truck songs of the week #32: where does the irony go?
featuring Jordan Davis, Conner Smith & LANCO
I’ve written before that I’m a California girl whose introduction to country music came when I was working as a backcountry guide in rural Utah, where the only music we could get was Miranda Lambert and Luke Bryan on staticky radio stations. I liked it ironically at first because I was just cosplaying being from the country, and then somewhere along the way the irony just sort of went away.
You can only like something ironically for so long before it just becomes your life. This is how kitsch gets folded back into mainstream culture. And lately, it’s become very trendy to go country in a kitschy way. You no longer need to be a 22-year-old stranded in eastern Utah. Camo is having a high fashion moment.
Last night, Kamala HQ unveiled a new camo print campaign hat that can somehow simultaneously signify Chappell Roan and Wisconsin home-improvement chain Menards. Workwear is hot! Country music is cool again!
But what do we lose when we expect an object to work at too many irony levels at once? It’s hard for me to imagine this hat selling well with anyone who isn’t young and extremely online. Isn’t it just a diminutive and fetishized version of rural America? The same vision that mainstream American media likes to be sold over and over again?
Having Tim Walz on the Democrat ticket is the plausible deniability that this hat needs to exist but this is merch for the Kamala fan base.
In 2021, Hanson O’Haver wrote about the irony collapse of the espresso martini, which could be “embraced by the chic and the normal and the embarrassingly uncool all at once, with equal enthusiasm, totally eschewing the standard cool-common-passé sequence.”
Maybe the hat really can have it both ways.
Jean Baudrillard wrote that what is unique in America is the clash of a first level of meaning, the natural and material world, and the third level of meaning — an absolute simulacrum. Here, there is no intermediate level. There is only a raw authentic and an ironic reality reproduced into oblivion.
But there may be a vanishing point, way out in the direction of the sunset, where they converge.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“I Ain’t Sayin’” by Jordan Davis
It’s truck song season. I’m convinced all these guys save their best windows-down anthems for the summer months.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Steal My Thunder (feat. Tucker Wetmore)” by Connor Smith
I’m actually not getting kickbacks from the Twisters soundtrack. It’s banger after banger, and you can definitely catch me at a stoplight dancing to this one in my truck.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“You’ll Always Be” by LANCO
The platonic ideal of a truck song. A song about a lost summertime love manages to hit all areas of the truck song Venn Diagram: nostalgia, yearning, and rolled down windows.
“You'll always be that tattooed arm / Makin' waves out the window with the headlight out” is a lovely, specific image.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
