Brooks & Dunn
Jul 27 2003
Last week was a tough one, as it brought about an end to my long overdue vacation
and then quickly deteriorated into two days of management level meetings. The
weekend that follows a vacation is never much of a weekend, so I veered off the
beaten path and accepted an invitation to see Brooks & Dunn down at the Hi Fi
Buys … uh … Coca Cola … uh … Coors Light … uh …
Corporate-cared-for Amphitheatre. The last time I had seen a country show was
sometime in the early eighties when I saw the Alabama
Roll
On tour. After that, I had to shy away from country music seeing as I was
trying to be cool in a small South Georgia town, where your degree of coolness
has to be figured by the distance you maintain from the local mainstream. The
local mainstream was of course country and so I missed country music’s rise
into pop culture. As a result, I’m left with the notion that country music
is David
Allan Coe on my dad’s cassette player, wailing out “Just divorced
was written on the window of the car it looked like a tombstone parked outside
the local bar …” or bluegrass which I later decided challenges the
classical notion that music is either Dionysian or Apollonian. Every once and
a while, I check in on mainstream country and every time I find it embarrassingly
intermingled with mainstream rock, which is embarrassingly intermingled with overt
commercialism. So, while the Brooks & Dunn’s music was pretty good,
I was expecting to hear them refer to themselves as “Coors Light’s
Brooks and Dunn” since the show was the “Coors Light Brooks &
Dunn Neon Circus” or something like that. I left realizing that mainstream
is a genre and Country is still David Allan Coe and Bluegrass, rock is still Operation
Ivy, the Misfits, and the Pixies and commercialism still abhors originality. After
the Brooks & Dunn show, I was not persuaded to either buy their new album
“Red Dirt Road” or a 12-pack of Coors Light, instead I’m headed
to the record store in search of albums by Flatt
& Scruggs and Béla
Fleck. And if that ain't country, you can kiss my …