{"id":8,"date":"2012-03-13T19:07:03","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T19:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8"},"modified":"2012-05-01T21:14:47","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T21:14:47","slug":"words-sounds-and-images-of-common-and-uncommon-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8","title":{"rendered":"WORDS, SOUNDS AND IMAGES OF COMMON (AND UNCOMMON) CULTURE"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Fb-Button\"\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>
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I\u2019m Kevin Lynch (or keve2109) from Milwaukee, and welcome to Culture Currents (Vernaculars Speak), my new blog. I subtitled it Words, Sounds and Images of Common (and uncommon) Culture. But it could also be Rooting around the Subculture. One of my notions is that subculture these days becomes mainstream culture very quickly, through co-opting or larger forces of consumption that bypass commercial or corporate marketing, which seems good.
\nSo yes, it will be basically a culture blog. I\u2019m a veteran, award-winning arts journalist, writer and visual artist who carries a curious little paradox around inside him, which I like to think of as my little shrunken head, a la Queequeg, one of my cultural heroes, fictional as he is. You see, I\u2019m a lifelong Midwesterner with a hankering for the sea that seems to be\u00a0part of what keeps my spirits restless. So the \u201csullen white surf\u201d theme photo above suits my inherent discontent to a \u201cT,\u201d as I suspect it did Herman Melville\u00a0 and his contemporary writers in what Lewis Mumford called “The Golden Age\u201d of American letters.\u00a0That literary generation has fallen into certain disrepute in some academic quarters but that doesn\u2019t change the quality of their writing. I try to reach across the American spectrum of creative writing but for now I remain fascinated by what appears to be\u00a0its true Genesis in the mid-1800s — especially Melville, Whitman, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson.<\/p>\n

As for using this e-medium, I\u2019m just beginning to accept James Fallows contention in a recent Atlantic<\/em> article that the new media is perhaps \u201ctransforming\u201d journalistic communications, by giving people what they want rather than what somebody thinks they need. So this blog won\u2019t be good-for-you hard reporting, though politics will inevitably seep in, and links to good, solid journalism. But I will share if I think you\u2019ll benefit from it in any sense of the word. That\u2019s a fundamental motive for any culture writer, it seems to me.<\/p>\n

So even if I do reel\u00a0in some Melville quotes and perspectives from that era, this blog will be plenty contemporary, I promise\u00a0with,\u00a0I hope, trenchant and provocative comments on another interest in American culture that grew into a personal obsession of sorts in recent years. It\u2019s a remarkably encompassing phenomenon that nevertheless I try to hornswaggle\u00a0with a rusty-sounding brand: North American Roots Music. Maybe\u00a0lassoing\u00a0this sprawling phenomenon is a bit like trying to catch tumbling tumble weeds, dancing and sweeping across the Great Plains, and into the Heartland and whirling and twisting back down into the Southwest. So I\u2019ll be wandering and chasing, and pausing to savor the voices in those winds.<\/p>\n

So I hope you don\u2019t mind following\u00a0some of my extended metaphors and shambling similes. I’m\u00a0tracking down a new generation of singer songwriters \u2013 a wonderfully motley crew \u2013 who are\u00a0speaking through\u00a0their lyrics and music with\u00a0great care for the composed word. Here is why I think our indigenous vernaculars are serving us better than ever and worth paying attention to. So\u00a0I also feel a sense of the restless, even slightly bedeviled, wanderer because I\u2019ll put a confession right up front: I\u2019ve always been fascinated by North American roots music but my very difficult (for me) divorce in 2007 cast me along the cruel shoals with countless forsaken spouses. There I rediscovered, and truly appreciated for the first time, Townes Van Zandt\u2019s mournfully poetic\u00a0soul salve. If you must know, \u201cFor the Sake of the Song\u201d seems to nail my marriage like a dolorous Grim Reaper.
\nBut I soon realized this man was right up there with Dylan and Young as a songwriter. I was unable to live without Van Zandt\u2019s music daily for three or four months, something I can\u2019t say about any other artist. Enough said about the marriage and \u201cart therapy\u201d though a few \u201cvernacular voyeurs\u201d I\u2019m sure will proceed to poke around in the psyche of my postings if they must.<\/p>\n

Truth is, roots music always had a hold on me in a way that I suspect entangles us all as real Americans, whether we\u2019re aware of it or not. That\u2019s okay, but it\u2019s a reason why I write about it now as much as any art form, or at least try to. I\u2019m really fascinated by the youngest generation of rootsy\u00a0singer-songwriters who seem to embrace their elder\u2019s style and sensibility while making it their own. I suspect they understand it\u2019s their own heritage as much as their parents.\u00a0The American song lyric\u00a0as a medium has matured and grown painfully with our vast, often self-deluding\u00a0but empowering\u00a0 “sense of destiny,” like our country’s whole, hoary democratic experiment. So I\u2019m interested in lyrics that you can (thankfully) hear\u00a0\u2014 as its own literary form, as well as the culture the songs and styles have spawned. Some of the forbearers\u00a0I may mention include of course the aforementioned Dylan, Van Zandt and Young, and Robbie Robertson, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Guy Clark, Kate and Anna McGarrigle,\u00a0Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne,Patti Smith,\u00a0Lou Reed, John Lennon, Tom Waits, Warrren\u00a0Zevon, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, Phil Ochs, Paul Simon, Robert Hunter, John Hiatt, Gram Parsons, Gene Clark, the individuals and \u201csuper\u201d collectives of The Flatlanders and The Highwaymen, and the Brits Richard Thompson and Nick Drake.<\/p>\n

A second-generation, very roughly calculated, includes Rosanne Cash, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Jim Lauderdale, Bill Camplin, Nanci Griffith, Robert Earl Keen, Patty Griffin, Dar Williams, Buddy and Julie Miller, the Jayhawks, Mary Chapin Carpenter.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a fan of virtually all these artists but the ones that really excite me for the future are the youngest ones whom I feel grateful for carrying on and reinvigorating these traditions rather than discarding them. Who do I mean? There are several literal and worthy offspring like Jakob Dylan, Justin Townes Earle, Shooter Jennings and Hank Williams III and Holly Williams and Pieta Brown (the daughter of the great Iowa troubadour Greg Brown and step daughter of the marvelous Iris DeMent, who I hope still writes when she\u2019s so moved). James McMurtry\u00a0also fits the literary offspring category even if his brilliant father Larry doesn\u2019t write songs. Among those simply gifted young songwriter-performers are the remarkable Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Hayes Carll, Ryan Bingham, Dierks\u00a0Bentley, Laura Viers, Peter Mulvey, Jeffrey Foucault, Alison Krauss, Diana Jones, The Avett\u00a0Brothers, the Uncle Tupelo gang, Donna the Buffalo, The Cowboy Junkies, Josh Ritter, The Pines, Slaid\u00a0Cleaves, The Counting Crows, the Old 97s’ Rhet Miller, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, again, to name only some notables.
\nYou get a sense of this new generation.
\nI don\u2019t mention deep pioneers of roots music but of course they range from the Carter family to Hazel Dickens, Woody Guthrie and the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, etc. etc.
\nThen there\u2019s the blues revival \u2014 absolutely seminal to roots per se but in terms of songwriting and original performance of good two revival generations include Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, Paul Butterfield, John Hammond Jr., Al Green, Jimi\u00a0Hendrix, Otis Redding, Ted Hawkins, Taj\u00a0Mahal, Jack Bruce, Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter, Chris Smither, Paul Germania, Robert Cray, Rory Block, Trucks and Tedeschi, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Chris Whitley, Kelly Joe Phelps,\u00a0Otis Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Tracy Nelson, KoKo\u00a0Taylor, Magic Sam, Sue Foley, Robert Randolph, Mose Allison, Eric Bibb, Keb Mo, and many more.<\/p>\n

Forgive my listing all this musical laundry. I only hope it feels (or will feel) eternally fresh for you. This is something I feel is alive and moving and of course very human and yet as elusive in ways as tumbling tumbleweeds, which is also why I love its unassuming nature as art.
\nMy seemingly belated conspicuous arrival at roots music (I interviewed Bill Monroe in 1982, and covered plenty of all roots music intermittently) stems from my critical faculties (as a long time \u201cfine arts\u201d critic and jazz writer) or perhaps snobbery, some might suspect, concerning \u201cfolk music,\u201d which can be the equivalent of karaoke music but without the courage of a little alcohol, and thus can still be insufferable and as self-important as Miss Piggy on a very tall mound of something ripe.<\/p>\n

So I will be commenting on whatever mode of cultural expression — the high, low and in between\u00a0— that seems interesting and timely, or timeless.\u00a0Yet some of the 20th century\u2019s most compelling and enduring music has emitted from so-called “folk” artists, who almost by definition often freely mine more specific vernaculars like blues, rock \u2018n roll, R&B, country and bluegrass.\u00a0As Louis Armstrong famously said \u201call music is folk music, horses can\u2019t sing.\u201d Thus, I happily set aside any leftover snootiness and gobble up wonderfully gritty and caloric glories of American art wherever reaches my senses.
\nOf course, my taste has its limits and I hear on the radio any number of folksy recording \u201cartists\u201d who sound too saccharine, wimpy and precious, as if ingratiating themselves into facile pop marketability. But I see this commercial impulse as a reflection of how roots music as a nominal subculture is starting to become a large part of a musical mainstream.<\/p>\n

As you may know,\u00a0at least popular two movies\u00a0which are crucial to roots music\u2019s\u00a0revival such as it is: \u201cO Brother, Where Art Thou?\u201d and \u201cThe Blues Brothers,\u201d the latter which I hold dear to my heart because my old white AMC Hornet putts along, I swear, in the background on an off ramp in the closing chase scene, filmed on Milwaukee\u2019s then-unfinished \u201cfreeway to nowhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cruising\u00a0 slowly on an off ramp seems like a symbolically appropriate\u00a0vantage point for a cultural blogger.
\nSo please, give me a holler as I\u00a0try to drive straight and keep my eye on the cultural panorama at the same time. At times “look out!” might be the best response. But at least I’m driving in a rusted-out (but American made) metaphor rather than blabbing on a cell behind a real wheel.<\/p>\n

So speak up, anyway you please, as long as you\u2019re civil and clean enough for our friendly sponsors. And if you’re on a Smart phone in your car, be smart. Pull over. If you’re dead already, blame me.
\n— Kevin Lynch<\/p>\n

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