New Music week of May 11th; Country Music Part III: when mythic heroes roamed the world

-Cam’rons spits the lyric real good, gangstas in the mid-west. The other two songs I have from the new album “Crime Pays” are alright with me, “Silky (No Homo)” has an excellent King Floyd sample and “Cookin’ Up”is all percussion. This is Cam’ron’s best work since 2004 but I bet Eminem ends up the hip hop album of the year because, for sure, “Beautiful” -a self portrait, is yet another great song off the forthcoming relapse.

Gallows, an English punk band who made few friends here a couple of years ago, will make less if “The Vultures”-a terrible dirge, is anything to go by. I am not a Daughtry believer, and I did try to get into his multi-plat and failed, and “No Surprise’ comes with its own punchline. For yet another week the thrills are coming from electronica, “Area (Villian Remix”) off Bloc Party’s “Intimacy remixed” sounds like Primal Scream circa “Vanishing Point” (that’s a compliment) and the Crystal Method’s “Divided By Night’ is a touch too specialist for me (sorta like listening to “Metal Machine Music” when you were aiming for “Walk On the Wild Side” -if you don’t mind me mixing my metaphors.

Back in the world of country, when last heard from Patsy cline was inventing Countrypolitan and the 60s were raging somewhere off stage and if the music fight was between flower power and pure Country, pure country were losing but with the aid of hindsight it was at best a drawer.

This was the time of George Jones, Johnny Cash (about to pal up with Bob Dylan -just not quite there yet), the Carter family, Loretta Lynn, Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard. And the theme, the other side of the us and themism conflicting the USA was Haggard’s “Okie From Muscogee” – “a place where even squares can have a ball.” and perhaps even more so, Lynn’s “One On the Way” -a place where feminism didn’t even begin to exist.

These country cats were hard men and women choking on the American but trying to keep hope alive for the last vestige of a Confederate America.

It was all a myth of course, but a myth with the greatest country music ever recorded, and for musicians (around this time the Grateful Dead would cover Haggard’s “Mama Tried”) country couldn’t be ignored: it was too good. And although both alternative and conservative were being destroyed by drugs, Gram Parsons, the Byrds, and country-rock were on the horizon. But that will have to wait till part IV.