Saturday, August 20, 2005

Man, I Feel Like a Woman

I think, before we go on, it's important to remember how this conversation started, as a rage about what being an imposter means, and then where it went, into a meditation on whether one can ever escape her past, even if the people of her past no longer recognize her. In other words, it was not about Aaron Fox personally, but about the ways in which I felt threatened by the implications of what he was saying. Having now read his article, I can't say that's changed. It's funny. I actually started thinking about all this again after Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon went off on Nashville. She says, in part:
A lot of this came up for me recently, and I would have buried it except tonight my boyfriend went on a standard rant about how Nashville ruined country music. It's true--a bunch of assholes decided country would sell better if you eliminated the fiddle and the steel guitar and the banjo and replaced it with pop music and called it country because an occasional twang could be extracted from the singer. (An aside: I lived in Virginia for a couple months and sang a lot of karaoke. Occasionally people would try country and fail miserably. I cannot sing to save my life, but I would sing Patsy Cline and the Dixie Chicks and because I have the requisite twang, people would be so impressed. It was funny.)
The reason I quote this part is that it inadvertently reveals something very crucial to our discussion, I think, which is that our ideas about what is "country" are very much shaped by what we're told is country music, regardless of what it actually sounds like. At the same moment she says "a bunch of assholes decided country would sell better if you eliminated the fiddle and the steel guitar and the banjo and replaced it with pop music and called it country"--implicating Shania and Faith and them--she evokes Patsy Cline, whose most popular songs don't, by Marcotte's standards, sound country at all. Who does Marcotte see as the "real" country stars, the voices Nashville has left behind? Steve Earle, Dale Watson, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Willie Nelson. Who does Fox identify as the people outside of "Nashville" currently? John Conlee and Waylon Jennings, early Randy Travis, Steve Earle, Dwight Youkum, Hank Williams. Fox says that when he hosted a radio show in New Jersey, he had to find a way to balance listeners' desire to hear the Statler Brothers and Conway Twitty against the need to play what was on the Americana charts. But Fox clearly enjoys the energy of hearing these old, now neglected stars next to these new stars, also neglected by the Nashville establishment. So, he's recognizing a commonality between these older stars and the alt.country crowd. And now, my friends, we're in an interesting place. Because, now that you've seen the list of who makes up the alternate universe, who is recognized as being "authentic" and "real," clearly you've noticed who's not real or authentic country music. I'm not going to get too into this--the many ways women are excluded from being "real" country--, because I'm not Barbara Ching, and all I'd be doing is rehashing her kick-ass chapter in A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. (Yes, the home of that awesome Michael Bertrand essay.) But I want to talk about what it means that women are not automatically recognized as being producers of "real" country music. Let's start with Shania Twain, since everyone seems to point to her as being the most fake, least country thing Nashville has ever produced. She really writes her own songs. She's really from a destitute, working class background. She really put her own dreams on hold to take care of her family and then came to Nashville to pursue her career. She then really made music that appealed to a wide audience of real country music fans (as much as she's had wide success, her fans are made up of a great many regular country music fans). She's got exactly the right characteristics. And yet Marcotte, Fox, and even I (shit, everyone except Steve Pick) characterize her as not a part of this authentic country music that we love. What's going on? I truly don't know. But here's the more interesting question. What's a girl to do? How can a woman be "real"? How can she be "authentic"? If having what seems to be the right credentials isn't good enough, what is? You could sleep with Gram Parsons like Emmylou Harris. You could sing songs about your rough upbringing like Loretta Lynn or Gretchen Wilson. You could make yourself so obviously fake that it circles around into real again like Dolly Parton. Or you can wear your hair back and dress very plain and take what you're doing very, very seriously while being in awe of your opportunities like Gillian Welch. But the truth is you have to do something, even if, like Lynn and Wilson, what you do is to pretend to be who you already are. You can't just be. So, here's where it's really interesting for me. What the fuck does it mean for me to have called Aaron Fox a poseur? With what authority can I indict him for anything? See, and here's where his article suggests some really interesting shit that he doesn't quite get to because of the constraints of the book it's published it (but he hints at the contours of such an argument in his discussion of the kinds of working class masculinities that were celebrated right after September 11th). Being recognized as authentically country means something very different for men than it does for women. For Fox, there is some standard, some core of "authentically country" that he can allude to (even if he disagrees about the fairness of such standard existing). He can rightly say to me "You are, in fact, using class to stereotype me (I put myself through Harvard working two and sometimes three full time jobs, and I'm the son of a professor and a nurse, not a banker or a president, I smoke, and like it sounds as if you do, I live pretty much paycheck to paycheck. What does that make me, a Rockefeller?)"; he can call upon his lived experiences to reinforce his authority to speak--working two or three full time jobs, being a DJ, listening to this music, knowing the cannon, AND, most importantly, he can allude to our common experiences to say "look, you live paycheck to paycheck and I live paycheck to paycheck. In some important ways, I'm very much like you." And that's the crux of the awesome feminist mistake he's making, what he's not getting when he reads me--like Marcotte, I'm not real. I can only access authenticity through Willie and Waylon and the boys. He can't say "In important ways, I'm like you," because the way the whole discourse of country music is set up, it doesn't work that way. I can be like him, but he can't be like me, because I, as an autonomous individual that is real and authentic just by being, don't exist. So, he's mistaking me for as real as him (thank the gods) and I'm mistaking him for as unreal as me, hence the reason I about died of shock when he showed up here in the first place. All very interesting.

5 Comments:

Blogger Aunt B said...

I don't know. I think Invisible Man ends on a pessamistic note. What could be more optimistic than having a real scholar mistake me for a real person? And treat my discourse like it matters? Hurray for Fox and hurray for feminism.

8/20/2005 02:41:00 PM  
Blogger rcm said...

Aaron here. OK, let me take the ball. I enjoyed that response very much. I'm impressed you got through the article so quickly. It's not the most straightforward piece in the world.

Now a few things on the gender angle. First, fair enough. Because whereas we can share some aspects of our classed existences -- living paycheck to paycheck, working for a living because we have to, and valuing the work other people do -- I'll always be a guy and you'll always be a woman and there will be no gettin' over it.

I should mention a few things, though. One, Barbara Ching, since you mention her, is an old friend who has been keeping me thinking about gender in country for almost 12 years now. She published her first paper on country around the same time as I did (before that she was a scholar of French literature, believe it or not). When each of us read the other's papers, we were blown away by how much we were converging on the same lines of analysis (up to and including both of us having analyzed Becky Hobbs' "Jones on the Jukebox," and interviewing the Beckaroo, as in "Mama Was a Workin' Man," in case you haven't heard that gem.) Barbara and I go way back. I had a paper in her *Knowing Your Place* volume, and we've done conference panels together, I've reviewed her book, and have a paper in her next book as well. And oddly, I'm also reviewing *A Boy Named Sue* for a journal now, and should tell you that Diane Pecknold is the name to watch among upcoming country scholars. Look for her book on the consumption of country from the 20s-60s on Duke Press soon. It rocks. And I'll mention Pam -- no relation -- Fox at Georgetown as well, doing bangup work on alt country and gender (she's coediting the new volume with Barbara). These women have been taking me to school on taking gender seriously for a long time.

You're right that the book this was in (*Country Music Goes to War*) precluded my developing the all-important gender angle too much in the paper in question. (Even so, I think it is central to that paper, and has a lot to do with my riff on Shania at the end, which I'll get back to). CMGtW was a mixed project, with everything from Jim Akenson's article on using country to teach middle-school kids ethical reasoning at the practical end to my paper at the far theoretical end. That paper was homeless, and I had always wanted to do something to show my respect for Charles Wolfe, in particular, so that's how it found its way into the volume. If you're interested in my take on gender in more depth, my book has a chapter devoted to the topic ("The Women Take Care of That") and much else on the subject. You can't understand country's history without recognizing that its central theme is a dialogue between the sexes about gender identity and role, and that gender is the core metaphor for every kind of difference, antagonism, and conflict in country music -- very much including class conflict.

But here's where I think you still don't quite grok what my article is saying. A lot of your defense of Shania Twain sounds like . . . my defense of Shania Twain! (I am in fact writing a longer article that argues Shania is the Dolly of our times). I compare her to the very icon of authenticity in country -- a redneck truck driver named Randy Meyer who was just about the greatest single country entertainer I've ever known, and who was never know beyond a small patch of central Texas in his life:

"Both Meyer and Twain express an entirely unironic *effort* in their performances, a commitment to values of discipline, self-denial, religiosity, convention, and craft, and both thereby refuse the canonical bourgeois affect identified by Bourdieu as *ease,* an aesthetic stance that announces "objective distance from necessity and those trapped within it" [1981:55]. The demonstration of effort -- or lack of ease -- in mainstream country is profoundly gendered. Twain's performative persona embodies what sociolinguists call *hypercorrection*: her visible efforts are directed too obviously to upward mobility, self-regulation, and a concern with what one's social betters might stigmatize. That she has succeeded in massively improving her class position confirms her performance of working-class femininity, and earns her the kind of bourgeois scorn reserved for working-class women who don't realize they are making fools of themselves and that money doesn't liberate. Steve Earle's comment [he called Shania "the highest paid lap dancer in Nashville"] nicely summarizes this dismissal . . ."


In other words, I think I am saying about Shania, and the double-marginality of working-class women, in a classist and sexist society, the same thing you are about a woman's alternative history of the genre more broadly. And if I failed to leave Becky Hobbs, Rose Maddox, Kelly Willis, or Roseanne Cash of my own list of favorites, my bad. But the point is that yes, Gillian Welch should be admired, and Allison Krauss, and Lucinda Williams (both faculty brats like me), and Neko Case and Libby Bosworth and so many more, for pushing against the box Shania had to work in, or even Emmylou (as you point out), though Emmylou left that box a long time ago.

Auntie B., I'm going to have to send you a copy of my book and hope you'll find time to read it. My main riiff in there is really that country does not reduce to Nashville and the music industry, but is the culture of working-class middle American whites (blacks too, but that's a different book project, and that raises a whole other kettle of fish I talk about in my paper "White Trash Alchemies of the Abject Sublime" published last year in Washburne and Derno's *Bad Music*). And that means the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly, and all the just plain hard stuff in between. As Simon Frith once wrote, and as I expanded on in my first article on country ("The Jukebox of History," 1992), "music cannot be true or false. It can only refer to conventions of truth and falsity."

Thanks for the response and the dialogue, and for fixing my misspelling of "Rockefeller" too. Looking forward to the next round.

Aaron

8/20/2005 08:29:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You meant canon, right? not cannon.

(You must have been thinking of the noted writer who was just shot out of one.)

Elias

8/21/2005 12:15:00 AM  
Blogger rcm said...

Just to let you know I am cross-posting parts of this (excerpts from your posts and my comments) on on my blog. - aaron

8/21/2005 07:38:00 AM  
Blogger Aunt B said...

Shoot, Elias, you're so sly. I was totally going to take responsibility for fixing Rockafeller, but, obviously, I can't spell my way out of a paper bag. If spell check can't fix it, it doesn't get fixed.

Aaron, no, I think we're totally on the same page with Twain, just coming at it from different angles.

I hope you see I wasn't trying to insinuate that you were a sexist pig or trying to insinuate that you'd done something wrong by not taking into account every possible ramification of gender in your argument.

That kind of writing--that must consider everything before it gets around to considering whatever the hell it set out to consider--is deathly boring and not very brave, I think, and it's a cheap shot to criticize someone for not doing the thing you'd have done. I just want to be clear that that's not what I'm up to.

I don't think you are wrong to focus on masculinities, especially since that's where the interesting meat of your piece is.

But I, personally, as a reader am delighted and frightened by the things your article doesn't quite do, but hints at.

That's why I sit befuddled before Shania Twain. Everybody I know want to talk about Shania. What do we make of Shania? What do we do with Shania?

Steve Pick (glad to see you here, Steve) is the only person I've ever encountered who both can talk about this shit like an educated man and who says (to steal from the Violent Femmes) "What do we do with Shania? Dance, motherfuckers, dance."

Steve reminds me constantly that you can only talk about this shit in our scholarly nit-picky way as long as it's fun, as long as you really feel like there's something there just out beyond the tip of your brain and if only you can get it down and think it out and say it, you're going to know some shit about music, yourself, and the world.

Once it starts to feel too much like work, like you've got to know all the right people and name-check Foucault and come to some conclusions that aren't too different than the conclusions before you, then we all need to get up out of our seats and shake our asses a little.

Okay, obviously, this comment is just swirling around with no real point, but I'm just enjoying kind of tossing all this stuff out there and seeing what feels right.

And so, I'm really digging on this idea of looking at Shania Twain and Dolly Parton as a pair. I think there's a lot going on with both of them in terms of gender performance and even performance of "country music star."

I'm thinking in terms of the current scramble for all the female cross-over artists to repackage themselves in response to Gretchen Wilson and how clear that makes the distinction between Faith Hill and Shania Twain.

Hill comes out with her new brown frizzy hair and her earthy look and her song--"Mississippi Girl"--that's almost a good song, but not quite. There's something uncomfortable and ill-at-ease in her new self-presentation.

But Shania swaggers out, looks around, says "Oh, is that what we're doing now? 'Real' country?" and, like Babe Ruth, having just gestured to where he's going to put the ball, hits one perfectly into the stands with "I Ain't No Quitter."

And I think there's something to that, the casual mastery of her craft, along with the flashy self-presentation, and a little bit of what is normally read--at least in Nashville--as a masculine swagger, that really puts me in mind of Parton.

It still bothers me that Earle called her a glorified stripper. But I like imagining that hers would be the most unsettling strip show in town.

8/21/2005 09:48:00 AM  

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