09.04.12
Johnny Rebel
So desperate is Hank Williams Jr. to sell his new record, he’s resorted to appealing to the worst, incorporating into his set a nightly ritual of offense:
” ‘We’ve got a Muslim for a President who hates cowboys, hates cowgirls, hates fishing, hates farming, loves gays, and we hate him,’ Williams Jr. bellowed [at the Ft. Worth Stockyards in Texas.] The Dallas Sun reported — the crowd responded with a loud cheer.”
“The 63-year-old singer began his anti-gay commentary a few songs earlier, mocking ‘queer guitar pickers’ in the middle of ‘All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down’ before moving on to his next target: Liberal politicians, who he told to ‘move to Mexico’ …” writes the free-lance correspondent for the Texas newspaper.
As with Ted Nugent, it’s code. Hank, Jr., uses slurs that won’t quite get him thrown out of his big gigs like railing about the n—– in DC and faggots would.
Now that he’s gone down this road any friends he had at record companies in Nashville will deem him radioactive. He’ll be financing everything by himself.
It’s worth contrasting the bigots like Hank Jr., with the Dixie Chicks.
Natalie Manes delivered a mild putdown of GWB in Milton Keynes, England. The wrath of the country music establishment came down on the band and cost it a chart-topping career.
Hank Williams, Jr., hasn’t been a chart-topper for a long time. But country music won’t flay the hide off him like it did the women.
That there’s your hypocrisy, folks, a tacit admission through lack of action that those who package and deliver modern country know well the nature of the audience. The same as the Republican party — white, angry, loutish and frequently worse, masquerading as the upholders and preservers of American traditions and pieties.
Warmth, the pure milk of human kindness, hospitality, civility, empathy and tolerance.
Functionally, Hank Williams, Jr. has turned into a supersized, mainstreamed Johnny Rebel, a very minor 60’s country artist notable for his racist sentiments.
Rebel, aka Pee Wee Trahan, however, had the stones to put all the words he really meant in the titles and lyrics of his records, all of which you can hear on YouTube.
Which makes Hank, Jr., also something of a spineless wretch.
A home-made YouTube video of his “Don’t Tread On Me,’ made by a random Tea Party bigot is what he wanted. And that was his reward.