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Moving Truth: Affect and Authenticity in Country Musicals Richard Shusterman The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 2, Aesthetics and Popular Culture. (Spring, 1999), pp. 221-233. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28199921%2957%3A2%3C221%3AMTAAAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/tasfa.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Mon Feb 18 14:00:10 2008 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN - - - -- Moving Truth: Affect and Authenticity in Country Musicals In a famous essay, William James describes an it sport the sort of modish multicultural cachet aesthetic blindness produced by the bias of our that attracts progressive intellectuals to music socially constructed taste. Driving through the like jazz, rhythm and blues, rap, reggae, or North Carolina mountains to appreciate their techno. Indeed, country's old links to white trash natural beauty, he was shocked by the sight of and redneck racial prejudice might even threaten crude farming homesteads that blotched the sub- to demean any thinker who gave it any sympa- lime mountain green like a "hideous ... ulcer." thetic attention. Nonetheless, we intellectuals What seemed an intrusive eyesore, James later can escape the Jamesian blindness and enjoy learned, was fondly viewed by its dwellers as an country music, sharing to some extent the appre- attractive haven of comforting cultivation, a stir- ciative pleasures of its lowbrow target audience, ring symbol of hard-won survival in a wild land- just as to some extent we share their concerns scape they struggled to endure, not simply visit and life-experience. for a brief taste of nature before returning to so- This essay seeks to explain country music's phisticated Boston life.' enormous appeal, but also to appreciate the genre If James was blind to the aesthetic charms of in intellectual terms. Since country's popularity these hillbilly homes, today's philosophers re- is overdetermined by a complex cluster of rea- main deaf to the appeal of the popular music sons too elaborate to explicate in full, I shall with which such mountain homes have always concentrate on those reasons that are most philo- been associated. Though country music has sophically interesting and involve intriguing blossomed into America's most popular sound, it doctrines about human nature, emotion, belief, remains, among intellectuals, the most scorned and authenticity-some of them advocated by and unexarnined musical genre.2 If studies re- William James himself. These philosophical is- peatedly show that the higher a person is edu- sues become especially clear in the film genre cated, the less likely she will be a country music generated by country's great commercial suc- fan, then country hits like Aaron Tippin's cess. I call this genre "the country musical," dis- "Working Man's Ph.D." and John Conlee's tinguishing it from the traditional "singing cow- "Common Man" strengthen this trend by blast- boy film" made famous by Gene Autry, Roy ing academics for "not pullin' their weight" and Rogers, and Tex Rittet4 Before probing its philo- by charging that all "highbrow people lose their sophical import as revealed in its new musicals, sanity."' we should begin by noting the socio-cultural Because its locus geni is neither the cos- factors that greatly contribute to country music's mopolitan city nor the erudite campus but down- popularity, for the philosophy of any cultural home rural America, because its values are far form (including philosophy itself) is unwise to more traditional than transgressive, country ignore the socio-cultural space that shapes the music has none of rock's radical chic. Nor does production and use of its products. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57:2 Spring 1999 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism at transcultural affiliation are often doubly re- jected: they are as unsavory to the courted mi- One crucial factor in the increasing popularity of nority culture (who fear the plunder of their hard- country music is the demographic aging of won heritage) as to mainstream white society America. Partly through its affirmation of tradi- (who fear the loss of their cultural hegemony). tional values, country music has always ap- Where, then, can one find a specifically white pealed to an older audience than rock and rap. American ethnicity expressed in a distinctive, While the latter pop genres focus on the teens ethnic popular music? Country music is the ob- and early twenties, country music's audience vious answer.6 Like rap and reggae, it provides a clusters between the ages of mid-twenties to complete cultural style replete with distinctive late-forties. As the children of the postwar baby- dance, fashion, food, and behavioral ethos. Here boom moved into this age range, country music whiteness can mean more than a mere pale back- evolved from an eccentric, minor musical genre ground of conformity that highlights nonwhite into a mainstream popular force. Song lyrics ethnicity. Indeed, country culture distinguishes it- sometimes recount how rock radicals of the six- self by its defiance of the bland, corporate, white- ties evolved, by the nineties, into country fans collar establishment-not only by its cowboy advocating mainstream America and family val- fashion and down-home, twangy speech, but in ues. But the correlation of country music's its oppositional attitude. By invoking the cow- growth with the aging of the baby-boomers is boy image of rebelliously rugged individualism perhaps more convincingly told in statistics. In while also recalling its reputed roots in the South 1961 there were only eighty-one full-time coun- (land of the the Civil War Rebels), country music try music stations in the entire USA, but in 1974 can project an image that is traditional, white, the number had reached about a thousand, by and all-American, yet also attractively distinc- 1992 it was rocketing over 2,200, by 1994 al- tive and not blandly conformist. Thus, in his hit most 2,400, and at the end of 1996 still climbing "Against the Grain," Garth Brooks circumvents to 2,600.5 his image as a country-mainstream crossover by A second factor in country's new popularity is claiming the nonconformist heroism of going America's increased preoccupation with ethnic "against the grain" to "sing a different song" and identity and multiculturalism. As traditional "buck the systemm-portraying this noncon- class identities and community identities lose formism as being true to the "mav'rick" tradition their power to provide the individual an ade- of classic cowboy hero "John Wayne" and to quate social definition, there is a greater need to Brooks's own "rebel bl00d."~ construct one's identity through cultural affilia- Though defiant of the white corporate estab- tion. Music has long been extremely significant lishment and intellectual elite, country music in forming such cultural identity. But if the broad (partly through its traditional ties to working- concept of American culture is too vague and class white culture) favors whiteness per se. It bland to provide an attractively thick sense of thus can recruit American whites from all differ- cultural identity, then so is the notion of Ameri- ent ethnic backgrounds, rallying them around a can music. As today's most exciting options for distinctive white image, whose cultural roots distinctive cultural definition are the emancipa- they may not have inherited but which they can tory consciousness-raising movements of mi- adopt without the contradiction of color. Even an nority ethnicities (along with feminism and gay actor of salient Italian ethnicity like John Tra- culture), so ethnicity now offers perhaps the most volta can suddenly don honkytonk cowboy gear absorbing musical cultures (e.g., rap, reggae, and be unproblematically accepted as the deep- salsa) that go beyond mere music by providing a rooted white Texan hero Bud Davis of Urbun comprehensive lifestyle for self-fashioning. But Cowboy (1980). For the millions of lower- and however attractive such musical cultures may be middle-class white Americans seeking a distinc- for white Americans, our racially divided society tive identity that simultaneously enables them to denies whites a trouble-free identification with stand out from the nondescript blandness of nonwhite culture. Beset by the dialectic of recip- white American mainstream culture while still rocal exclusion, where excluded minorities exer- fitting in as true to its traditions, country must be cise their own exclusionary power, such attempts the music of choice. Shusterman Moving Truth: Affect and Authenticity in Country Musicals 223 A third factor fueling country's rocketing pop- persuasive dialectic, I now consider its concrete ularity is the dearth of competitive alternatives deployment in the narratives of country musi- in the 1990s musical field.

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