10.13.2013

Have so many issues...

...with alt-coutntry as an idea, genre, scene, etc., and occasionally get really pissed about it. Especially not being in DC or NYC any more. I could write a lot, a LOT, but it all comes down to something simple: there seems to be a huge segment of the American "left" that has a problem with cities, that still locates authenticity in some halcyon era before, I dunno. It never existed (at least without lynching [too much?]).

Sometimes in Brooklyn, looking around bars filled with wood and taxidermy stocked with all sorts of "handmade" ryes, it felt to me like the goal was to literally create a retroactive history in which ethnic white working-class people never left the city and blacks and immigrants never moved in. This scares me. A lot.

This feeling really inverts my sense of "guilty pleasure" in music. I love horrifically maudlin, "plastic" freestyle records unabashedly. I keep the small handful of alt-country songs I love to myself. Here's one, one of the best ever written. Songs I mean, of all time, for me, at least. Not for any cannon that exists outside of my late night solitary listening.


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