Country Rocks

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If the baby boomers have discovered country, however, it is not just out of nostalgia. They have looked across the musical landscape and found a cast of artists who are very much like themselves. Today's hot country stars, Garth Brooks foremost among them, are more likely to be college graduates with IRAs than dropouts with prison records. They put Mercedes and Volvos in their videos and refer to wine and cafes as much as beer and honky-tonks. They worry about keeping in shape and, in an era of middle-class constriction, about keeping ahead. The women sing about their heartbreaks, but they also rejoice in their sexual independence and ponder their opportunities. Both genders extol the virtues of marital longevity.

Gill, for one, looks as if he stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog, and he loves golf so much that he lives on a course outside Nashville. Cleve Francis, one of the few black country singers signed to a major label since Charley Pride in the '60s, is a 46-year-old cardiologist from the suburbs of Washington. Mary-Chapin Carpenter has a degree in American civilization from Brown University; she drew the idea for her highly successful When Halley Came to Jackson, about the appearance of Halley's comet in Mississippi, from a line in the memoirs of Eudora Welty. K.T. Oslin once made a living as a Broadway chorus girl, and when she turned to country in her mid-40s, it was to sing about such nonbucolic topics as older women sleeping with younger men. Even the down-home Reba McEntire, who spent her youth on her father's ranch and on the rodeo circuit, went on to college, where she studied classical violin and piano and "analyzed Mozart every which way."

But more than any other country headliner, Brooks encapsulates most of the / complexities of the baby boomers. He was raised in an Oklahoma City suburb, where he listened to Kiss and Queen, and graduated from Oklahoma State, where he was a middling jock and an advertising major. He hides his receding hairline under his Stetson, and once said, "I'd rather be like Schwarzenegger -- perfect teeth, perfect body, full head of hair." He can be a pop nostalgist who croons old Billy Joel songs, a country nostalgist who traces his lineage to the backwoodsy George Jones, or a rock nostalgist who remembers what the back and forth between a jumping-jack-flash performer and his audience is supposed to be like. "Like great sex," he says, "where you get wild and frenzied, then turn that around quick to something gentle, tender and slow, and then get wild and crazy again and just keep doing that over and over until one of you drops dead."

His essence, above all, is in a ballad like The Dance, a palliative for a generation that has begun to lick old wounds as it approaches middle age. "I could have missed the pain," he sings. "But I'd of had to miss the dance." The video of The Dance shows images of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and the song's autumnal, retrospective tone is what seems to touch millions of listeners. Says Sue Thayer, 43, a machine-shop secretary from Grayling, Mich., and a convert to country music from rock: "It's about love affairs gone bad, and death -- the finality of relationships."