Is it time yet? Have we finally gotten there? Did we all get through the dense woods and find the clearing on the other side that led to a graveyard, and did we find the tombstone with the chiseled epitaph "ANYTHING BUT COUNTRY"? Let us kill it now, if not. Let us take the sentiments of being able to stand any type of music except country music, and let us douse those sentiments with kerosene before lighting the match. Say what you will about Red Headed Stranger, but you cannot say in good faith that you heard this album and still assumed that every country you'll ever hear is a piece of shit. At the very least, it is listenable. There are plenty of artists and albums and songs that are unlistenable. If you can't say that about Willie Nelson, though, then you can no longer say that you listening to "anything but country." It just doesn't make sense logically.
I'm attacking strawmen here, I know. Even the most staunchly anti-country music listeners among us have softened their stance through years of Record Club, some wild combination of Sturgill's acid-fueled madness and Reba's granny-indebted commercial rock and Adeem's staunch justice-seeking balladry and Dolly's, um, holiday music, we've come to an understanding regarding the idea that country music isn't all bad. It's just bad if you don't know where to look. And the kids who haven't heard of Record Club, they don't know where to look.
You know why? Because it's being kept from them. That's right. That's right. The powers that be don't want you to know that there is country music out there beyond the bullshit conservative-leaning trumped-up racist bullshit you'll hear on the radio. Bro country, whatever you wanna call it. Fuck that shit, and fuck Jesus and fuck your truck too. Nah, that ain't country, brah. It ain't. This is what country is. It's on the margins now but it used to be the genre's raison d'être. It used to be the workingman's music. Blue-collar shit. The correct and moral side of the class war. Fuck-you music for the boss man.
The culture warriors stole that from you. They took the sounds of country and they crafted a thin veneer of that old sound and added cheap studio wizardry and opened their mouths wide for the billionaire's cock. Now the country you know from the radio is about the fact that you're better because you believe in the correct god and that those OTHERS are trying to take what's rightfully YOURS oh and also that happen to have different color skin but no oh no don't worry about that, you see, Shaboozey is here too, he's Black, he's country, nothing wrong with pop country, oh no.
Oh god, where am I? What was I talking about? No, no, that can't be right. None of that has anything to do with Willie Nelson. Does it? I don't know. What the fuck was I even trying to say? Something about pop country. Of which Red Headed Stranger is not. It's more like a cowboy singing solo around a campfire than anything else. It's a working-class album, I'd argue. An album of pain and regret. A man who lashes out and kills his wife and her lover and then goes on the lam, and finds that he'll never know peace again. It's not valorizing domestic abuse, this story. It's more, like, making a point that the human experience is hard. It's sad and the music is sad. We can relate to the sadness, to the idea that life is hard, to the idea that you feel sad and low and the music you feel in your heart is soft and bare sometimes.
This is what the disembodied voice coming out of my throat meant when it was talking about how mainstream country music these days looks nothing like country music did closer to its origin point. This is not pop music, this is a photonegative of pop music. It's not minimalism, it's more like it's honed to a very sharp point. In Red Headed Stranger, both in the covers and the originals scattered throughout, Willie Nelson found ground zero of country music, the densest osmium of old-time Western country sound, no glamour or flair beyond a buoyant barroom piano solo from Willie's dear ol' sis. It's not tough-guy machoism or anything like that, it's just... simple. And more effective because of that simplicity.
I don't even know if I love it. It's honestly a bit repetitive. Which is fine, for a concept album. You want certain motifs to keep popping up over and over, it helps to fortify the thematic elements of the album, helps to tell the story. But as an album, I didn't get too much variety. A little boring. Also pretty short, and calming during its short time with us. I don't know how I got into it at the beginning here making it seem like I'm some valiant defender of all country music haters. This shit is a-okay. I like it but I'm not tied to it.
I just get this creeping fucking feeling that we were all conditioned to dislike country music back in the day, before the bro- and pop-country waves, because country music was the music of the common man, and the elites were scared of us taking artists like Willie Nelson seriously. And so they managed to convince a whole generation of kids to listen to "anything but country." And that shit stuck, even after the jig was up and the elites shifted their tactics and started to make country that spoke to their own interests and made that country bullshit popular.
Red Headed Stranger is the type of country music that can bring us together. The country music that the majority of "country music listeners" like these days, the Jason Aldean types, that country music is designed to divide. And it's working. What we need to do now, me and you, the regular common folk of this country, we need to take country music back. We need to stop dismissing country music outright, and instead advocate for country music like it used to be. Humble, kind, unifying.
And yeah, I guess a little boring. But at the very least, you can't say that you'll listen to anything but country. You can listen to this. Some weeks, that's enough.
GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5
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