A SHOT OF POTPOURRI: Toby Keith, Mojo Nixon, Taylor Swift, and Damo Suzuki.
The godfather of bro-country aggravated my PTSD from beyond the grave and made me miss Mojo Nixon even more. Plus a little on the Swiftie Bowl and Damo Suzuki's last ride.
Last night, I was at my day job, which at present has me working weekends. The pay is good, the customers are nice, and the corporate environment there is not a toxic stress-inducing stew like my previous job at a certain blue box chain was. (And I am not kidding about the stress-inducing culture there - those of you who heard my second Toy Piano album, Toy Piano’s Second Album, now know why the album ends with a song called “Two Mugs of Coffee and an Ativan for Breakfast” - because that was my reality at the time.) But one of the coolest parts of the job is the store’s in-house radio, which is wonderfully and ridiculously diverse. On one of my first days on duty post-training, I was at the counter, heard something familiar, and upon paying closer attention realized that I was not hearing things and was indeed hearing a deep cut from the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime!
This was a doubly shocking choice. Hearing any Minutemen in a public venue that isn’t an enlightened record store, or a TouchTunes jukebox where I’d hijack the feed via my iPhone and brought up some of their tracks, is one thing. This was not “Corona” or “This Ain’t No Picnic”, the first two tracks you’d expect someone to sneak onto any mainstream outlet as the album is reaching its 40th Anniversary this year. This is like being a Rush fan and realizing that you’re hearing “Trees” or “Witch Hunt” or “La Villa Strangliano” instead of the usual “Tom Sawyer” or “The Spirit Of Radio”. This is a world removed from working at SprawlMart and having a short playlist of the worst of bro-country (with two or three random classic rock songs thrown in to be “edgy” and a few Latinx selections for “diversity”) bombarded over your head, North Korea-style. Especially that fucking horrid cover version of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” by current bro-country poster boy Luke Combs. The only positive effects coming from that track, quite frankly, were upon Tracy Chapman’s bank account (especially after dueting with Combs last week at the Grammys and seeing sales and streams of her 1988 debut album skyrocket tenfold right afterward).
But back to the present day. My store’s in-house radio rarely fails to surprise me. There is rarely, if ever, a repeat in the course of an eight-hour shift. Never in a million years would I expect to hear the Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, Wreckless Eric, the Ramones, Elvis Costello, the Vibrators, the Undertones, the Chocolate Watchband, and such on a playlist that didn’t originate from my Apple Music account. And no, I don’t have anything to do with it, or else I’d be throwing in Blackpink, Morning Musume, 2NE1, the Monkees, Kraftwerk, and pretty much everything else in my main, fifty-hours-plus, shuffle-ready playlist.
Normally on a Friday or Saturday evening, my store’s radio will lean towards dance-oriented material, which is at least 60% classic disco. I can dig it. Having grown up on 70’s R&B/soul as part of my pre-punk diet, I welcome overhearing those grooves - and often find myself voluntarily cueing them up on my stereo or Apple Music when the mood strikes. (Not so much my wife, who overheard me playing a Salsoul Orchestra anthology last summer and grumbled, “I feel like I should be wearing an afro wig and platform shoes right now.”)
Last night, however, a couple of the other ladies in the kitchen area at work got to talking about recent events, which led them to deploy the Bluetooth speaker hidden behind one of the order screens there. Fine by me. Normally, unless I find myself assigned there, I don’t hear it. Not so much last night. Right in the middle of one of my favorite Bee Gees tracks being playing on the store radio (“Love You Inside Out”), the brotherly harmonies of Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb got the BeeGeesus rudely interrupted out of them by:
“I WANT TO TALK ABOUT ME, WANT TO TALK ABOUT I, WANT TO TALK ABOUT NUMBER ONE, OH MY ME MY, WHAT I THINK, WHAT I LIKE, WHAT I KNOW, WHAT I WANT…”
FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKK! I felt like I was back at my previous job, hearing “Fancy Like” or “Fast Car” again ad infinitum. PTSD! PTSD! And this was worse. If you didn’t realize it by now, the girls had been talking about the recent death of, and thus decided to eulogize by the deployment of his greatest hits of, the godfather of bro-country, Toby Keith.
I get it. People loved that guy. I was not one of them. I was never sold on his music. He is not the equal of contemporaries like George Strait or Alan Jackson, let alone the likes of Willie Nelson (whom he dueted with on one song, “Beer For My Horses”, and honored with another, “Weed With Willie”), Waylon Jennings, or Johnny Cash. And cancer sucks. We lost Brother Wayne Kramer to it last week. We lost Damo Suzuki, the late iconic vocalist of Can, to it this past Friday. But did I have to hear Toby Keith’s greatest hits at a volume at which only The Stooges and Blackpink should be played? I lost track of how many times I had to ask customers at my register to repeat themselves because of some of my co-workers’ indiscretions (and questionable taste in music).
Once the PTSD shock of being teleported back to Blue Box Hell was finally subsided, I thought back to another musical hero we’d lost a couple of days earlier in-between Brother Wayne and Damo: Mojo Nixon, and specifically a track from Prairie Home Invasion, his collaborative album with Jello Biafra: “Let’s Go Burn Nashville Down”.
Oh, how the specific topic of this song has not aged one bit since it first dropped in 1994. Replace a few of the names mentioned - swap out Garth Brooks (who I do admit to being a fan of) with Luke Combs, replace schmaltz-master over-producer Jimmy Bowen with notorious industry swindler Scooter Braun - but the meat of it all - that mainstream country music today is a total and complete mockery of itself, a fantasyland peddled to the most naive parts of our society - remains. Hopefully, I won’t be as equally tortured tonight at work. At least I won’t find myself getting irritated at idiots posting on Facebook during the broadcast of tonight’s Super Bowl about every imagined sin possible, from seeing Taylor Swift on screen for twenty seconds to seeing an artist who isn’t a heavy metal artist for twelve minutes on the halftime show.
So, you know what? I’m going to answer those two topics. The latter is being saved for another post because it deserves its own post; the former issue I’m addressing right now.
Now, I feel weird seemingly defending Taylor Swift. I am not a Taylor Swift consumer. I could not identify a single Taylor Swift song and don’t know if I’d want to wreck my Apple Music or YouTube algorithms going down her discographical rabbit hole, even with an “Essentials” playlist. The closest I ever came to buying a Taylor Swift album was when it was rumored that she was going to collaborate with my beloved Blackpink for a track on her most recent studio album Midnights, which didn’t happen. And notice I referred to Taylor Swift’s discography as a rabbit hole. Over the past several years, as most of us already know, Taylor has been giving a very public middle finger to her former label by re-recording her early back catalog (everything before the 2019 album Lover) and labeling those re-recorded and expanded editions as Taylor’s Versions. And her devoted fan base of Swifties has been at her side, buying and streaming those authorized editions en masse and ignoring the discredited originals, thus adding their own middle fingers to the backlash against Taylor’s aptly-named ex-label.
But she is not being a diva - or worse yet, a shithoarder - with her wealth and status. She is donating money from her income streams to multiple charities. Ever since telling Nashville to fuck off, she’s been collaborating with a wide variety of artists and bringing others that she likes (Beabadoobee being one surprising example to me) to open for her on her most recent Eras Tour. She’s been very vocal about getting people to register to vote, and they’ve been heeding her call. And most importantly, she is not supporting, sympathizing, or associating with the MAGAts of this world.
Those last two instances are why your half-braindead uncle who only watches OAN and Newsmax (because Fox News “betrayed America” after Trump was defeated in the 2020 Election) is throwing more shit at Taylor Swift than GG Allin ever did to every audience he ever played in front of. And he is probably going to root against the Kansas City Chiefs tonight for spite, despite being favored to win. The stupidest remark of all from the Trumpzi crowd is that Taylor’s “a gold-digging bitch that’s chasing after a millionaire”. Um, no, that would be the person Jim Cornette likes to call either “Melanoma” or “The First Cunt”. (Meanwhile, Ms. Swift is more of a billionaire than their orange-skinned hero ever was or ever will be.)
Now, granted, Taylor’s past romantic public life has been low-hanging fruit for the gossip mill since she first became famous - as well as songwriting fodder for her succeeding albums. I get that. But leave her the fuck alone. Let her be happy. And if it doesn’t work out, god forbid? Well, more lyrical ideas for the follow-up to Midnights… and I highly doubt her fans would complain. But Jesus.Christ, people… she deserves your respect, not your venom. Your daughter wants to pick up the guitar because of her, rather than just stand in a queue for an audition for the next season of American Idle or The Voice. Leave Taylor alone.
To the people that are going to talk shit about her anyway tonight, especially in front of people you know love her? Let me say this, even though you’re most likely going to be a narrow-minded shithead anyway, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: Don’t like her music? Don’t listen to it. If you’re that fucking bothered by a glimpse of her in the VIP section at the game on TV? Tough shit. If you don’t like her because she’s successful, vocal, liberal, and your daughter wants to be her or your son wants to be with her… that’s your fucking problem, not mine. Me, I’m glad the existence of Taylor Swift pisses people like you off.
To close things out, let me say a quick word on the passing of Damo Suzuki. Colon cancer took Damo this past Friday, as mentioned above. Damo was discovered by the rest of Can busking on a sidewalk in their native Germany, invited him to sing with the band onstage that night, and wound up singing on some of Can’s early 70’s studio album output including their classic albums Tamo Mago and Future Days. Damo was one of iconic The Fall frontman Mark E. Smith’s heroes to the point that MES wrote “I Am Damo Suzuki” on This Nation’s Saving Grace. Dereck Higgins got me into Can over a decade ago by introducing me to Future Days and it has been one of my all-time favorite albums ever since. I’ll let Brother Dereck eulogize Damo in a vlog post he did this morning, below better than I ever could.