We first flew from Boston to Houston. I finally made it to Texas for this first time this past spring for the Society for American Music Conference in San Antonio, at which I delivered the Wynton paper ("The World According to Wynton: Musical Political Critique in From the Plantation to the Penitentiary) that I'm working on submitting for publication. I never made it to Houston, and I guess I can't really say that spending a few hours in George H. W. Bush Aiport (yikes!—but at least it's him and not Bush 43) means that I've been to Houston, either. Mostly, what I know of Houston is that it's hot, smoggy, tied up heavily in the oil industry, and featured in a great Steve Earle song, "Home to Houston." The first three of those may be balanced out by the fourth.
"Home to Houston" is on his album The Revolution Starts Now, which came out in 2004. That summer, I worked at the Columbia Music Library on their card catalog, going through and matching their old paper catalog with the online version. It was incredibly mindless work, but the great thing about it was that I just listened to headphones the whole time, and I got to set my own hours. So it was in the run-up to the 2004 elections and, mindless liberal that I am, I remember listening to a lot of Air America radio. And this album was advertised basically non-stop, since it's supposed to be a political album. (It also has a song, somewhat bizarrely, about how attractive Condaleeza Rice is.) Rhapsody—the online music service that I love (can I get an endorsement contract?—has hilarious biographies of artists and reviews of some albums. I think that they say of Steve Earle: "he makes the kind of music that will have Michael Moore dancing in the street." And that, I gotta see.
Anyway, "Home to Houston" is about a truck driver who joins the army and is sent to Iraq. I'm not sure what kind of change of heart he encounters while there, if he becomes against the war, if this isn't what he thought he signed up for, or if he is just homesick and scared, but the ending line of each verse is "God, get me back home to Houston alive, and I won't drive a truck anymore." It's a great song, set to a kind of rockabilly style beat, with some witty lyrics, "Sergeant on the radio hollerin' at me, he said/'Look out up ahead, here come the R.P.G.'"
I have to admit to growing to like Steve Earle quite a bit, and I also like the fact that his fans span a bizarre range of people. For instance, Sugarland—the pop country band that's currently pretty popular—has a song called "Steve Earle" about how much the female lead singer in the group has a crush on Steve Earle. Who would have thought that she would be interested in this grizzled, ex-drug addict, alt-country playing dude?
Alt-country, by the way, is one of my least favorite genre names, but perhaps one of my favorite genres. I mean, any genre that takes in Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle, Ryan Adams (a musician I hate to love), and Wilco is fine by me. But I hate the name—it's such a sort of East Coast elitist type of thing. "Oh, I don't like that country music [remember when it was cool to say that you liked every kind of music except country?], I like alt-country." Actually, what I really think is going on with the way alt-country is used is that it's country music for people who don't like country people. I'm pretty sure that's the subtext here. So let's get a better name. Let's call it country music, with the understanding that that genre name itself is pretty broad and takes in a lot of things, not just the much-lambasted Nashville-style country. Or let's call it folk rock (which most of it sort of sounds like anyway) or something else. Any ideas?
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