Someone Called Lil Nas X, Some Familiar but Dangerous Old Town Roads, and the Crossroads of America on a Sleepless Weekend

After a long and mostly sleepless and stomach flu-afflicted weekend, which entailed an early-morning trip down to Oklahoma for the funeral of a beloved family member and a caffeine-fueled late afternoon drive back up I-35, and a near-wreck with some idiot who blew past a stop sign at ten miles an hour over the speed limit on the way home from the worship service we’d somehow made it to at the West Douglas Church of Christ, and then a much-needed nap and a couple of much-needed beers at Kirby’s Beer Store, we tried to catch up with the rest of the news. There was some cold comfort, at least, in finding that the rest of the world seems to have its own troubles.

One story that caught our eye was about some some rapper called Lil Nas X being removed from Billboard Magazine’s list of top-100 country-and-western top-sellers, where it had debuted in the 19th spot a few weeks ago and begun climbing up the chart. We’d previously never heard of Lil Nas X nor his his country-and-western song “Old Town Road,” but for various reasons we found it interesting nonetheless.

For the past half-century or so Billboard Magazine has been the definitive source of the weekly top 100 charts for American music and all its various branches, with all the authority of the Dow Industrial Average or the Bureau of Economic Analysis on the state of the broader economy, and for many years of our life we paid even more rapt attention to Billboard’s findings. The magazine has apparently dropped “Old Town Road” from its country-and-western charts because it’s insufficiently country-and-western, too, and as lifelong fans of country-and-western and all the other branches of the glorious tree of America’s music that all grabbed our attention. These days the debate about the culture is as dreary as the one about the economy, with the left talking all sorts of “cultural appropriation” nonsense about the interracial and cross-cultural pollinations that have made American culture in general and American music in particular so rich, and the right seemingly suddenly intent on making American great again with its own racialist agenda, and somehow some rapper called Lil Nas X and his “Old Town Road” is caught up in that.

We’re old and grew up in Kansas with all the kinfolk down in Oklahoma, so we also grew up with Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys and Buck Owens’ Buckaroos and Merle Haggard and his Strangers playing on the 8-track or AM radio, and thus have some pretty fixed ideas about what constitutes country-and-western music. We followed the internet links to hear (and watch) Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” and although it doesn’t meet our strict standards we wouldn’t kick it off the country-and-western charts. The recording has some bucolic lyrics and some banjo licks “sampled” from previous recording, the video features some old west imagery from some violent cowboy shoot-’em-up video game, and it’s as least as country-and-western as anything we find on the radio on two drives between Wichita and Oklahoma City on Saturday, or any of the godawful bumper music that New York City-born-and-bred Sean Hannity uses on the right-wing talk radio show where he’s constantly apologizing to his heartland audience for the New York-City-born and bred President Donald Trump.

“Country-and-western” is a vague enough term to encompass everything from Jimmie Rodgers’ primitivism to the string-laden elegance of Patsy Cline, “rock ‘n’ roll” ranges from the soft rock of Simon and Garfunkel to the hard rock of The Ramones, “jazz” stretches from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane and beyond, and even the best of “it’s a black thing” “rhythm and blues” and “soul” and “hip hop” involve some talented white boys and European instruments and musical techniques who complicate the leftist racial narratives about that great stuff. Country-and-western is considered a white boy thing, but Rodgers and Williams and Wills and Monroe and Owens and Haggard always freely acknowledged everything they learned from their black friends, and we’ve found that if you want to fully enjoy the best of America’s great music you should set all of the left’s and right’s racial politics aside.

The definitions of “country-and-western” and “rock ‘n’ roll” and “jazz” and “hip hop” and the rest of American music gloriously diverse genres have mostly been defined by whatever the self-identified fans of those of genres have liked, and until recently they’ve done a pretty good job of it. Lil Nas X “Old Town” isn’t a great a recording by any of American music’s historic standards, but we’ve heard worse, and we hate to see it kicked off this week’s Billboard “country-and-western” charts, even if it’s still faring well on the “rhythm and blues” chart, which these days is the magazines old-fashioned way of saying “hip hop.” Billboard has always judged sales of “country-and-western” and “rhythm and blues” based on what the self-indentified “country and western” and “rhythm and blues” stores were selling, and although that’s harder to gauge in a time when all the kids are downloading their music off the internet it does seem that Lil Nas X was fairly popular with the country-and-western audience.

We rather like it that these young whippersnapper country-and-western fans are willing to embrace someone so obviously black he’s called Lil Nas X, and that black urban culture is culturally appropriating banjo licks and cowboy imagery, but we hope they all learn there’s better cross-cultural stuff on both sides of that divide, and start learning from that.

Meanwhile we notice that former Vice President and current Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden once again stands credibly accused of touchy creepiness toward women, and given the Democratic party’s currently strict standards that should be a problem for the him and the Democrats. We also notice that the leader of the erstwhile family values Republican party is President Donald “Grab ’em by the pussy” Trump, and that it doesn’t seem to be a problem for him or the Republicans. There’s also talk of Trump shutting down the border with Mexico, his ongoing trade wars and growing trade deficits with almost everyone else, most of the rest of the Democratic presidential field is so far to the crazy left that Biden’s creepiness toward women doesn’t seem so bad, and the economic and political news is almost as bad as what else is on the radio.

Even so, we’ll try to get a good night’s sleep and face another April Fools’ Day with help from the music and history of better times.

— Bud Norman

Up the Lazy River

The weather on Monday was far too uncommonly perfect in our portion of the Great Plains to worry about politics or economics or other such dreary matters, so after a frustrating hour or so of getting the e-mail working again, and then another couple of hours of composing and sending out some pressing e-mails and doing other unavoidable chores, we vowed to take a day off from the news and instead ventured into the heart of the River Festival. For those of you who aren’t so lucky as to live in Wichita, Kansas, on a such a glorious Great Plains day in early June, and are therefore unlikely to be familiar with the River Festival, suffice to say it’s the big annual civic celebration around here, and it’s really something to see.

The festival is also quite an inconvenience to those of us who live in the old and picturesque Riverside neighborhood of the city, which is bounded by the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers that give both it and the River Festival their names, and especially to those of us Riversiders who also frequently do business in the downtown district just past the nearby confluence, where most of the action takes place these days and many of the streets are suddenly and rather unaccountably blocked off and the usual free-flowing traffic is now just dreadful, so that just seemed all the more reason to take advantage of it. Being wised up to all the short cuts in our city we successfully motored our top-down way to the parking lot of the huge Metropolitan Baptist Church, listening to some swingin’ Sergio Mendes and Brasil ’67 on the old folks’ AM station en route rather than our usual right-wing talk radio fare, then walked across scenic McClean Boulevard and past the nice fountain monument to city father Ben McClean and over the Douglas Bridge that spans the Arkansas River into downtown. Along the way we encountered some ugly old women and some pretty young girls and some surly skateboarding young punks with tattoos and a genial old fellow in a a fine straw hat who handed us some Biblical scriptures and an invitation to the services at the Temple Baptist Church, “If you don’t already have a church home,” and when we told him that we did have a church home but very much appreciated the invitation he seemed pleased by the response, and in such perfect weather it all felt quite pleasingly like Wichita.

When we flashed our reasonably priced button and entered the festival area without any intrusive pat-downs, gospel music was blaring, and it was glorious. The annual “Gospelfest” concert was taking place on a temporary stage at the Kennedy Plaza next to the big circular Century II concert and convention and exhibition and theater and whatnot building, and an all-star choir from the city’s many mostly-black churches and an absolutely brilliant fellow named Cameo Profit from St. Mark’s Church of God in Christ in the lead were kicking out some Holy Spirit with a more beguiling backbeat than you could find at the sleaziest nightspot anywhere even on a Saturday night, and the old black women in their church hats were waving their hands and a handsome young black man was doing that gospel two-step just behind us and even our stiffly Church of Christ white knees were moving in that sanctified time. We happily absorbed that for an hour or so, then wandered past the food courts with their steak sandwiches and chickens on a stick and other culinary delights, and the t-shirt stands and the street musicians and the statue of Prairie Populist heroine Mary Elizabeth Lease and the gorgeous old Proudfoot and Bird-built City Building where an old friend of ours now runs the Sedgwick County Historical Museum, which is well is worth a visit if you’re ever in town and have time, and then toward the “Waterwalk” area that was supposed to be a garden spot by now according to some well-connected real estate mogul’s grandiose plans but is still mostly a parking lot, where Brave Combo was set to play a concert.

If you’re not fortunate enough to have been in on the punk-polka movement that swept the hipper portions of the Great Plains back in the early ’80s, suffice to say that Brave Combo is one of the very best bands in the entire history of music. We’ve been fans for the past 30 years or so, ever since they first wandered out of Denton, Texas, and into the old Coyote Club on that rough patch of North Broadway, and with the most excellent musicianship they play polkas, polka nortena, rhumbas, cha-chas, fox-trots, twists, tangos, horas, waltzes, show tunes, chicken dances, and anything else that people might dance to anywhere in the world, and always with the most hilariously punk sense of humor. We rather liked it that they’d moved from that rough patch on North Broadway to that parking lot in the heart of the big civic celebration, not so far removed from the “Gospelfest,” and we had the good fortune to run into our old friend Teri Mott and thank her for making it happen.

We go way back with Mott, to the early ’80s days when she was spinning discs on the local college radio station’s very alternative “After Midnight” show and we were both promulgating our own notions of musical rebellion in the local media, but by now she’s insinuated herself so far into the River Festival organization that she’s turning it into a 10-day musical festival that beats Woodstock for sheer eclectic weirdness. We’ve already missed performances by the Violent Femmes and the Meat Puppets and the missing-its-big-star Black Flag, who we once spent a memorably hazy night with at a friend’s cheap apartment after their shut-down-by-the-man performance on at a tiny joint on North Market, and if you’re not hip to the seminal punk scene suffice to say they were all notable, and there’s some old-school hip-hop names that even we recognize. The obligatory country-and-western offerings are hipper than usual, and there are some intriguing jazz offerings and the annual appearance by our better-than-you’d-expect local symphony orchestra, and Mott was especially proud of that all-star choir kicking out that great gospel music over in Kennedy Plaza, even if she is the unchurched sort.

Still, it’s all rather odd to anyone who’s been through so many River Festivals. The whole hubbub started with the city’s centennial in 1972, when the Century II building was unveiled and a two-day “Wichitennial” celebration marked the occasion. There was a big parade, featuring ourselves riding a unicycle decorated as a cardboard horse, a “bathtub race” down the Arkansas River and a “bed race” down Broadway, and a performance by the local Midian Shrine Dixieland Jazz Band, which was also one of the greatest bands in the history of music, and it was such an endearingly corny big city version of a small town celebration that the city decided to do it again the next year. What started as a yearly custom soon became an annual tradition, and it grew to include canoe races along the Little Arkansas river and tug-of-wars on the sand bank of the Arkansas and a “block party” on a strip just east of downtown that was slowly converting from skid row to a yuppie zone and turned into a bloody brawl, and a popular blues concert that was cancelled when the local Blues Society couldn’t afford the big fees that the increasingly corporate Wichita Festivals Inc. was charging for inclusion in the increasingly corporatized event, and now it’s evolving into an eclectic musical festival where the cutest little girl you’ve ever seen and her rather handsome young mother were gleefully doing the chicken dance with Brave Combo.

We’ll get back to the dreary business of politics and economics tomorrow, but with a bolstered hope that it somehow leaves us the hell alone to have our parties as we see fit here in Wichita, Kansas, and that the good people of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, can continue to hold their annual Groundhog Day corniness and that whatever town in upstate New York it was that always had their annual ice-skating and barrel-jumping competition on “The Wide World of Sports” is still doing that, and that whatever cheers your heart in your hometown will still persist. On a perfect early summer day a free people can do great things, and all that dreary political and economic news should be absorbed with that in mind.

— Bud Norman

The Secret Life of Barack Obama

Had you been standing nearby and armed with a feather you could have easily knocked us over when we read President Barack Obama’s claim that he shoots skeet “all the time.”

What we know of the activity seems so startlingly incongruous with what we know of the president’s personality, after all. Old movies indicate that skeet shooting can be an upper-crusty pastime, and is even a favorite sport of super-rich arch-villains, but out here on the prairie we associate it with that bitterly gun-and-God-clinging segment of the rural working class commonly known as the good ol’ boy. This is not to imply that Obama isn’t good, old, or a boy, but he does seem to possess a certain metrosexuality that defies the description.

Our own experiences of skeet shooting date back to our boyhood days of hurtling “clay pigeons” for the old man, an erstwhile country boy who had retained a keen eye even after moving to the suburbs and an executive office. He would occasionally haul us out to a remote field on the outskirts of Wichita, now the site of a gargantuan Home Depot store, and have us wear out our arm flinging disks from a primitive spring-loaded device as he knocked down one after another. The old man tried his best to impart the skill to the next generation, but we had no knack for it, and we sadly confess that if the country is ever invaded by skeet we will contribute little to the national defense. We did gain an appreciation of the art, however, and try as we might we just can’t envision Obama shooting skeet.

Still, the story comes from The Telegraph, which is pugnaciously British and generally reliable. Lending further plausibility is the detail that Obama does his shooting while at Camp David, where a skeet shooting course has almost surely been installed by one or another of those past Republican presidents, presumably with one of those fancy-schmantzy machines that will spare the presidential daughters the onerous chore of hurtling the skeet, and we were also convinced by the lack of any extravagant claims about the president’s skill. The Telegraph’s correspondent slyly insinuates that Obama might merely be attempting to reassure gun-owners as he pushes an unprecedented gun control regime, but we would never be so cynical as to suggest such a thing.

Learning of Obama’s gun-toting exploits did get us to wondering what other unknown proclivities he’s been keeping private, however, so we consulted with a source close to the president. Those readers who are unaware of satire should be forewarned that our source is entirely fictional, and his information completely made up, but we felt his observations worth passing along nonetheless.

It turns out that the president is also partial to pickup trucks. “He has a special fondness for Ford F-150s,” our source said. “Get him out in one of those babies on a muddy road with a tree stump that needs pulling, and he’s a happy man.” The presidential pickup is apparently well stocked with cassette recordings of country-and-western music, as well. “Obama’s favorite is probably Buck Owens and his Buckeroos, especially from the era when Don Rich was adding that great high-lonesome harmony,” our source told us. “But he pretty much likes anything with that Bakersfield sound — Merle Haggard, Wynn Stewart, the Maddox Brothers and Rose, you name it. He’ll play Tommy Collins’ ‘Opal, You Asked Me’ over and over, and it always cracks him up. Says it reminds him of Michelle.”

Our source also reports that the White House chefs have been required to master the preparation of chicken fried steaks and fried okra, that a room near the Oval Office has been re-decorated as an exact replica of Elvis Presley’s jungle room at Graceland, and that Obama has complained to friends about Bill Clinton already laying claim to nickname “Bubba.” All those unwashed yokels in flyover country who didn’t vote for Obama should be reassured to know that he’s such a regular skeet-shooting kind of guy, but we suggest they take a long hard look at his gun control proposals anyway.

— Bud Norman