This Tuesday had all the makings of a Monday. I walked into the grocery before the 180 degree hour of six and was greeted by the sounds of new country music. My friend in produce, Tom, was fumbling with a cart full of bananas and tuning out the world. I decided to sing along to the Larsen Blaine song by his side, delivering those ridiculous lines... "I don't know what she said, but i sure like the way that she said it...!" A carefully crafted song about a gringo in some Mexican beach resort hotel and his eyecandy maid. True love...
What is it about the talk of "senoritas" and "crossing the border" that country is so latched to? I understand the relation to cowboys and rugged terrain, but this latest draw for margaritas and pina coladas and brown-skinned mamas, what's that? And remember, the vast majority of country music listeners are Republican bigots who probably are all in for building a three-thousand mile border fence, but love a competitive minimum wage. And Acapulco, Cancun, the street boys of Juaraz and Mexicali and Tecate, fuck it man! "Bring me two pina coladas, i need one for each hand (Garth Brooks)" and "Senorita Margarita i'm as lonesome as a man can be (Tim McGraw) or "Some beach, somewhere there's nowhere to go, when you've got all day to get there. There's cold margaritas and hot senoritas... (Blake Shelton)" It sells for a reason...
Tom wasn't feeling it, a little surprised that i knew the song so well. He leaned toward me and asked in confidence, "You know why we listen to this shit everyday?" He didn't seem to mind my closet love for new country. "It's cos everybody in here is divorced and pissed off. I know... cos i did the same thing. There's something about this cheap music..." he trailed off. Quite a thought for the hour. I thanked him and got to work.
It struck me that right about the time i started listening to country music two things had happened. The first, i'd split with my first love and wasn't feeling terribly happy about life. And the second was my car attenae broke. That left me with only AM radio, which further narrowed the choices to Rush Limbaugh, NPR, oldies, circus tuba music (from across the border), and good ol' new country music. Perhaps a tape deck would have solved this tough decision.
I was driving down to Portland, Oregon in 1999 with that country music playing. I'd recently had that separation i mentioned and was feeling in loose ends. And on came an old favorite song by Mark Willis, Wish you were here. It's about this fella that has to catch a plane. He says goodbye to his baby and buys a postcard with a picture of paradise on the front, it just reads heaven. Then he gets on the plane and WHABAM! Of course, the whole thing goes down. But, wouldn't you know it. He writes her from heaven and she finds this postcard, "That just said Heaven with a picture of the ocean and the beach... and the simple words he wrote her, said he loved her and they told her, how he'd love her if his arms would reach..."
And it was too much for me. Sentimentality knows no bounds to appropriate outburst. I sang for a little while to this cheezy song and kept pushing the car forward, but i finally had to pull over. The emotional vehicular breakdown. Maybe Tom's right; broken love makes a maudlin person, susceptible to the insipid tastes of new country music. Sometimes you gotta dumb down to feel it.
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