looks so craggy
up against his Knots Landing wifey on the cover of People), he's
devolved from the terse, guilt-stricken reflections of Killin' Time to
the soggy homilies of The Hard Way (RCA). Imagine how trite and
condescending a song called "A Woman Has Her Way" could be, and
you'll have an idea what Clint considers sentiments suitable to a
matinee idol.
This is what I feared from country's pop breakthrough--schmaltz, oomph,
and other musical steroids. If Black's relatively
mild case is exacerbated by his mild voice, Billy Ray Cyrus's
capacity for overstatement only reminds us that the bigger the
instrument, the grosser you can get with it. And though I'm glad
the guitaristics on T-R-O-U-B-L-E (Warner Bros.) distract
hunk-rocker Travis's Tritt from the sexist jive of his countryified
It's All About to Change, Hank Williams Jr.-style Allman Brothers
imitations are not my idea of great Nashville. So I'm afraid my
favorite crossover king is also the world's, or at least the
suburbs'.
Like anybody who sells 27 million albums, Garth Brooks is
accused of a lot of things, most of them bland. He isn't even a
hunk; as early critic Ken Tucker put it, "he has a face like a
thumb with a hat on it." But not all suburbanites are as stupid as
Michael Bolton believes. Brooks knows a good song whether it's his
or someone else's, and he always adds the right quantum of
expressiveness to his sweet, strong, unspectacularly adaptable
voice. The Chase (Liberty) is burdened by the responsibilities
Brooks believes come with success: the lead single is the first
song in Nashville history to inveigh, however discreetly, against
not just racism but homophobia. There's nothing as wicked as
Ropin' the Wind's "Papa Loved Mama," which doesn't bat an eye when mama
fucks around or when papa runs her over with his truck. But
"Somewhere Other Than the Night," about sex on the farm, and
"Learning to Live Again," about a divorcé's blind date, typify his
smarts, and only the rodeo song rankles. Having mastered the kind
of nice-guy aura that has escaped pop superstars since the days of
Cole and Como, Brooks could yet get away with being a liberal.
And give Garth this: his megabucks translate into venture
capital for eccentrics who might otherwise be counted too risky for
Music City. Stacy Dean Campbell's Lonesome Wins Again (Columbia) is
so classic it resists not just schmaltz but steel guitars, so bare-bones
it doesn't countenance puns--this is country music as
unalloyed sentiment, the sheer tuneful essence of the thing,
ringing high and lonesome in your head whether you remember the
words or not. Dennis Robbins's Man With a Plan (Giant) is
country-rock honky tonk by a songwriter with an eye. Unlike Tritt, Robbins
doesn't regard women as torturers or receptacles, and when he tells
a joke, which is often, the only one who winces is Dennis.
Two debuts of this quality in a year may not be a Nashville
record, though it is since I've been counting. But it's reason to
put one's trepidations aside.
Details, 1992
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