Brad Paisley and American masculinity

Y'all know that I'm a serious man pondering serious matters, so this post's descent into frivolity may shock and sadden you. Rest assured that I feel your pain, for it is mine. *clears throat*

I love country music. That's often considered unusual, even embarrassing on this side of the pond (and, I'm told, in parts of the US). And while I do like the classic stuff - Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and more modern Americana artists like Dave Alvin - I'm also into some fairly gaudy, poppy acts. Case in point: Brad Paisley. In many ways, Paisley ought to be the antithesis of all that I like in music: his stuff is often shallow, calibrated to produce chart-topping singles, carefully produced into the tiniest detail, and shamelessly pandering to the perceived prejudices of his audience. He's sober, happy, and entirely devoid of the inner torment that is the lot of most great country artists.

Much of what needs to be said about Paisley has been, in this masterful instalment of Nathan Rabin's Nashville or Bust series. Rabin points out that Paisley is very much a 'guy's guy', making music for men. It so happens that I've finally decided to get in touch with my inner man this past year. It was an occasion of some joy to discover he did, in fact, exist, having somehow survived The O.C. marathons and a good amount of Dungeons & Dragons; and I nurtured him by hitting the gym, discovering the joys of beer and whiskey and reactivating a dormant interest in sports that involve being hit in the face.

Paisley's own turn towards guy music was somewhere between his third (Mud on the Tires, 2003) and fourth albums (Time Well Wasted, 2005). He ditched the collared cowboy shirts and went from being a nice young man playing neotraditional country to a much more populist act incorporating plenty of pop influences (including a number of collaborations with Carrie Underwood). But as I will argue through scattershot references to a couple of his songs, what underlies his work is a renegotiation of traditional masculinity in the twenty-first century that includes deconstructing treasured male behaviours.

'Ticks' is one of a number of songs in which Paisley deconstructs men's attempts to pick up women ('Me Neither', an adaptation of the 'Like a weasel' exchange in Hamlet 3.2, is another excellent example). The song's narrator, eager to see 'the other half / of your butterly tattoo', contrasts himself favourably with 'every guy in here tonight', who merely 'would like to take you home'. He, of course, has nobler aims: namely, to 'check you for ticks' after a trip to the countryside. The song deconstructs men's crude designs, but it does so with a tongue-in-cheek yokel charm that has become Paisley's trademark.

'Online' is one of Paisley's more controversial songs. Kevin J. Coyne thought Paisley was cruelly mocking all those less handsome, wealthy and successful than him: cyberbullying, if you will. And at first I was convinced. After all, the song's protagonist 'work[s] down at the Pizza Pit' and lives in his parents' basement, is '5'3'' and overweight' as well as 'a sci-fi fanatic' who has 'never been to second base'. It is only in the magical world of the internet that 'even on a slow day [he] can have a three-way chat with two women at one time' by pretending to be a wealthy Hollywood single who 'drive[s] a Maserati' and is 'a black belt in karate'.

But then, just when I was thoroughly appalled at Paisley, I discovered that he's 1.74m tall - an inch shorter, in other words, than even my little sister. Totally irrational and patronising though it is, this made me think he couldn't be a bully: surely he must have struggled with his Cruisean height. So I re-examined the song, and voilà! It actually celebrates its protagonist. The hilarious video, starring Seinfeld veteran Jason Alexander as the nerd and William Shatner and Estelle Warren as his parents, certainly plays a part in making the protagonist sympathetic (and he gets the girl!) while depicting the bullies as despicable and empty-headed.

It also serves to make Paisley's character, the superstar our protagonist would like to be, seem like a jackass jock. Combined with the nerd's infinitely more fun-looking hobbies (lightsaber fights! playing the tuba!), 'Online' perversely becomes an ecstatic celebration of the transformative possibilities of the internet. True, it does not offer a critique of underlying models of success: the nerd's chances lie not in alternative models of success to the handsome, wealthy Hollywood playboy, but in the possibility of plausibly mimicking the latter. But who am I to nitpick the mind of Paisley?

Moving steadily into more awkward territory, we have 'You Need a Man Around Here' from Time Well Wasted. The song's narrator finds himself exasperated by his girlfriend's interior decorating, which lacks 'a mounted bass', appropriately manly magazines, or a telly of unusual size. He concludes that 'you need a man around here... someone to kill the spiders, change the channel and drink the beer'. This would be offensive if it wasn't for - well, okay, it is offensive. Like many male musicians, Paisley can be quite patronising towards women, who often look 'so darn cute' to him (the Springsteen equivalent would be the ubiquitous address 'little girl'). But it's somewhat mitigated by the sheer worthlessness of the slob boyfriend's decorating advice and the shallowness of his taste, which certainly outdoes the candles his girlfriend is so liberal with.

It's on 'I'm Still A Guy' that Paisley finally goes too far even for my forgiving judgment. The protagonist's girlfriend is proud of having domesticated him, but he is keen to assert that he's as masculine as ever: 'These days there's dudes gettin' facials / Manicured, waxed and botoxed / With deep spray-on tans and creamy lotiony hands / You can't grip a tacklebox. /  Yeah, with all of these men linin' up to get neutered / And headin' out to be feminised / But I don't highlight my hair, I've still got a pair / Yeah honey, I'm still a guy.'

And this is the distinctive male identity Paisley's so proud of: 'When you see a deer you see Bambi / And I see antlers up on the wall / ... Oh, my eyebrows aren't plucked, / There's a gun in my truck / Oh, thank God, honey, I'm still a guy.' Well, with the greatest respect: frak you, Brad Paisley. Those masculine traits are designed to appeal to the imagined audience, but I'm a vegetarian, and while guns may be necessary in some situations there's nothing to be proud of in tools for murder (not to mention that pride in firearms doesn't travel across the pond very well).* Of course there's affectionate parody in the primitiveness 'I'm Still A Guy' implicitly accuses men of, but I'd not be quite comfortable drunkenly singing along to this - unlike most of Paisley's songs.

Paisley, then: an artist who de- and reconstructs traditional models of masculinity. Most of the time he does well, poking holes in the lies men tell themselves and others. But there's something just a little too comfortable about gentle ribbing that allows men to laugh at themselves without challenging them to change. Bring on revolutionary feminist country music!

*Yes, I fully acknowledge guns are awesome, but they're also terrible, and the sooner the world is rid of them the better.

Stansted at night: dispatches from late capitalism

An artist's impression of Stansted Airport

My recent journey back to Germany was unpleasant. It began with a taxi driver who insisted on telling me that the Jews controlled the world's financial system, while the Vatican ruled the spiritual part of the new world order. From there, it was an uncomfortable four-hour coach ride to the airport. National Express has automated announcements now. In the good old days, the driver would tell us once, at the beginning of the journey, where we could find emergency exits and such; but there was a tacit agreement that nobody was listening, and the announcement was therefore not repeated. Now, however, the pleasantly voiced electronic lady will tell us to wear our seatbelts at every stop, over and over again. The machine is pitiless.

And so, at around four a.m., we arrived at last at Stansted Airport. I'd like to claim Stansted by night is pandaemonium, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but sadly it's a collection of exhausted people just passing through, trying to minimise the unpleasantness of the experience. The villainy is systemic and thus much less colourful. For example, one of the first things you see as you enter the airport is a large illuminated poster advertising courses in Grenoble. Beneath the slogan, 'Stand out from the crowd', there is a large number of people, some of whom are in focus, while the majority are pixelled. Learn this, passerby: unless you acquire the desired human capital by studying for a flexible part-time MBA in 'the Silicon Valley of France', you're not even human.

Stansted Airport is an ugly box in the middle of the beautiful Essex countryside. It's hated by the locals, who campaigned successfully against a proposed second runway. So, why do I fly, from Stansted or anywhere else? I shouldn't, really: compared to taking the train, flying releases far more carbon, is not much quicker and far more unpleasant to boot. But while the EU maintains frankly insane tax legislation, flying is that much cheaper, and that matters to a penniless student. I dislike it and I fly with a guilty conscience. So do most people, but for the time being I have little choice if I want to see my family.

One might think an airport would be somewhat empty in the middle of the night, but since budget airlines fly either very early or very late, it's actually quite crowded. Tired people queue endlessly before Ryanair counters, desperately hoping their luggage will not incur the wrath of the company's regulations. (Ryanair employees are victims in this just like everyone else, and there's little as pitiful as seeing an employee and a passenger haggle over the size of carry-on baggage.) The vanquished customers tend to suffer what they must silently, so there was something deeply refreshing about the person who walked past five or six queues, exclaiming 'Fuck Ryanair. Fuck Ryanair. Fuck Ryanair' all the way.

Long I wondered why Ryanair irked me so. Now I believe it is the company's total refusal to lie to me. Like most things, Marx had something to say on this in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

Human beings can't live this way: they struggle to reconcile themselves to their own commodification. Making people feel like things is bad for business, and so companies had to reinsert 'feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations'. They had to introduce the notion that Nike (Apple, BMW, ExxonMobil) loves you and wants good things for you. Processed foods must pretend to be made Grandma's way, politicians must see you as someone worth listening to rather than just another vote, and airlines must make a show and dance of caring about you as a human being to conceal the fact that really you're just another piece of cargo, if a particularly capricious one.

Well, Ryanair won't create that illusion for you. At Ryanair your personal worth is quite obviously resolved into exchange value. They'll cheerfully try to cheat you out of as much money as possible, creating blatantly fraudulent surcharges for card payment and luggage, thinking little of inconveniencing you with pop-up windows advertising car rental and hotels. They'll treat you as cattle in the most obvious way. They plaster advertising all over their planes and plague you with sales pitches for soft drinks, scratch cards and overpriced foodstuffs over the loudspeakers so you can't even sleep.

All that is quite horrible, and I cannot find Ryanair's honesty at all refreshing. I like my illusions. I don't need to try very hard to convince myself that Lufthansa cares about me: although obviously untrue, it's preferable to knowing you're just another commodity. Ryanair disrupts the smooth workings of capitalist exchange by being so obviously mercenary; its 'naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation' pushes you right into the reality of the way we live. It's a flying, kerosene-guzzling disturbance in the Force.

Stansted is a place where the dispiriting cheapness of reality and the sparkling dreamworld of advertising coexist in the 24/7 Spar and the billboards. It's noisy and awful, and I admire the people (a great many people, perpetually giving the place the appearance of being in the aftermath of some catastrophe) who manage to sleep on their luggage while waiting. It's not that it's soulless: it's that all signs of human use, of the history of the thousands passing through, is obliterated with industrial cleaner. Its small chapel (in reality, a broom closet with a couple of holy books and a prayer mat) is the only place that provides some quiet, and even there the noise of the airport can be heard through the walls, barely muffled.

Last but not least, it's a violent place. Airport police have now switched from the Heckler & Koch MP5, a submachine gun using pistol rounds, to the G36C (pictured left), a compact version of a popular assault rifle. As the magazines are made of a transparent polymer, you can see the rounds as you walk past - and 2¼ inch length rifle rounds are terrifying. The government tells me they're there to keep me safe and wants me to be grateful that several groups of Middle Eastern people were subjected to 'random' searches as I walked past, but I don't quite believe them. When I was a child, military lorries going past us on the motorway terrified me: I always thought they might kill us. That feeling, however irrational, hasn't quite left me.

Stansted by night, then: a place where the glittering fantasy world of consumer capitalism dissolves into sheer exhaustion, a place people want to leave as quickly as they can. There's quite a lot of shopping at Stansted at five in the morning, fuelled by sheer boredom. No-one wants or needs the things they purchase there. Perhaps we're past that: maybe we've reached the stage where, if we're still lucky enough to have any disposable cash, we buy just because we're supposed to, not because we desire things anymore. Well, at least we're doing our patriotic duty.