SWINGING STRIKE
Brad Paisley accidentally reaches beyond his wheelhouse on Wheelhouse
by Matt Ashare |
Posted April 24, 2013
Brad
Paisley's a country music mega-star who's never shied from what tend to pass
for bold statements in a rather conservative genre. He made characteristically
breezy plea for unity and acceptance on the title track of his 2009 album,
"American Saturday Night," which turns a typical night on the town
into an opportunity to enjoy a multi-national coalition of sensual delights,
from a French kiss and an Italian ice, to some Canadian bacon on a pizza pie,
to a couple of bottles of Corona and Amstel Light. And, on the same album, he
waxed hopeful in "Welcome to the Future," a song that enjoys the
shock of the new (video chatting), while digging into the more troubling past
by alluding to the struggles of civil rights activists Rosa Parks and Martin Luther
King Jr. ("From a woman on a bus/To a man with a dream. . .).
He followed that up, in 2009, by
retrenching to a degree on "This Is Country Music," which I initially
mistook to be a compilation of contemporary Top 40 Nashville hits in the vein
of the "Now That's What I Call Music," a long-running franchise of
blockbuster singles collections that hit 45-and-counting in February of this
year. Instead, "This Is Country Music" served as a vehicle for the
white-Stetson'd Paisley to reaffirm his southern roots in the rollicking anthem
"Old Alabama," as in "Forget about Sinatra or Coltrane, or some
ol' Righteous Brothers song. . . Play some back-home, come-on music that comes
from the heart."
As anticipation grew for the mid-April
release of Paisley's 8th studio album, there were mixed signals. The disc's
title, "Wheelhouse," seemed to suggest that Paisley was content
remaining within the bounds of a particular comfort zone that's served him
well, a place where smartly crafted, amped-up, arena-ready country-rock intersects
clean-cut American romanticism. But, despite the fact that the disc's first
teaser single came with a title that suggested an advertising campaign for a
particular brand of whiskey-based liquor, the song, "Southern Comfort
Zone," heads off in somewhat surprising direction. "No everybody
drives a truck, not everybody drinks sweet tea/ "Not everybody owns a gun,
wears a ball cap and jeans" he croons crisply on the opening verse.
"Not everybody goes to church or watches every Nascar race/Not everybody
knows the words to 'Ring of Fire' or 'Amazing Grace.'"
Paisley concedes, on the chorus, that he
misses his Tennessee home. But, as he puts it, "I can't see the world
unless I go outside of my Southern Comfort Zone." At a time when pundits
and politicians are all to willing to exploit Red State/Blue State tensions in
polarizing debates over issues that the majority of Americans appear to agree
on, it's a song that makes an earnest attempt to cut through some of the innate
stereotypes that can, and often do cloud civil discourse. Hats off for that to
Paisley, who's also been willing to tackle the prickly issue of gender roles,
in "The Pants" from "American Saturday Night," and again on
"Wheelhouse" by delving into domestic violence from the woman's point
of view in "Karate."
Unfortunately, when people start paying
close attention to what your songs are about, then what your songs are about
takes on a whole new meaning. And, whatever good a tune like "Southern
Comfort Zone" may or may not be able to accomplish, has largely be
overshadowed by the controversy surrounding another track on
"Wheelhouse," a country-rap collaboration that pairs an earnest
Paisley with form hip-hop heavyweight champ, and current "CSI New
York" crimefighter LL Cool J. It's called "Accidental Racist,"
which is sorta where the problems start. And it finds Paisley getting in
character as a humble country boy who makes the innocent mistake of walking
into an upscale Starbucks (her loves product placement) sporting a Lynyrd
Skynyrd shirt festooned with the Confederate flag.
In all fairness, it would be a fairly
innocuous, if somewhat overly long track about the cultural baggage we
sometimes forget we're carrying around with us, if it for LL's rap, which is as
clumsy as the title. Paisley makes a few missteps — "I try to put
myself in your shoes and that's a good place to begin," he suggests,
"But it ain't like I can walk a mile in someone else's skin." But,
mostly he's wrestling with "being caught between southern pride and
southern blame," with "the old can of worms" he's unwittingly
opened by wearing a Skynyrd shirt. And, while that might be insensitive, I'm
not sure it really counts as racism.
In any case, the sticking point in
"Accidental Racist" — the part that's incited quite a bit of critical
hand-wringing; a thoughtful, if largely irrelevant NPR essay on "The
History of White Southern Musical Identity"; a "USA Today"
headline that asks if the song is an "Epic Fail"; and an hilarious
"Colbert Report" bit that I'll get back to shortly — centers around
the rap portion of the program. Specifically, when LL, who doesn't exactly
exude street cred, takes on the role of the offended barista and enters the
fray with insights like this: "Just because my pants are saggin' doesn't
mean I'm up to no good"; and "You don't judge my doo-rag/I won't
judge your red flag/If you don't judge my gold chains/I'll forget the iron
chains."
As Stephen Colbert bemusedly pointed out,
"Now, that's a pretty good deal. . . LL will forget 250 years of
enslavement, if you accept his taste in accessories." So, yeah, that is
kind of a tough sell. Some critics have suggested that Paisley would have been
better tapping a rapper with more contemporary relevance than LL, or, better
yet, any number of young southern rappers. But, I'm not sure that would solved
the problem, which is that, for all its good intentions, "Accidental
Racist" just isn't a particularly good song — it's laconic, it drags, and
the soft-focus melody just doesn't have the stick-to-your-ribs quality that
ground Paisley's better compositions. And, frankly, mainstream music never been
a particularly good medium for addressing racism head-on. I'm thinking of Neil
Young's stinging "Southern Man," which prompted an answer from Lynyrd
Skynyrd in the form of "Sweet Home Alabama," with its pointed retort,
"I hope Neil Young will remember/Southern man don't need him around
anyhow." Of course, a friendship between Young and Skynyrd ensued, so it
worked out in the end.
Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney struck gold 1982 with their
unforgettably treacly duet "Ebony and Ivory," but that only addressed
what was already apparent at the time: that artists, and musicians in
particular, were well ahead of the curve when it came to dealing with issues of
race, largely by playing music together and not by writing songs about it. So,
maybe the real lesson here isn't that Paisley, perhaps admirably, took a swing
and missed with "Accidental Racist," that it's simply, if somewhat
ironically, outside of his wheelhouse. It's that racism in America is too
complicated, too nuanced, too difficult an issue for even a six-minute
country-rap song to sort through. As one reader framed it in a posted online
response to the "USA Today" story, "It's an impossible to tackle
entirely effectively in one song." LL seems to get it: he brought Paisley
on board for one of the tracks from his soon-to-be-released album “AUTHENTIC.”
It’s hip-pop romantic balled called “Live For You,” and it’s streaming on
SoundCloud.
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