HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-08-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2012. PAGE 5.
Idon’t like country music, but I don’t mean
to denigrate those who do. And for the
people who like country music, ‘denigrate’
means ‘put down’.
– Bob Newhart
I’m not quite as dismissive as Mister
Newhart is on the subject of country music; I
have more of a love-loathe relationship with
the genre. I love the simple honesty of a Hank
Williams (pere) tune; the stately grace of a
Carter family ballad and the intricacies of
anything finger-picked by Doc Watson. I
loathe the hokey, flag-waving, rhinestone
cowboy maudlin crap to which so much
country music has descended of late.
Maybe it’s the artists. Perhaps it’s the
audiences.
What has 72 legs and 23 teeth?
The front row of a Willie Nelson concert.
It’s easy to make fun of country music
because so much of it is excruciatingly bad but
that doesn’t mean it can’t be taken seriously.
Recently, a scientific paper appeared in the
pages of the Review of General Psychology
the very title of which must have tweaked a
few scholarly eyebrows. The paper was called
Cheatin’ Hearts and Loaded Guns. It wasn’t a
smackdown of country music: it was a sober
investigation of what those hurtin’ songs really
mean. According to Robert Kurzban, the
paper’s author, “Country music feeds our
desire to learn about things that carry high
fitness consequences in the world”.
That’s convoluted psychobabble that really
means country songs are morality tales. They
tell the listener what happens when you go off
the straight and narrow. All those mournful
yodelings about trucks and gals and bars and
jails aren’t really about trucks and gals and
bars and jails, they’re actually musical
instruction booklets full of advice about
human survival and sexual reproduction.
Sexual reproduction? You bet.
How about Tammy Wynette’s Don’t Come
Home A-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ On Your Mind.
Survival? I give you Roped and Throwed by
Jesus in the Holy Ghost Corral. Not to
mention: Drop Kick Me Jesus, Through the
Goalposts of Life.
On a more secular plane, country songs
address the eternal verities like Heartbreak: I
Got Tears in My Ears from Lying on My Bed
Crying on my Pillow Over You.
Or the even more magnificent Garth Brooks
lyric from a ditty called Papa Loved Mama:
“Papa loved mama, mama loved men;
mama’s in the graveyard, papa’s in the pen.”
Alcohol looms large in country music.
Witness the songs 80 Proof Bottle of Tear
Stopper and also I Want a Beer Cold as my Ex-
Wife’s Heart.
Failed relationships are prominent too, as in
Lyle Lovett’s All My Exes Live in Texas.
Occasionally a country song comes along
that manages to turn a double play. Here’s one
that addresses gambling and heartbreak: I
Gave Her My Heart and a Diamond and She
Clubbed Me with a Spade.
Personally, I prefer the simpler titles such as
Bubba Shot the Jukebox and also Velcro Arms,
Teflon Heart – but I’ve always been an
incurable romantic.
It’s a macho world, is country music, but
some of its biggest stars are women and
female sensibilities are beginning to make
inroads. A singer by the name of Miranda
Lambert croons a vengeful little ballad that
includes these lines: “He slapped my face and
he shook me like a rag doll. Don’t that sound
like a real man? I’m gonna show him what a
little girl’s made of: gunpowder and lead.”
A little too John Wayne-ish for me. I prefer
the caustic wit of Deana Carter’s song I
Shaved My Legs for This?
Professor Kurzban, the man behind the
paper Cheatin’ Hearts and Loaded Guns,
insists country music survives because it
“satisfies an informational need”. Well, maybe
– but it’s funnybone fodder too. Hard to
improve on a title like: When You Leave Me
Walk Out Backwards So I’ll Think You’re
Walkin’ In.
Cole Porter, eat your heart out.
You know what happens if you play a
country music song backwards, don’t you?
Your girlfriend returns, your pickup is un-
repossessed, your hangover disappears, your
dog comes back to life and you get a pardon
from the warden.
Arthur
Black
Other Views The not so Grand Ol’ Opry
Have I got to the point where I have to
recycle columns? Not quite yet. But
yes, regular readers of this column will
remember my column entitled “Support our
Troops” from Nov. 11 just two years ago.
That column was all about moral support for
those brave men and women serving our
country both abroad and here at home.
This column, however, is about a different
kind of support. It’s a lot more hands-on than
sticking a “Support our Troops” ribbon on the
back of your car.
For a few days of The Citizen’s annual
vacation time, Jess and I took a trip to Chicago
to take in a few Cubs games at Wrigley Field
and sample some of the cultural flavour of The
Windy City (namely deep dish pizza).
After being in Chicago for a few days I
learned a few things about one of Toronto’s
sister cities.
The first thing I learned was that I didn’t
pack well. They don’t call it The Windy City
for nothing. The first night there we sat (under
covered seats thankfully) at Wrigley Field
freezing during a 90-minute rain delay. I only
packed t-shirts and shorts. I didn’t go to
Chicago for the shopping, but let’s just say I
did my fair share of it while I was there out of
necessity.
The second thing I learned was that, like
Toronto, Chicago is very supportive of
alternative lifestyles. Our hotel was located in
Wrigleyville, a community named for its
proximity to the “Friendly Confines” of
Wrigley Field which is just north of a
community called Boystown, a community
which is exactly what it sounds like.
The third thing I learned is that Chicago is a
huge tourist destination. Everywhere you
turned there was someone to talk to, and rarely
were they from Chicago. They were playing
the Cincinnati Reds over the weekend, so there
were plenty of fans who made the trip from
nearby Ohio to watch their beloved Reds play
the Cubs.
However, on Saturday Jess and I had a few
drinks at The Captain Morgan Club, a patio bar
attached to the right field section of Wrigley
Field when in walked six sailors and their
commanding officer. They sat at the table next
to us and upon further inspection of their
uniforms, I saw that they were members of the
Royal Canadian Navy.
I got talking with the boys and after
identifying myself as a fellow Canadian,
discovered that they were from Halifax, but
their ship had made its way to Lake Michigan
where they were able to sneak some time away
from their posts (the commanding officer
informed me that they weren’t supposed to be
at the game, but in Milwaukee).
The Navy boys were showered with attention
from honoured men and adoring women alike
before the game’s first pitch and the
commanding officer told me how proud he
was. He said they didn’t get that kind of
attention at home.
On my way out I bought the boys a round of
the beer they were enjoying and Jess and I had
our picture taken with them.
It’s rare that you get a chance to thank a
member of the armed forces in person, but
apparently even when we have the chance (at
least in the case of those men from Halifax) it
doesn’t happen nearly enough.
I’m not a rich man, but even with baseball
stadium beer prices, I thought of few better
things to spend my money on that afternoon
than honouring a handful of our country’s
heroes while they’re thousands of kilometres
away from their homes and their families.
Support our troops II
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
If you don’t recognize the paraphrasing of
the above quote, I’ll fill in the blanks for
you. It’s from The Matrix Reloaded.The
exact statement is “There are levels of survival
we are prepared to accept” and it is uttered by
The Architect who, if you believe the lore,
helped to build the computerized world that
humans live in for the purposes of the film.
The statement is made in response to the
film’s protagonist, Neo, suggesting that
humanity must survive if the robots who feed
off them also want to survive.
The statement always struck me as a
misnomer.
Survival means to continue to exist despite
difficult situations.
There are no levels in that description. You
are either surviving against adversity or you
are not. If you are doing better than you have
been doing before then you’re not surviving,
you’re flourishing.
A man living on the street barely scraping
together enough coins for a sandwich is
surviving. A man with too many cars to fit in
his three car garage isn’t surviving, he is
flourishing.
Why, you may ask, is this on my mind?
Well some time ago someone made the
comment to me that they were barely able to
continue feeding themselves and bemoaned
the fact that they would have to live off peanut
butter and jam to make ends meet.
Suffice to say, I was a little angry at them.
I’m not going to write a column
complaining about how I might be barely
doing more than surviving, but I am going to
point out a few facts about life that a lot of
people my age, and some older, seem to have
forgotten.
The first of which is that there isn’t a danged
thing wrong with living off peanut butter and
jam sandwiches. I’m doing it right now. I have
cereal for breakfast, Pb&J for lunch and,
if it’s not too far after payday for me to have
fresh hamburg or or hotdog buns or pasta
sauce, some kind of barbecued meat or
spaghetti for dinner.
If the pantry’s bare of the grain products I
need, I’ll usually double up and have another
bowl of cereal.
Never once has it occurred to me that some
people might consider this “surviving” or even
less so.
When I explain to people that I go out for
coffee a maximum of once every other week, I
don’t have cable and I limit myself to eating
dinner out to the two or three times a month
my coworkers and I get together, they look at
me with wonder or, even worse, pity, when
really, it’s all a matter of decisions.
I could sit in front of cable TV every night if
I drove an older car.
I could go out for dinner every day if I didn’t
decide to build equity in a home.
I could have filet mignon every night but that
would mean giving up something more
important like the occasional trip to Kitchener,
Guelph, Cambridge or Toronto to visit friends.
When it gets right down to it, I decided,
several years ago actually, when I was still in
university, that I was more interested in having
a good life than a life of plenty.
This isn’t because I was forced to make the
decision, this was because I had to decide
which career path I wanted to take.
A lot of journalists told me don’t take
journalism. They said take a broader subject
matter so I can get out if I ever feel the need to
or if I ever need to move on.
One said, in exactly these words, that I
would never get rich reporting the news.
“That,” I responded, “isn’t a problem. If I
wanted to make money I would have studied
something shorter and more practical.”
Apparently that made me a part of a
minority.
As I write this I’m aware that it shares
some very similar messages to a previous
column I wrote about taking time to enjoy
what you have, but this is about a little bit
more than that.
This isn’t about items owning you or you
owning items, it’s about the level of life you’re
looking to live.
Some of the most amazing people I have
ever met were content with surviving.
They would take whatever work they could
to just pay the bills long enough to keep the
debtors off their back.
They did this because they didn’t want to
reach for that two-storey house with a two car
garage at the cost of their sanity and their
freedom.
Me, I’m somewhere in the middle.
I think it’s important to have a goal in mind,
but I’m more interested in a bungalow with
just enough bedrooms for my family than I am
in a slice of suburbia.
I’m interested in having a home and some
job security and I’m interested in living
slightly above the ability to pay my bills.
I am not, however, interested in being rich.
Sure, I’d love to win the lottery and never
have to worry about making that next Ontario
Student Assistance Program (OSAP) payment.
I’d love to never have to concern myself with
making sure I set aside enough for my
insurance and car payments. I would love to
live without that worry and I can’t name a
single person who wouldn’t.
However, I’m not about to sacrifice the
things I enjoy; be it my job or be it my sanity,
to make enough money to live “comfortably”.
I’d rather live on a tight budget and remind
myself that there are people out there who do
far worse jobs for more money and are
miserable because of it.
I guess the point is be happy, and change if
you’re not.
Levels of survival we will accept
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den