Four Temptations of Country Music 

Some moneyed Christians are big fans of country music.  I have in mind the affluent ones who live in gated communities and send their children to private schools and also middle-class Christians who live a bit more simply.  Country music makes them feel rooted and authentic.  It signals to others that they are really down to earth and of the people; that they have their priorities straight and don't sweat the small stuff.   It makes them feel non-elite.  These moneyed Christians may wear cowboy hats and boots, too.  And some of them are big hunters.  They like guns and don't mind killing things.

A word of disclosure here.  I am talking to myself here.  I am not a gun-lover or a hunter; and I am not a rich person by the standards of multi-millionaires.  I live in a somewhat modest suburb in Arkansas.  But I am certainly rich by global standards and by the standards of many who live close to me.  I'm a middle-class white American who has health insurance, vacation money, a nice living room, a great partner, and two wonderful dogs.  I have never been hungry.  I not only listen to country music, I play it in a band.  I'm a moneyed Christian who likes Johnny Cash.  
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Jesus' Call to Downward Mobility

It's the Christian part that makes me question my affiliation with the country music fan-base.  I don't think Jesus was much into guns and killing things, and I can't quite picture him with cowboy boots; but the real issue runs deeper.  Jesus tells us not just to serve the poor but to be in community with the poor.  He invites us into a lifestyle of downward mobility, of simplicity, of freedom from possessions. of service.  This kind of life includes a rejection of consumer-driven values, a willing embrace of voluntary simplicity, and an internal growth into what the Franciscan writer, Richard Rohr, calls soul knowledge.

“Soul knowledge sends you in the opposite direction from consumerism. It’s not addition that makes one holy, but subtraction: stripping the illusions, letting go of the pretense, exposing the false self, breaking open the heart and the understanding, not taking my private self too seriously. Conversion is more about unlearning than learning. In a certain sense we are on the utterly wrong track. We are climbing while Jesus is descending, and in that we reflect the pride and the arrogance of Western civilization, usually trying to accomplish, perform, and achieve. This is our real operative religion. Success is holy! We transferred much of that to our version of Christianity and made the Gospel into spiritual consumerism. The ego is still in charge. There is not much room left for God when the false self takes itself and its private self-development that seriously. All we can really do is get ourselves out of the way, and honestly, we can’t even do that. It is done to us through this terrible thing called suffering.”

As far as I can tell, we moneyed Christians are not much into downward mobility or soul knowledge.  Many of us measure success by fame, fortune, and power, shoring up what Rohr calls our false self.  We may also valorize country music stars who also measure success this way, and we support a music industry that does the same.  We are, at our worst, ego-driven puppets of consumer culture, wearing cowboy hats.  Deep down we know that there's a contradiction between worshipping success and following Jesus.  Our appreciation of country music wrongly brings with it a sense of pride that we are "authentic" when we are not, and that we are "of the people" when, in truth, we are trapped inside bubbles of privilege and power.  Our love of country music makes us feel good about ourselves, when we ought to feel guilty and change our ways, committing ourselves to a path of simplicity and solidarity. 

The Four Temptations

Additionally, this love of country music carries with it four temptations that, taken together, are utterly toxic for American life today. 

• The Cult of Authenticity: believing that country music is more authentic than, say, classical music, rock music, hio-hop, or electronic music and that when you listen to it, you are being "authentic."
• The Myth of the Perfect Past: believing that country music is the music of a mythic (agrarian) past where people lived simply and had core virtues.  
• The Lure of Folk Nationalism: believing that country music is of the people, by the people, and for the people, with "people" understood in ethnic and racial terms.
• Prejudice for "peasants" over the urban poor: believing that country music is authentic because it comes from the rural poor, not the urban poor.​

When we fall into these four temptations, we contribute to a political culture which is toxic to American life.  This is one reason why, in certain circumstances, it is necessary to give up on Johnny Cash and listen to other music.  Or not listen at all.  Don't let the American flags are political rallies fool you.  Be careful.

​- Jay McDaniel

Giving Up on Johnny Cash

against the politics of nostalgia
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It's time to stop romanticizing the good old days, thinking of everything in local and hyper-personal terms, playing songs with three chords, avoiding conceptual complexity, trying to bring back vinyl records, talking about 'roots' as if they were always good, pretending that Christianity is the only true religion, and wallowing in the familiarity of white, patriarchal culture -- all in the name of being 'authentic' or 'real.'  If that's what Johnny Cash means to you, give him up.

If you're into punk or metal and hate country music, you're not off the hook.  It's also time to abandon the idea that deconstructive melancholy, or self-preoccupied irony, or pure rage, is somehow more authentic than sincerity with an element of play added.

Here's the point.  The rugged individual is a myth; authenticity is but protective armor we wear to pretend that we are better than others.  Nobody is more or less authentic than anybody else.  We're all just struggling to make meaning of our lives in a world filled with violence, injustice, poignancy, and beauty.  It's time to take off the armor and expand our collective imaginations beyond what capitalism allows.

When Johnny Cash gazes down at the world today with all its violence and selfishness, its pettiness and greed, I bet even Johnny Cash is giving up on "Johnny Cash."  Something tells me he's wishing we'd get over nostalgia and work for a new and better world.

Against the politics of nostalgia 

At least this is what I glean from the article below, written by Adam Harper, called "On Music and Folk Politics."  Harper is the author of Infinite Music: Imagining the Next Millennium of Music-Making and editor a great blog: Rouge's Foam: Excessive Aesthetics.

In the article Harper critiques the folk politics of kinds of music what were once progressive, but that have lost or abandoned their calling and fallen into self-absorbed, hyper-individualized false consciousness obsessed with nostalgia.  By progressive he does not mean namby-pamby liberal.  He means an unflinching critique of capitalist culture combined with actions aimed at helping bring about a post-capitalist world that is creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind.  He wants us to hear the beckoning of the future and not romanticize the givens of the past.  In this he shares and intensifies the approach of, say, the philosophers Philip Clayton and Justin Heinzekehr in Organic Marxism or, for that matter, Pope Francis in Laudato Si.  See Creative Socialism: It's What Happens When Humanity Grows Up.

According to Harper we can't really do this alone.  We need to expand of our collective imaginations beyond what capitalism allows; and recognize, again in the spirit of process philosophy, that no one ever really does anything alone.  It's time to stop valorizing singer-songwriters, too, even Bob Dylan, when we imagine them as 'creating' something all by themselves, without dependence on other people present and past.  Who really creates anything all by himself or herself?  The answer is nobody -- not even the Soul of the universe, with its song of peace and creativity and love.  Even God had to create the world out of preexisting chaos.

The real need today is to get over the folk politics of nostalgia and self-impressed authenticity; working together to help invent what can happen next:  It is to stop making a god the way things used to be, which they never really were; and listen to the call of the not-yet.  Adam Harper suggests that progressive electronic music, created and shared collectively, may have a better chance of inspiring us that the false consciousness of once progressive folk artists.  Maybe so!  See Open Space Calling: Holly Herndon's Platform as Political Theology.  For my part, I'll keep listening to Johnny Cash as well as Holly Herndon, but also hoping that I avoid even the slightest hint of being 'authentic' in my tastes.

​-- Jay McDaniel

​On Music and Folk Politics

by Adam Harper, reposted from Verso, December 2015

When, in Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams critique the collection of tendencies within the contemporary left they call 'folk politics,' they could also be lamenting the aesthetics that now dominates those areas of popular music that were once progressive. Whether it's underground, or 'indie,' or even happens to be in the charts, contemporary popular music routinely 'chooses the familiarities of the past over the unknowns of the future;... habitually chooses the small over the large' and 'value[s] withdrawal or exit rather than building a broad counter-hegemony'. For independent music as in folk politics, 'organisations and communities are to be transparent, rejecting in advance any conceptual mediation, or even modest amounts of complexity' and both 'emphasis[e] the local and the authentic, the temporary and the spontaneous, the autonomous and the particular'. Srnicek and Williams show that these strategies arose and achieved much in the special political circumstances of the mid-twentieth century, and again, as aesthetic strategies in popular music, they arose during the same period in the countercultural atmosphere of jazz, rock, punk and, indeed, folk musics. And for both folk politics and folk-political music, the time has come to invent what happens next.

Srnicek and Williams point to advanced technological organisation as a possible solution to the political impasse of the left. Countercultural popular music has often been mistrustful of technology, from the outrage against Bob Dylan's electrification right up to the compulsory vinyl authenticity of recent years. Even electronic dance music, which as it first developed was seen as a locus of futurist and utopian practice, is insisting upon its roots at every turn, either positively and insipidly (Disclosure, Daft Punk, Jamie XX) or with a self-awareness that typically results in deconstructive melancholy (Burial, Actress, Lee Gamble). Analogue and classic are for the true believers, while digital, ridden into town by the internet, is seen as a corruption of and a decline in IRL realism and the ever-important folk-political capital.
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But in certain circles of underground music, the times might be a-changing. While folk-political musical aesthetics and its discourse was quite happy to base itself online for over a decade (see Pitchfork, Gorilla Vs Bear), it seems as if a point of termination shock has been reached, a point where the sheer weight of the digital world as both an everyday fact of life and as a creative opportunity has overtaken the resistance to it. The underground is in the middle of what might prove to be a shift from CDs, vinyl and cassettes sold through small labels to digital streaming and downloads on platforms like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, often supplied for free. Herein lies the beginnings, perhaps, of a 'popular political control of new technologies'- as long as they can be controlled democratically and not at the behest of neoliberal capital and potentially outmoded attitudes to copyright.
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Alongside this shift in distribution has been a shift in aesthetics away from analogue archaism to digital futurism. In its darker moments, I have considered the latter aesthetic comparable to 'accelerationism,' the recently theorised position that the most progressive strategy is to accelerate capitalism rather than withdraw from it. Srnicek and Williams called an earlier manifestation of the position they would take inInventing the Future a 'Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,' but in their book they have abandoned the term. It had been heavily associated with the nihilistic, crypto-fascist ideas of the likes of Nick Land, and has come to carry the connotation of a dangerous flirtation with a sublime and evil digital dissolution. Plenty of underground music can be heard in this light, whether literally accelerating into a reprogrammed, post-human future (as in the jungle of the 1990s, or the cybernetic club sounds of labels like Night Slugs) or whether taking on an apparently ambivalent, even sarcastic veil of capitalist and/or technocratic propaganda (as with the enfants terribles of the online label PC Music or the recently emerged genre of vaporwave, which is predominantly circulated through free zip files).

But the difference between this music and the techno-progressive future Srnicek and Williams are the layers of irony and exoticism that often go with it. Whether attempting to withdraw from capitalism, technology and technocracy into folk-political aesthetics or whether adopting them critically, both aesthetic camps risk not just an inability to 'expand our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows' but can equally accelerate capital as commodities (wittingly or unwittingly, irony or no). Perhaps another solution is possible, one that neither performs the simplistic rejection of techno-capital or performs an aestheticised alienation from within it.

​Net-based labels like Quantum Natives, NONand White Colours, as well as countless artists acting alone through Soundcloud and Bandcamp, might be rejecting folk-political aesthetics without accelerating its opposite number, and, for that matter, they distribute their music for free online.

Naturally, though, music cannot be free until society is. The two domains are not just intimately linked, but one and the same: music is a form of social communication. There is little point to a culture of free music-making unless it exists within a prosperous, non-precarious post-work economy. Otherwise it would simply be those people that have the time, resources and requisite enculturation who would be entitled to make and consume music - a musical world neither diverse nor equal. But if Inventing the Future can also be read, implicitly, as a reflection on the production of culture and aesthetics - a critique of today and a sketch of tomorrow - then popular music and 'popular political control of new technologies' can perhaps go forward hand in hand.