truck songs of the week #31: country songwriting meets late-stage capitalism
new music featuring gasoline, John Wayne & turquoise rings
This week is deeply commodified.
Last week, this essay I wrote about country music symbolism was published. “Rock music is about ideas, country music is about stuff.” The lyrics of country music are uniquely grounded in the material world.
So what happens when that songwriting tradition meets late-stage capitalism? Find out below.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“Wild” by Erin Kinsey
Incredibly, this track is one of the only current country singles that isn’t part of the Twisters soundtrack despite these lyrics: “Drive me wild like a Tennessee tornado / Lifting my feet out of these Luccheses.”
“Boots” is arguably an easier rhyme but I love the drive toward a more specific image. Specificity makes for punchy writing, and branding is the inevitable evolution in that direction. These aren’t just boots, these aren’t just cowboy boots, they’re Lucchese cowboy boots (probably these bestselling $1,100 goat leather babies).
Lucchese girl is expensive but she’s also real country. She could probably drive manual in a pinch, even if she’s happiest playing passenger princess.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Saddle Up” by Jordana Bryant
In this buoyant track, Jordana Bryant pulls a classic country music reversal, flipping “saddle up” from its connotation of leaving to a “hanging his saddle up” connotation of staying.
We get lots of classically country specificity here. “Matte black snapback,” for example, conjures much about a Southern bro in its brevity.
What other characterization do we get of this guy? “His Tecovas are picking up dust.”
He’s a Tecova guy! Here we are moving toward brand as inherently characterizing. Specific, yes, but also as conspicuous consumption. Boots that are supposed to telegraph identity.
Tecova guy works with his hands and probably smells like Marlboro Reds. He’s no Jeff Bezos in a Stetson.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Tecovas” by Logan Ryan Band
The only next step is an entire song built around the brand itself. The line between song and advertising jingle is gone. Every country song is an advertisement for a lifestyle, and increasingly, for the objects of that lifestyle.
Jean Baudrillard wrote, in horrified awe, of the televised commercials that cut through films on television, often blurring with the programming itself. The features were, he argued, “basically, of the same order as advertisements. Most films — including many of the better ones — are made up from the same everyday romance: cars, telephones, psychology, make-up. They are purely and simply illustrations of the way of life. And advertising does just the same: it canonizes the way of life through images, making the whole a genuinely integrated circuit.”
So a song like “Tecovas” canonizes a particular American lifestyle, while selling you the material objects of that lifestyle. This identically titled track from Karissa Ella even generated some sponsored content.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Thoughts on Andy Warhol and the fetishization of the cowboy in Dispatches Magazine: “Historically, Americans have a tendency to ignore real stories in favor of ready-made symbols. We are John Wayne. We are the Buffalo Nickel. We are the extraction of culture into digestible images that feel authentic, but are only vague gestures at authenticity. Or, with the luxury of looking back that the exhibition affords, we were John Wayne and Buffalo Nickel and so on. But who are ‘we’ now?”