for the '90s country naysayers

Camille Paglia has written that "country music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way." She was writing in response to the FDA's reluctant refusal of a drug "meant to elevate sexual desire in premenopausal women who are distressed by diminished libidos." I thought of that article as I read this New York Magazine article on the consequences of "turn[ing] one's body into an efficient little non-procreative machine":

Suddenly, one anxiety—Am I pregnant?—is replaced by another: Can I get pregnant? The days of gobbling down the Pill and running out to CVS at 3 a.m. for a pregnancy test recede in the distance, replaced by a new set of obsessions. The Pill didn’t create the field of infertility medicine, but it turned it into an enormous industry. Inadvertently, indirectly, infertility has become the Pill’s primary side effect. [I add this quote because if you go to the link you might not be able to get past the first few paragraphs without turning off your computer in disgust - TS]

According to Paglia, a female Viagra will fail because post-Pill pharmacology operates comfortably within the confines of the "bourgeois propriety" championed by the ascendant "white upper middle class." Nature's anti-feminist "fascism," cast into Tartarus during the sexual revolution, has slipped by the Hekatonkheires and returned to earth. So, having identified propriety as the once and future source of "sexual malaise," Paglia sets herself the task of a psychosomatic close reading of the "genuine eroticism" still observable in our cultural inheritance. Again:

Country music, with its history in the rural South and Southwest, is still filled with blazingly raunchy scenarios, where the sexes remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way."

For Paglia, it is the blazingly raunchy that preserves the old-fashioned dynamic difference of the sexes. One need look no further than the progress of a single country song plot over a couple decades in order to dispute her claim.

An excerpt from Trisha Yearwood's She's in Love With the Boy (1991):

Katie sits on her old front porch
Watching the chickens peck the ground
There ain't a whole lot goin' on tonight
In this one horse town.
Over yonder comin' up the road
In a beat up Chevy truck,
Her boyfriend Tommy is layin' on the horn,
Splashin' through the mud and the muck

Her daddy says
He ain't worth a lick
When it comes to brains
He got the short end of the stick
But Katie's young
And, man, she just don't care
She'd follow Tommy anywhere
She's in love with the boy
She's in love with the boy
She's in love with the boy
And even if they have to run away
She's gonna marry that boy someday

From Dierks Bentley's What Was I Thinking (2003):

Becky was a beauty from South Alabama
Her Daddy had a hard lock and nine pound hammer
Think he even did a little time in the slammer
What was I thinking?
She snuck out one night and met me by the front gate
Her daddy came out waving that twelve gage
We tore out the drive, he peppered my tailgate
What was I thinking?

From Nickelback's Animals (2005):

I'm driving past your house while you were sneaking out
I got the car door opened up so you can jump in on the run
Your mom don't know that you were missing
She'd be pissed if she could see the parts of you that I've been kissing.

We were parked out by the tracks . . .
When she whispered "what was that?"
The wind, I think 'cause no one else knows where we are
And that was when she started screamin'
"That's my dad outside the car!"
Oh please, the keys, they're not in the ignition
Must have wound up on the floor while
we were switching our positions
I guess they knew that she was missing
As I tried to tell her dad it was her mouth that I was kissing

In Yearwood's version, the chorus alters the meaning of the song while at the same time marking a continuity in that meaning. It imitates the reflections on time and generation common in the American culture it aims to describe. A refrain that begins as the narration and expectant prediction of the singer ("She's gonna marry that boy some day") is ultimately repeated as a conversation between Katie's mother and father that rekindles the memory of the beginning of their own love and its dynamic stillness:

My daddy said you was not worth a lick
When it came to brains you'd got the short end of the stick
But he was wrong and, honey, you are too
Katie looks at Tommy like I still look at you

It is marriage rather than the "blazingly raunchy scenario" that allows the sexes to "remain dynamically polarized in the old-fashioned way."

Bentley's version is capable of raunchiness and appears to be more dynamic -- there is attraction, sex, risk, and rebellion -- but its dynamism is that of aesthetic repetition. The boy and girl could have ended up like Katie and Tommy, but they return home only to go back out again. ("Like a bullet we were gone again . . . 'cause I was thinkin' 'bout a little white tanktop . . .") The singer will go on, even after he marries, to seek out those scenarios in which he can say, "what was I thinking?" He will forever be "as loose as ashes in the wind." He will die with the words of Tennyson's Ulysses on his lips:

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains . . . 

Marriage and children -- "life piled on life" -- that's all.

There is nothing to be said for Nickelback's version. Though it is not strictly country, Paglia gets what she asked for. Yet, as one reviewer has written of Nickelback's songwriter:

Kroeger is a genius because he knows exactly what people want and precisely how far he can go. He turned out an extremely racy album that's loaded with songs about gettin' drunk and doin' it all without breaking any taboos, and with enough love and moral authority to grease its passage into the mainstream.

Like Kroeger, mainstream country artists are very aware of the accommodations that "bourgeois propriety" has prepared for the "blazingly raunchy." But good old '90s country music -- no doubt just as bourgeois -- sounded a different theme: "how did that time become this time?" That question need not be asked in the midst of nostalgia, melancholy, or loneliness, or to mark the historical situation of a culture. When Tim McGraw repeats, "don't take the girl," or George Strait, "let me tell you a secret" and "check yes or no," this thematic question is the expression of surprise at, first, the existence of love and, second, at the realization that it does not, like everything else, pass away. And the thematic question gratefully modifies itself: "how is that time still in this time!" Love allows saying to indulge in meaningful repetition. In Sunday Morning Coming Down, Johnny Cash's loneliness pays tribute to that nearly miraculous way of marking time:

In the park I saw a daddy
With a laughing little girl that he was swinging.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school
And listened to the songs they were singing.
Then I headed down the street,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing,
And it echoed through the canyon
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

Sometimes, while listening, one can imagine that they have "a glimpse through curtain laces / Of youthful forms and youthful faces." Or at least a record of such things.