08.19.10

Another Tea Party Band

Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll, Stumble and Fail at 1:18 pm by George Smith

“They ain’t us,” the guy sings.

De facto, Lynyrd Skynyrd 2.0 or 3.0 is the ‘best’ Tea Party band.

They espouse the same white-man’s-paranoia in the folk videos posted yesterday, only with great singing and musicality.

And they want the same demographic as Darryl Worley with “Keep the Change.”

You see the mainstreamed face of extremism, those who hold the central belief that it’s the others — the lazy poor who will take your money, the enemy within which hates the soldiers, those who don’t pray in public — pitted against all the good people, now in rebellion, who believe in guns and the bible.

Skynyrd’s profile now, beyond the Nugent bottom-out-of-sight casino circuit, is boosted only by classic rock radio oldies programming and the involvement of Fox News, in this case — Sean Hannity.

Ironically, it’s their only leg up in the music world. Although revered by every act on country music television, the industry will never play this Lynyrd Skynyrd. With an eye to building a younger audience, one that likes Taylor Swift and Lady Antebellum way more than Toby Keith, they’re atavistic bad news. (Even despite Van Zant’s hit, “Get Right With the Man,” from a few years back.)

But Sean Hannity has Skynyrd on the bill of his Freedom Rally slated for Tulsa. The local newspaper discusses the cognitive dissonances:

Consider the title of the band’s latest album, “God & Guns.” Besides being one word away from being U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe’s platform since 1994, the song contains the following lines:

“There ain’t nobody safe no more

So you say your prayers and you thank the Lord

For that peace maker in the dresser drawer

God and guns keep us strong

That’s what this country was founded on

Well we might as well give up and run

If we let them take our God and guns.”

It’s a long way from the sentiments expressed in the band’s 1975 song, “Saturday Night Special,” which includes the lines “Hand guns are made for killin’/Ain’t no good for nothin’ else.”

A little more than the reporter lets on.

Most of Lynyrd Skynyrd is long dead.

Half of the band was wiped out in the famous plane crash of 1977, one which ended its recording career. Almost all the rest — gone from hard-living and the disease and misadventure associated with it since. The only surviving member actually in the band now is guitarist Gary Rossington.

One could make a discussion about how this band’s writing differs from the subtlety of “Sweet Home Alabama” and the mythology that evolved from the song over the years:

“In Birmingham they love the governor/Boo boo boo”

But it’s probably more logical to attribute the loss in intellect and spirit to the fact that 90 percent of the act is dead. And now they do what they can do for the Nugent circuit. Boo boo boo.

Like so many others, it’s quite something to make the mass delusion — “they’re gonna take my guns and my bible” — your defining world view as well as the backbone of a record by a band with a famous name.

Mass delusion, in fact, may be a little too mild a term.

Shared psychosis is more accurate, a sickness built on group fear in a hard time, nourished and stimulated by cynical and very real villainy, Fox News’ broadcast of barely veiled intolerance, always directed at the others. It’s a search for scapegoats and backstabbers. You’ve tuned into Glenn Beck and one day he’s jabbering about the Weimar Republic and how a video snip of Liza Minelli in Cabaret is sexually decadent, the next — how the country was founded to be a theocracy and that this has been expunged from history books.

It may be cause for alarm in other western nations. Observers can’t help but see that a noticeable portion of the country appears incapable of rational thought, unreachable through reasoned argument.

Ignorance and Fox News alone, for example, do not precisely explain why one in five people believe the president is Muslim, today’s big news.

What’s certain is that this won’t turn around anytime soon. The old journalist structures left in the mainstream media aren’t up to the task. To them, the one-in-five story is just another news item, one to be leavened with a paragraph saying the president does go to church and pray. (Or worse, finding a semi-egghead in 30 minutes to provide a few quotes for something that takes on an air of refinement and reason, blithely putting most of it away to human nature.)

You think the Skynyrd 2.0 or 3.0 guys believe what they read in newspapers? Rhetorical question.

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Those who pay attention to these things may have noticed that a good number of modern country artists scurry sub rosa to Fox News when presented with the opportunity. For example, the musically apolitical Trace Adkins — his new album, Cowboy’s Back in Town, is actually quite good — is the latest example.

Another mental inconsistency in the white man’s country music is how so many of the manly guy artists make a big deal out of supporting the troops. They do it in song. They blabber it in interview. God bless ’em, they even play overseas and publicize it as much as they can. But for all the public devotion to the honor of service, not one single man among them, strapping men of action as they are portrayed by Nashville, took the example of Pat Tillman and ran with it.

DD has it figured this way: It’s overcompensation. As committed as they are to the mythology of their music and reverence to Uncle Sam, they’re subconsciously feeling guilty as hell over not stepping up to be in the war. So they feel they can work it off with penance.

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