PrettyFakes

So this past weekend, I was out of town; I had to give a talk at a thing. Had some downtime in the hotel to practice my presentation, and, for reasons that I can’t quite recall, I left the TV on Great American Country (GAC) while I did so. A few things that I noticed about the contemporary country music video:

Common Trends

1. A “hot” girl. I put hot in scare-quotes because the girl may not actually be hot—she may indeed look a little bit like Peter Falk—but she will clearly be made up in a manner that evokes hotness, and other characters in the video will react to her as though she is in fact hot. I suspect they may just be afraid.

2. Water and water sports. Including one video in which a man plays a banjo while riding a jet ski, thus honoring the time-honored traditions of Appalachia. Seriously, though, at least a third of the videos I saw featured women rolling in the surf, men diving off of cliffs, or—distressingly common—inappropriately attired bands playing their electrical instruments in knee-deep water. I assume that the electrocution rate for impressionable teenage country music fans is higher than in the general population.

3. People with $200 haircuts whose marriages are nevertheless falling apart against a backdrop of unpainted, ramshackle houses. My guess is they’re arguing over finances.

4. Desperate attempts to appropriate some cheap gravitas (“grav-grabbing,” I call it) by singing earnest paeans to the country styles and artists of a bygone age, performed by artists on record labels that quit releasing music by those artists or in that style a long, long time ago.

5. Whenever something is meant to be a memory, it is always represented as a flickering, slightly staticky image, as though it were being viewed on an old television, even though these are memories of things that allegedly really happened to the singers, not of something they saw on TV. There’s a pop culture paper to be written there.

6. Videos conceived and directed by an 8th grade AV club tweaking on crystal meth and Red Bull. My favorite of these was for a band called Trick Pony’s cover of Bonnie Tyler’s “It’s a Heartache,” a song I remember well from the 80s, as you may. First, now, say what you will about Trick Pony, you cannot doubt their absolute passion for demographics. This is a band with something for everyone who isn’t looking that hard to find anything: there’s a “hot” girl singer, a studly cowboy guitarist, and a gangly bassist with a funny hat who is clearly intended to attract the coveted “alternative” demographic that labels were trying so desperately to reach in the 1990s.

So, I mean, “It’s a Heartache,” right? Not a real thinker of a song. But the directors clearly think it’s the Mikado or something. You’ve got the band playing on the beach, with the “hot” singer rolling about in the surf—so far, so par. But then there are also televisions strewn all about the beach, a bold use of mise-en-scene that clearly indicates that this video is about something, dammit. Shots of the band performing, grimly, and the singer surf-lolling—also, impossibly, grimly—are intercut with scenes from the story on the TV: a husband and wife, on the verge of divorce, decide to give it one last chance. Lacking imagination, they arrange a romantic meal at home, but when he makes one last stop to buy the wine, he gets caught in the crossfire of a liquor store holdup, takes a bullet, and dies. It’s the most insanely portentous and melodramatic thing I’ve seen in some time, and it’s all somehow meant to have something to do with “It’s a Heartache.” Honestly, Japanese detergent commercials could learn a thing or two about sheer straight-faced nonsequiturality from this video.

Country Music Stars Headed for Padded Cells

1. So, there’s this band called Montgomery Gentry, and I think they may the raddest concept band ever. Just judging from the two (!) MG videos I saw, here’s their story: a colonial-era Puritan minister is expelled from the settlement for pedophilia and doomed to walk the earth for a thousand generations without updating his hat. Finally, he meets up with an addle-brained, washed-up NFL defensive end, and they wander into the barren desert, where they take peyote and hallucinate a narrow range of jingoistic images. I would pay upwards of 7 dollars to see a rock-n-roll musical that fleshes out this story.

2. I also saw the video for Faith Hill’s “Mississippi Girl.” I was intrigued, being from Mississippi, but this was, well, this was 4 minutes of Faith Hill and some friendly butterflies frolicking on an old wooden bridge over a sparkling stream running through a verdant field. Funny, I didn’t know the Shire was in Mississippi. People: Faith Hill is from STAR. I mean, she says it right in the first line of the song. I’ve been to Star. I did not see any hobbits, although I did meet a guy who makes his own chain mail. And yeah, there are butterflies in Star, but you do not want to mess with ‘em.

You know, in the old days—and I watched a lot of country music videos back in the old days, back when CMT still had singing cows—it was just George Strait, standing very still, pretending to sing. Who knew that was the aesthetic apex of country music video?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 4:17 pm and is filed under In Mississippi, In the South, Professor Fury, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.