Farm Report: Of War and Freud

Glen Rock, PA ? You may recall that last time, which seems like decades ago, I expressed myself sick of country music, at least the Nashville variety. But now I am affirming America: our glorious schlockiness, our commercialism, even the perfect surface hiding mediocre content, like an infinitely tall gleaming tower with brokerage firms inside. Nothing is as American as country music. When Martina McBride's Greatest Hits (RCA) arrived a few days before the conflagration, I was a bit irritated that she was wearing an American flag on her tanktop. Now it all seems so right.

The content was always so right. Martina's always been a great country singer, with enough slick to stay on the charts and enough attitude to be interesting. "Independence Day," a song of abuse and fire by Gretchen Peters, is probably the greatest country single of the last decade, and it's here in all its spine-tingling glory. I always loved Martina's "Love's the Only House (Big Enough for all the Pain)," but Wanda never really heard it as sincere until the conflagration. Now it's a kind of anthem around here.

?Chely Wright has appealed to me, despite various contretemps, since I saw a very young her many years ago on the Opry doing an amazing song called "I Can Talk to God (Why Can't I Talk to You)." Her performance was clumsy and she had a bit of trouble hitting the notes, but that made her sound more vulnerable and sincere. She got all commercial in the interim and had a breakthrough hit, the insufferable "Single White Female." Maybe it's my sudden xenophobia, but the latest thing, Never Love You Enough (MCA), seems suddenly sweet, sexy and true. And maybe I'm hallucinating but the commercial stuff out of Nashville seems to be floating back a bit toward trad.

Speaking of trad, I have met the perfect country album and it is us. Call me heterosexist, but I don't think, if my name was Dallas, I would call my album Here I Am in Dallas (High Tone). But Dallas Wayne is not only a probable heterosexual, he's the most amazing trad country artist I've heard in a long time. As a singer, he's comparable to the very best: George Jones and Vern Gosdin, for example. He sounds a lot like John Anderson, but an octave down: so deep that you feel it in your shoes when he dips down yet further. And the songs! There's not a clunker in the bunch, and they're so rooted in the tradition that they will never be dislodged. It's all drinking, sinking, cheating, weeping. "The Stuff Inside," "Bouncin' Beer Cans Off the Jukebox (I'm a Poster Boy for Detox)," "If These Walls Could Cry," "Cheatin' Traces." I'm telling you, this old boy should be in the fucking Country Music Hall of Fame.

Toby Keith could be Dallas Wayne, but he keeps trying to split the difference. He looks like a big old hard-drinking boy, and sings like one too, especially on killer numbers like "I'm Just Talkin' About Tonight" or "Pick 'Em Up and Lay 'Em Down." Now the current demographic for country stations is women in their 30s. Women in their 30s like touching, slow songs about angels and shit, it seems. So Toby alternates the good shit with some really touching schlub. As Freud's great follower Bubba Spraddle insisted as early as 1923, "Boys, when we finally figger out what women want, it's gonna bore us silly."

Okay. Now we come to the best record to emerge from the major-label country operations this year. Gary Allan doesn't bother to split the difference. There is a coherent vision on Alright Guy (MCA), a kind of retro twang that pulls Chris Isaak down onto the Texas border with Mexico (shit, I'm gifted). He's got the best writers on board: Leslie Satcher, Bruce Robison, Jamie O'Hara, Jim Lauderdale. Here's one lyric: "How's it going, might be what I'd say/Well you broke my heart you know/Or it looks like rain today/Or maybe, God I've missed you/Since you went away/You're looking well/Or go to hell/Might be what I'd say."

Shit. You know what that's about? Or how about the hilarious anthem "What Would Willie Do," which rivals the greatest song of our generation, that thing from the South Park movie, about Brian Boitano.

?Last time I reviewed the Yayhoos' album Fear Not the Obvious (Bloodshot). I want to add this sentence: This is the best rock 'n' roll band in America. Get me? THE BEST FUCKING ROCK 'N' ROLL BAND IN AMERICA. Speaking of which, rock 'n' roll is an American art. The Taliban haven't even gotten Little Richard on board yet. But they will, once we've finished bombing them up past the jazz age.

?Sometimes you just go off people, know what I mean? Alison Krauss has mutated from the girl genius who saved bluegrass to the Princess of Pap. Her journey toward new-age bullshit could not be more evident than on her new album with her band Union Station (New Favorite, Rounder) in which her rootless, incredibly sweet dreck alternates with good traditional music sung by the members of her band, who are still traditional bluegrass pickers. Krauss' music at this point is baseless, pretty and pointless. Of course, everybody's still playing great, especially her. Alison's at the center of a whole movement of limp wimpy bluegrass that includes the very irritating babies of Nickel Creek and now also includes her guitar player, Ron Block. Block's Faraway Land (Rounder) is sweet, incredibly well-played and dedicated, as well it might be, to the glory of the Christian God. Still, I don't wanna hear it no more.

The Wayfaring Strangers, who include Tony Trischka on banjo, have these problems and then some. On Shifting Sands of Time (Rounder) there is not only rootless insipidity but pretentiousness, as if bluegrass were getting set to merge with avant-garde jazz and classical music. Well, maybe it is, and maybe it's just my prejudiced ears, but this album sounds incoherent to me, and immensely irritating. I'm not saying that there can't be any changes or developments in traditional music; what I'm saying is that these particular changes are not desirable.

There's no real reason to listen to wimpgrass because there's so much of the real thing out there right now. It's something of a golden age. Rocky Skaggs' History of the Future (Skaggs Family) is the best moment in Skaggs' extended return to his bluegrass roots. The sheer virtuosity of the playing and singing has to be heard to be believed. And the mix of new songs with chestnuts like "Dim Lights Thick Smoke" and "Mother's Only Sleeping (She's Not Dead)" is exquisite. Meanwhile, the insanely groovy Rebel Records has reissued Skaggs' first recording, an early-70s collaboration of the teenaged Skaggs with the teenaged Keith Whitley called Second Generation Bluegrass. Both were playing with the Stanley Brothers at the time, and the record, recorded in a DC-area basement in one day, definitely bears the Stanleys' stamp. Yes, there is a struggle toward maturity here, but there is also a movement toward the absolute mastery that both these guys would soon be manifesting. Combined with a real roughness and rusticity they make this album an important and listenable document in the history of country music.

Blue Highway's Still Climbing Mountains (Rounder) redeems Rounder, and even Alison, who appears singing her gorgeous harmonies. This is contempo- rather than neo-trad, and it emphasizes producer Jerry Douglas' great dobro. So it's sweet and gentle without being flaccid. And when they want to slay you, as in "Riding the Danville Pike," they do it utterly. For the purest real shit, though, get a hold of the Mark Newton Band's Charlie Lawson's Still (Rebel). One of the more radical moves is the song "Lost," which uses extreme changes of tempo to mark the point of the lyrics. And there are a lot of good lyrics here, which is perhaps a bit unusual in a bluegrass album. "Down in the Cold Ground," for instance, is both sweet and scary.

?Okay, back to the world of alt. How about the too-cool Robbie Fulks' albums 13 Hillbilly Giants (Bloodshot) and Couples in Trouble (Boondoggle). The first digs up obscure country songs of incredible kitsch, while the second is originals in a variety of styles. Got to love Hillbilly Giants, which includes neglected chestnuts such as Bill Anderson's "Cocktails" and Hank Cochran's "Bury the Bottle with Me." It would be easy for a sophisticated young man like Fulks to make fun of these songs while he sang them, but he gets it just right: he sings them straight, with great devotion, and lets the campiness emerge from them on its own. Couples in Trouble is more uneven, or maybe just more eclectic. I'm not in love with every song, but I respect every song. And I respect the range of Fulks' expertise as well as the consistency of his lyrics. Songs like "Dancing on the Ashes," which plain rocks, are as good as anything in contemporary popular music.

Ever since the classic "Thinkin' Problem" long about '93, David Ball has been trying fruitlessly to follow up and get back on the charts. What was immediately evident, though, was that he was too hardassed for late-90s country. He is no longer what women want, I guess. So finally he has been liberated from the major labels and into the realm of perfect Tex-Mex. Amigo (Dualtone) is the work of a master: so fucking country, first of all, and so well-written and well-made. Also, Ball no longer has the Toby Keith syndrome where his trad stuff has to be dotted with hits like rice pudding with raisins. So he just settles down somewhere along the Rio Grande and stays there.

?Out here in the rural world, we are all for avenging you, New York. We are listening to American music and staying pissed off as hell. So get your lives in order, drink, buy some CDs and let us keep putting the smackdown on Osama.