The Rules Of The Game left off last year with country singer Eric Church proclaiming “I know where I come from, how ’bout you?” A boast, a taunt, a challenge, but also a problem for Eric himself and for the whole genre, because legacy and continuity themselves are problems for it. How to modernize while remaining “country” is always a question. The Dixie Chicks gave a sense to country that it could have glamour and girl power while still fiddling and banjoing away, but the
But in “Sinners Like Me” Eric Church has enough restless poetry in him to put as one of his answers to his own question (where do I come from?) “a long line of sinners.” He combines the idea that there’s both something fundamentally wrong (that we are sinners and that it is only through God’s grace that we prosper) and something fundamentally right: We live in God’s universe, and there is an overarching right and wrong and an ultimate balance and ultimate justice. So here sin is an individual thing, also a human thing for which we can be forgiven. Human beings screw up, hurt one another, do wrong and go wrong but still live within a broader goodness and a greater love. But then country also has the sense of trying to maintain country music and Christianity as an enclave in a larger sinful culture, and the sin here isn’t individual; it’s the sense of being bought out by the suits, or getting foreclosed and uprooted, and thrown or enticed into a colder, glitzier secular culture. So sin here wouldn’t be to give into one’s individual sinful impulses but to give away one’s essential self by being drawn into a larger, noncountry, world. This is where legacy and continuity become important. Religion and right living are legacies from the past. But so is just plain being who you are, your rowdy, alive, messed-up, struggling self. This is why a genre called “country” continues onward in a largely urbanized, cosmopolitan nation. The name refers to a rural past. You know who you are because you know where you come from.
But legacy and continuity are tricky. There’s an ongoing theme in country songs of repetition from generation to generation, stuff like the Dixies’ “Wide Open Spaces” about a daughter wanting to run free just as her mother had: as the parents let the young woman set off on her own, her mother muses that “It didn’t seem so long ago/When she stood there and let her own folks know/She needed wide open spaces/Room to make her own mistakes.” Or Trisha Yearwood’s “She’s In Love With The Boy” (dad tells daughter that when it comes to brains her boyfriend got the short end of the stick, and mom interjects and tells him that that’s what her dad said about him when they were dating). Rodney Atkins plays intergenerational continuity for laughs in “Cleaning This Gun”: he recalls the time in high school he came to a girl’s house to pick her up while the girl’s dad casually mentions he’s going to be up all night “cleaning this gun.” Rodney doesn’t remember the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, but this is the one speech from high school he’ll never forget. So now Rodney, with a teen daughter of his own, is preparing to tell her young man to have fun, drive safe, while ole Rodney himself will be up all night cleaning the gun.
LeAnn Rimes’ excellent “Family” starts with a little child gone missing, Momma crying, while Daddy runs off with some white trash half his age, leaving the kids to pay for his mistakes. Then a little later the girl narrator recounts, “I ran away and ran around with a man twice my age/Ain’t it funny how things never change.” LeAnn declares the family best of friends and worst of enemies and says they make no apologies, while in her background vocals she goes into celebratory shouts.
And then of course Eric Church’s “Sinners Like Me”: his grandpa catches him drinking beer at age fifteen and laughs uproariously and says “You come from a long line of sinners like me,” Eric then singing about his own hellraising—but there’s an acceptance of all this as belonging to the way of the world, because Eric knows when he dies he’ll queue up to meet Jesus, standing in “a whole line of sinners like me,” implying that faith and God’s love will absolve him of his own sins. But there’s still a total ambivalence about the hellraising itself—sometimes it’s murderous destruction (Eric’s got a song narrated by a condemned killer), sometimes it’s the spirit of life itself. The genre itself can’t make up its mind.
All this is preamble to my wondering what to make of the fact that Reba McEntire’s duet with Kelly Clarkson on Kelly’s “Because Of You” became a country hit last year. Back in 2005, when Kelly’s original played on pop radio, my friend Anthony Easton wrote in an online convo, “The video looked like some lost melodrama, all blonde on black, with heartbreak and a sort of undersung sadness/melancholy... but how it was sung was more country and less girl singer, more Lambert and less Lohan.” I agreed with Anthony, claimed it could easily be country with or even without a few tweaks, it tending towards the country pop divaness anyway, and Anthony added, “the best proof of its country tendencies is its obsessive seeking of solution with respect to domestic melodrama.”
So, you could say we were prescient—except then I actually paid attention to the words and went “Oh!” and changed my mind: “It is out of bounds for country.” My reasoning was this: What country won’t accept here isn’t that the lyrics are unremittingly despairing, since you could say the same about country classics like “He Stopped Loving Her Today” and “The End of the World.” But those feel more like assertion than despair. (I’ve always considered “End of the World” a beautiful, sweet delight.) In general, country’s “life falls apart” story belongs to its standard romance cycle: “My heart is broken, now I’m drunk, now I’m going to screw up again and again,” which is mined for a lot of rue and a lot of comedy. It’s something country is comfortable with. Whereas “the relationship was fundamentally pathological and has left me unfit to live” is not standard for country, even if it’s fine on Oprah and adult contemporary and for the tykes who listen to Radio Disney. (Just heard the song yesterday on Disney, by the way: “I watched you die, I heard you cry every night in your sleep/I was so young, you should have known better than to lean on me/You never thought of anyone else, you just saw your pain/And now I cry in the middle of the night for that same damn thing.”)
Something that the video [http://music.aol.com/video/because-of-you/kelly-clarkson/1413326] makes one hundred percent clear is that the “you” in the lyrics refers to the narrator’s parents (presumably Kelly’s own). And this is where it seemed to me that the song couldn’t cross to country.
The video fudges this, but the song itself portrays a family dynamic that is irremediably f--ked-up, the mother’s legacy to the daughter being fear and nothing else. Whereas, though country is full of ugly occurrences—daddies killing mommies, mommies killing daddies, girlfriends killing boyfriends (not to mention all the infidelities and addictions etc.)—this doesn’t spill over into an idea that there is something fundamentally wrong in God’s world; country always has the sense of there being a legacy of values and decency, no matter the pain and the failures and the wrongs people do to one another. Not to say that “Because Of You” says differently; it simply gives no perspective outside of the despair of the song. Compare to Jason Michael Carroll’s “Alyssa Lies,” a song about the new girl in school who comes in trying to hide her bruises, so she lies to the classroom, and finally, at the end of the song, lies with Jesus, because there’s nothing anyone would do. The situation is wrong, and the community is wrong for failing to intervene, but right and wrong still exist as part of the community, even when the community falls short. Some country songs are more equivocal: the woman who destroys herself and her husband in fire rather than continue to put up with his abuse in “Independence Day” isn’t really given any other choice, any other way out, and the song—narrated by the daughter—says “I ain’t sayin’ it’s right or wrong, but maybe it’s the only way”; then later, in the chorus, “Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong, roll the stone away, let the guilty pay, it’s independence day”; but still, there’s a sense of a greater justice outside the song. Whereas “Because Of You” has no outside: “Because of you I never stray too far from the sidewalk/Because of you I learned to play on the safe side so I don’t get hurt/Because of you I try my hardest just to forget everything/Because of you I don’t know how to let anyone else in/Because of you I’m ashamed of my life because it’s empty/Because of you I am afraid.” End of story.
Except there the song was last year, at number two on the country charts. (So, what do I know?) I can think of a number of reasons. For instance, maybe there is an assumed outside to the song; this story is just another sad relationship and sad family, but that doesn’t contaminate the idea of a fundamentally strong legacy from the past; everything will ultimately be fixed through therapy and prayer. (And the video itself supplies a happy ending that the song refused.) Or maybe, though country is tied to the idea of continuity and a positive legacy from the past, it allows exceptions. (Chuck Eddy, who knows way more about country than I do, says I need to listen to a lot of Hank Jr.) Or maybe the lyrics are just plain too vague.
Or maybe country is changing.
Keep the conversation going at koganbot(at)gmail.com