Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction and Critiques of Pure Country

BARBARA CHING Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction and Critiques of Pure Country Country music has the fastest-growing audience in America but it is still rather scandalous for an intellectual to admit to liking it. Contemporary cultural theory—which is to say cultural studies—has thus had practically nothing to say about it. At first glance, it may seem that everything has already been said. I know well enough that many people find country music to be dumb, reactionary, sentimental, maudlin , primitive, etc. Still others, perhaps influenced one way or another by the Frankfurt school, sneer at what they feel is the contrived, hokey, convention-bound nature of the music: they hear a commodification and cheapening of the same supposed folksy authenticity that so disgusts the first type ofcritic. But the issue is not just authenticity. Behind this issue lies the more sensitive and distinctly contemporary question of sophistication. Put bluntly, whether people question the authenticity of country music, or whether they feel the authenticity of it is too powerfully crude for them, they are often imagining some pitiful (but perhaps good-hearted) rube who happily sings along. And their bemused or puzzled reaction to intellectuals who actually like country music indicates that they want to preserve that image of the rural unsophisticate . The authenticity of the music, then, is seen as either impossibly degraded or impossibly innocent, but this double-binding condemnation never questions the authentic, uncultured "nature" of country music's benighted listeners. As such, they are either innocent pawns being debased or preserved by their music. Either way, "sophistiAn '^ona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 3, Autumn 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 ??8Barbara Ching cation," an ironie and pleasurable confidence in, or allusion to, a high degree of cultural status, is the one thing that this double bind of authenticity excludes. In this essay, I will be talking about how country music re-presents, disseminates, and ctitiques this double-bind of rustic authenticity, a double-bind that also silently underlies many prominent theoties of the post-modem condition. At the same time, I will be describing how the music itself explains why we need this patticular counttified spectacle to love of to loathe.1 While the sociological facts of the matter indicate that country music and its listeners are not limited to the rural backwaters of the south and west, 2 the music consistently portrays and addresses itself to a psychic geography that is at least metaphorically tustic. I know because I respond to this address: I'm from Dubuque—the classic hick town thanks to Harold Ross' refusal to edit the New Yorker for old ladies who happen to live there. Country music simply reverses Ross' logic. It thus situates its listeners in what Pierre Bourdieu has called a habitus: the life-space created by both the socio-economic detetminers that fotm individual taste and the choices made by individuals based on their tastes (???, 169 ff). But since the tetm cultural "tastes," with its allusion to a sensual, natural response, is easily conceived of as an innate rather than a socially consttucted quality, those whose taste is "bad" seem to deserve theit fate while those with good taste seem to merit the distinction which the social order confers upon them. A similar logic is at work in the separation between country music lovers and haters. While not necessarily rural, country music listenets are not often found among the elite. Sociological research indicates that country music plays in the space of white Americans who are on the whole less educated and hold low status jobs (Peterson and DiMaggio 501-3; McLaurin and Peterson 8-13). Although pethaps relatively ptivileged by vittue of its white skin, this is a population that lacks, again in Bourdieu 's tetminology, "cultural capital," a lack announced in a range of labels from the somewhat romanticized yet rustic "cowboy" to the mote pejorative "bumpkin," "cracker," "hayseed," "hick," "hillbilly," "redneck ," "rube," "simple folk," "yokel," and the name that includes most of the above group, and strips away the euphemistic raillery of those othet names: "white trash." As a cultural phenomenon, then, country music can be heard as the music chosen...