truck songs of the week #30: modern American mythology
Independence Day pyrotechnics edition 🇺🇸
This week is pure patriotism. It’s the reality of America gone up in a shower of sparks. An advertisement for “freedom.”
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“HELL YEAH” by Austin Michael
There’s a sweet earnestness to this new track from Texas-raised Austin, Michael, who was on track to be a rodeo star before he got intercepted by American Idol and “country Justin Bieber” went viral for lassoing Katy Perry.
The ranch roots seep through the lyrics, which brim with language so originally reimagined that the effect is country music defamiliarization — “long cut in my jaw,” “whitetail on the wall,” and “my bluetick in my front seat.” The images aren’t new so much as they are rendered so precisely as to veer into the thrillingly uncanny, only possible from a kid who grew up in a double-wide trailer with a wrap-around porch.
Bonus: Michael laments a girl who left him for a Ford-driving boy on “FORD VS CHEVY.”
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“New To Country” by Bailey Zimmerman
After a certain level of commercial success, artists are generally required to release a track about how they’re still authentic, homegrown artists. Perhaps this is doubly true in country music, which is, as a genre, particularly linked to class symbols. So here’s Bailey Zimmerman’s best shot at convincing you he’s still a good ol’ country boy, no matter how much money he’s got.
The song has extra zing as so many mainstream pop artists rush to buy Telecasters.
Country artists have cosplayed blue-collar for decades. But social designations like “blue-collar” are moving away from economic meaning and toward social meaning.
If authentic was once a measure of where something was made (or by whom), it is now increasingly a measure of how something is made — and an $80,000 truck is not going to stop Zimmerman from making authentic country music.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“American Dream” by BOOMTOWN SAINTS
From the cover art to the lyrics, “American Dream” has an AI-generated quality to it, perhaps because it is such a pure distallation of the country music glorification of small-town America. Part of a rash of almost delusionally patriotic singles dropped ahead of the Fourth of July, it traffics in real-time romanticization. But rather than evoking any meaning of its own, it name-drops Jack and Diane, Johnny and June, and Waylon and Jessi1 — capitalizing on a listener's pre-existing sentiments.
Like Michael and Zimmerman, “American Dream” is trafficking in what Marxist critic Frederic Jameson would call a “nostalgia of the present,” like a marketing campaign for contemporary reality. In such a romanticized society, there can be no critique of the prevailing economic systems. Everything is wonderful. The poor, whatever complaints they might have, are no longer credible.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
The New York Times recently highlighted its picks for the forty best songs of 2024 so far and, as Jacqui Devaney points out in her very smart Dinner Music, is light on country music — despite its enthusiasm for critical darlings like Beyonce, Waxahatchee, and Adrienne Lenker whose recent work has drawn heavy inspo from the country world.
Still, despite its commercial popularity, country remains a genre that coastal critics simply don’t engage with seriously. To me, that suggests, at best, a naivety about the life experience of huge swaths of the country, and, at worse, an outright classism.
That said, I imagine country heavy-hitters like Miranda Lambert are crying all the way to the bank.
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Gram and Emmylou would like a word.
I second that emotion re: Gram and Emmy Lou!