June 16, 2005

Big week for the music industry last week. Coldplay released their latest opus (an exciting development for everyone who likes Radiohead but wishes they sucked), which was outsold only by a ringtone. And the White Stripes sent critics into paroxysms of pontification with a truly astonishing feature of their new album: It has a marimba on it.
      Meanwhile, a guy named Robbie Fulks just released a country record, Georgia Hard, that no one will hear about. It is not low-fi, "stripped down," vaguely post-punk, or any of the other things that critics—every single one of whom is profoundly retarded—care about. Why does Robbie Fulks get virtually no attention from the same press that fawns over the pleasant but thoroughly unremarkable Neko Case and the dreary, blank-eyed Gillian Welch? Because the geeks who swoon over the least of Wilco's obscure art posturing and the lamest three-chords-plus-whispery-vocals output by the Red House Painters (or whoever) are not man enough to take their shit straight. Outside of a dozen or so hipster-approved tracks by Merle and Johnny and Willie, these flannel-wearing girlie men don't actually like country at all.
      Okay, that's actually more of a pet rant (and I like Wilco, okay?) than a plausible theory about the lack of wider success for Robbie Fulks, who (inconveniently for my theory) is not a straight country artist, but more of a genre-hopping singer-songwriter in the style of late-model Elvis Costello. His 2001 album Couples in Trouble was stuffed with jazz, string quartets, and robot noise. But he always comes back to country, a strong, simple form like a Greek vase into which he can pour his focused songwriting intelligence.
      The few things I have read about Fulks' new record (including a bit from those smug pukes at the New Yorker) all seem to mention how unlike the album is from his "misguided major lable effort" Let's Kill Saturday Night. I may be a bit touchy about this, since I love Let's Kill Saturday Night so much that if it suddenly disappeared from the universe I would drop dead, and I know critics have to fill up space with bullshit most of the time, but come on! They still need to learn a little bit before pretending to know everything. (If you want to learn a little, start at Robbie Fulks dot com, where I found out that Robbie Fulks is also brilliant writer—read this, the best thing ever written about Lucinda Williams, and this, which is very, very, very funny.)
      Georgia Hard is drenched in the Countrypolitan sounds of what Fulks calls "the seventies of the mind," a period from 1965 to 1982. That means plenty of strings and massed harmony vocals to lift the basic country music apparatus of guitar/bass/fiddle into the sweet stratosphere of pure pop pleasure. The songs are plain old great, and the production is elaborate but entirely organic. What you are hearing is the songs themselves, not the songs with a buncha shit thrown on top. When the strings slide in discreetly behind a gentle back beat, it's as natural as leaves on a tree. The songs—all of them beautifully crafted, and a few of them classics—take in a wider swath of country music than the aforementioned girlie men will be able to wrap their solemn pea brains around. So, yeah, Hank and all them guys, but also Charlie Rich, Roger Miller, Roy Orbison, Glen Campbell, and maybe even a bit of Dwight Yoakam and Shania Twain. If you don't like any of that stuff, you won't like this record. That's hard for me to conceive, but whatever.