© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 71
Everyone should at some or other stage confess to some strange, slightly embarrassing secret. It could be breaking out in a sweat at the sight of certain sports cars ( a common condition in many males, I’m sure), an urge to kill at the mention of the word ‘sheep’ or an inexplicable fondness for those frilly doilies that get fobbed off on you by tasteless relatives who haven’t grasped the fact that the absence of ornamentation in your house is not poverty, but ‘minimalism’.
The confession, harmless in nature, always earns some amusement and a customary beer. For my part, I am going to confess to and attempt to explain a strange liking for alt.country music. Stop sniggering, you there in the back!
I read somewhere that the music we listen to in adolescence is the music that we will always return to. My adolescence was in the early Eighties. The music of choice at the school I attended, hence my music of choice by the process of osmosis, was anything that attacked the staid values of society, particularly punk, ska and goth. It was the counter-cultural loophole amongst all the hundreds of behavioural clauses that began with ‘thou shalt not’.
According to this idea. I should be one of those executive types with at least an earring, a couple of concealed piercings and maybe also a somewhat disturbing tattoo. Taken together, these would be the hallmarks of my ongoing rebellion against society, the tyranny of homework, or possibly unpaid managerial overtime, and having to be home by midnight.
But revolution is merely a turn of the wheel and revolutionaries inevitably end up where they started. What was rebellion in our youth becomes respectable mainstream culture.
The Beatles once shocked the world by turning to psychedelia, yet today presidents and prime ministers who did drugs in their youth are no longer scandalous, merely par for the course. Acid guru Leary advised Reagan on economics to no spectacularly ill effect. And as for the punks, barring verses containing four letter words, their protests and angst can be heard adding impact to advertisements flighted in the early evenings.
Many of the musicians that I listened to are still around. The Buzzcocks could teach the Stones a lesson about being disreputable as they enter late middle age. Proto-goths, Joy Division became New Order after the suicide of singer Ian Curtiss in the early Eighties, and released an album this year, though how they will carry off a live dance music show as their aging joints cramp up, beats me. Kraftwerk just completed a world tour using laptops as far as I can see.
Some however moved on. Joe Strummer of iconic punk band, The Clash, was my turning point. Still underpinned by gritty guitars and vocals, he went on to form the Mescaleros. The songs that attracted attention contain the Clash’s aggressive style, but have the sound and feel of country. As a disconcerting point of interest he died recently, not with his hands on the ‘trigger of a gun, as one of the Clash’s earlier songs suggested might be the case, but of a heart attack, in his kitchen.
The migration of rebels and visionaries into more introspective country inevitably leads to what is known as alt.country. Amongst all the genres this is the point where the so-called ‘singer songwriter’ can exercise his or her skills, generally without the whiny ‘achy breaky heart’ mediocrity and the piece of straw between the teeth, normally associated with mainstream country. In fact, much of it just sounds like various types of bizarre rock with some folk trappings, that got shoved into the alt.country pigeon hole for want of a more convenient, mainstream definition.
So there’s my confession and why I like alt.country. Make what you will of it. Now can I have that beer please?
What of the counter-cultural cool associated with punk and goth? As I reason it there is nothing more counter-cultural than something with the label ‘country’. If you get the chance, give it a go. It really is cool in the strangest way.
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