Double Flee A

Country music. Once the gritty refuge of honky-tonk outlaws, it's now another marketing superhighway leading from the radio to the Wal-Mart music section. Safe to say, its glory days are gone and nearly forgotten.

Today we examine the strange case of Clint Black, country musician. For it was he who made me laugh harder than any other single person has in a long time, when I heard a song of his playing over the loudspeaker at Elko about a month back. You're going to need a little background.

I am from the hills of Tennessee, the dirty south, where despite the invasion of motel chains and restaurants (cracker barrel being the most notably ridiculous; a corporation that has met no resistance from the people whose cuisine they analyzed, sent to a lab, reinvented, reconstituted with hot water, and sold back to southerners in a brown paper wrapper as down-home-a-licious (no offense to anyone who's ever bought me breakfast there the morning I got out of jail, mom, but you know what I mean)), it's uncommon to trust outsiders. A fake accent can be heard a mile away, and folk wisdoms abound. Not ones like "a likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility", but more like "a clean conscience makes a soft pillow", or, "still waters run deep".

It's these sometimes understated aphorisms that Clint Black grabbed like a fingerhold on the rock face to country stardom, and that fingerhold turned out to be more of a glass elevator. I noticed this while living there when I was about nineteen. It was part of my deconstruction of country music, which was necessary so that I could bitch about it precisely enough to justify the changing of the car radio with whomever I was riding with. You can't just say "this sucks" and get people to consent to change the channel. They need a reason. Here's mine.

Clint Black is an excessively didactic songwriter. There are always lessons to learn when listening to his music. A Clint Black song is more likely than any other to make you go "hmm", and if going "hmm" is your thing, great. However, going "hmm" is not my thing.

I eventually convinced everyone who drove me around that I had learned every lyric of Clint's that I needed to know to enjoy a long, wise, cowboylike life and they, somewhat stunned by my energy on the subject, agreed to change it to classic rock station (there were still a few good ones in the south at the time).

Then, many city-dwelling years since I had heard anything by Clint Black, I was at Elko speedway, walking to my seat, getting ready for the races to start, and vaguely hearing the speakers wheedling a modest euphoria out of the spectators, when I noticed what I was listening to. (The first person who can tell me where I got the following simile gets to choose the next celebrity for the oven mitt.) What happened in my brain was like the aural equivalent of seeing a picture of two silhoutted faces turn into a white candlestick. It was Clint Black, but not a Clint Black song I had ever heard before. I heard the end of a chorus, and then stopped in my tracks. No way my brain could process it at first, it was too perfect. Clint was milking it as hard as he could:

Wherever you go there you are
You can run from yourself but you won't get far
You can dive to the bottom of your medicine jar
But wherever you go there you are

As you can imagine, I laughed, all alone, and was a little embarassed, because though my reason for doing so was good, it would have been nearly impossible to explain.

Have a good day.

posted by dale @ 9:45 AM