Music Not For Me

This Tweet by my friend* Andy:

Reminded me of something I recently wrote about myself:

Craft is craft, whether in the shaping of a song or the fitting of bathroom tile. The older I get the more deeply I believe “getting” things is far less important than experiencing them with a spirit of appreciation. In fact, the fear of not “getting” things may be a leading impediment of happiness and certainly leads to chronic stiffening of the spine.

In my 30s I went through an extended stage in which I felt compelled to warn folks away from the vacuity of then-contemporary country music. In particular I was agitating for “alternative country,” which in my opinion served my modern and artistic sensibilities while properly doffing its non-cowboy hat to classic country stalwarts, or, as I call them, “the one-namers”: Waylon and Willie. Buck and Merle. George and Tammy. Loretta. Of course this was nothing more than my oft-remarked creeping codgerism kicking in early, although—I cannot lie—I take guilty delight in having written the following line: “Johnny Paycheck is to Kenny Chesney as corn whiskey is to wine coolers.”

As you can see over a decade and innumerable beach-bro hits later, Mr. Chesney’s career did not waver in the face of my wit. Should we ever meet I will apologize personally. Then we’ll rap out a nice set of ab crunches. If he wishes, I’ll hold his ankles.

The original essay after the break (also, an essay about Andy).

*Andy and I don’t hang out or anything. We’re self-employed free-range friends, the kind that meet intermittently on the fly maybe once or twice a year. Musicians, roadies and writers have a lot of friends like this.

WORKING WITH MUSICIANS

Some time ago a neighbor who does a little songwriting asked if I might help out with a project. I said yes, thanks, and did. Mostly my job was to listen and type. This led to my spending a lot of time in the company of musicians, observing them in the manner of an untrained anthropologist. Many of them were very hip and cutting edge and subversively stylish and whatnot, and a few of them have names that elicit oohs and aahs all around the world and some have won Grammys and some might win them soon and others of them you will have heard in television advertisements for Volkswagens. They were by and large an equanimous bunch, if a little drifty, impulsive, and easily distracted by the latest distortion pedal or free food. A lot of their music I don’t get, which did nothing to impede my enjoyment in watching them at their work. Craft is craft, whether in the shaping of a song or the fitting of bathroom tile. The older I get the more deeply I believe “getting” things is far less important than experiencing them with a spirit of appreciation. In fact, the fear of not “getting” things may be a leading impediment of happiness and certainly leads to chronic stiffening of the spine.

In my 30s I went through an extended stage in which I felt compelled to warn folks away from the vacuity of then-contemporary country music. In particular I was agitating for “alternative country,” which in my opinion served my modern and artistic sensibilities while properly doffing its non-cowboy hat to classic country stalwarts, or, as I call them, “the one-namers”: Waylon and Willie. Buck and Merle. George and Tammy. Loretta. Of course this was nothing more than my oft-remarked creeping codgerism kicking in early, although—I cannot lie—I take guilty delight in having written the following line: “Johnny Paycheck is to Kenny Chesney as corn whiskey is to wine coolers.”

As you can see over a decade and innumerable beach-bro hits later, Mr. Chesney’s career did not waver in the face of my wit. Should we ever meet I will apologize personally. Then we’ll rap out a nice set of ab crunches. If he wishes, I’ll hold his ankles.

In time one learns to reserve the high horse for only very special occasions involving apple-picking, and even then it’s likely best left in the stable. As father to a teenaged daughter I am now familiar with a wide range of music targeted for ears less droopy than mine, and I can’t always say I like what I hear, but beyond discussion of pertinent lyrical content, I keep the preaching to a minimum. Taste has a way of sorting itself out over time. “Dad!” said the teenager excitedly, “Have you ever heard of Garth Brooks? His music is so much better than that stuff on the radio today! He does real country!”

That is not exactly how I wrote it up in 1996. But I’ll let her discover that on her own. She is conversant in Lightnin’ Hopkins, so one takes solace. Somewhere in the past I also wrote that it is silly to say bad things about pop music. Among the many things that shape our taste is time itself. And whatever proud stance I took back in the day, I also accidentally learned all the words to those Garth Brooks songs, which means my daughter and I can sing together in the pickup truck today.

Also: the local “classic country” station is now playing early Kenny Chesney. Which is to say, in the course of history, Kenny and entropy win.

See you at the beach.

THE LEAST RAP-LIKE CAT IN THE HOUSE

Two summers ago I stopped to visit a neighbor just a couple of cornfields down the road and there encountered an itinerant rapper, which is the sort of thing that can happen in an age when the catch and release of music is no longer the exclusive purview of cities and coasts and may be committed, yea, even within view of Holsteins.

His name was Andy, although he goes professionally by the name of Astronautalis. He concocted this stage moniker as a callow youth, thinking it sounded spacy, scientific, metaphorically complex, and two or three other things that seemed to be real mindblowers at the time. Now he shakes his head and says it is a silly name, but in fact he wears it well. (Referring to his cockeyed Shel Silverstein hit, “A Boy Named Sue,” Johnny Cash once said you should never record a song unless you’re willing to sing it every night for the rest of your life—his tone of voice indicating he learned this after the fact.)

I will never get a gig as a paid consultant on the history or present state of rap and its variant subsets (although I welcome any street cred due me for listening to a friend’s Kurtis Blow cassette while tearing down and scrubbing milking machines in rural Chippewa County in 1980) but I liked Andy’s work immediately upon hearing his album Pomegranate, which struck me less as a rap album than brash literature. Filled with painterly images, hybrid rhymes, and salted with historical references, it took me to unexpected places (Consider the opening line of “An Episode of Sparrows”: “just as the last of the hay’s cut today…”, which caught my ear for the obvious farmboy reasons.) Also, it was good typing music. I’m not sure that’s what a rapper wants to hear, but there y’go. On many a molasses-brain morning, the martial insistence of “Two Years Before the Mast” has been just the thing to put a kick in the keyboard.

Astronautalis plays all over the world, an endless one-man tour of couches and redeyes, rapping to hundreds (and occasionally thousands) one night, then a disinterested bartender the next. It’s not easy, but Andy’s making it. Got his first apartment this year, paying the rent with his craft by hustling his craft. Face to the forge, as he puts it in the spoken lines of “Avalanche Patrol.”

It is my policy not to overreach in my appreciation, so I did not join the young and fierce people in the front row of last night’s show, but settled rather for earplugs and a chair at a table in the back, a wise choice in that even from that distance the speakers stomped my sternum like an anabolic CPR instructor with anger issues.

But the words. The words were good. The ones I recognized, sure, but Astronautalis also does a freestyle segment in which he solicits random words from the crowd and uses them to create a free-flowing rap on the fly. There is an ephemeral electric punch to a performance like this that can only be felt in the instant. I sat quietly in the back and left the fist-pumping to others, but I was smiling. Smiling at the ways a chance encounter can lead to a moment like this, when the least rap-like cat in the house feels the energy of the MC and his work and is reminded yet again how sleepy we can become rolling along in a rut up to our hubs, how good it is to put ourselves in the path of new energies, if only to knock ourselves sideways, which, by definition provides a fresh perspective.