Country Rocks

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But country's message makes the music belong, first and foremost, to the baby boomers now coping with being in their 40s. Twenty-year-olds, says record executive Bowen, "are having their first romance, and we're talking about the third divorce over here." If rock is about feral impulses, country is about spiritual nourishment. Cultural critic Camille Paglia, who has celebrated the Dionysian power of rock music in her writings, believes the genre suffered an identity crisis as it moved further from the rural immediacy of folk and blues and lost its restless, questing spirit. "In rock you're getting middle-class suburban kids who have no experience of anything except what they hear on the radio," she says. "Country music speaks emotional truth. Rock has drifted from it." Says Paul Shaffer, David Letterman's bandleader: "Country is soul music for white people, and people always return to soul music, because that's where the feeling is."

If, as in Shaffer's description, country's appeal has something to do with race, it is because pop has rarely been as racially polarized as it is in the era of rap. Country fans, who, like their stars, tend to be white, are not shy about describing their music as the musical equivalent of the urban escapism known as white flight. "Thank God for rap," says Bowen. "Every morning when they play that stuff, people come running to us." Says Ralph Emery: "Rap music speaks only to black issues, and has turned a lot of white people off."

But much more than race is involved in country's success. At the end of a decade marked by lip-synching scandals and Material Girlhood, Americans are reclaiming their right to sentimentality, civility and a little bit of cellulite on the dance floor. Take, for example, some patrons of the Golden Nugget, a night spot in Buffalo's flourishing country-and-western scene. "In a disco, if you're not a size 3, forget it," says Heidi Fisher, 28. "They're into spandex heaven. And your hair has to be out to here with hair spray. I only wear spandex in a dark gym. Here it's more relaxed and I can be myself. And if someone bumps into you they're more likely to say, 'Excuse me.' " Danny Beal, a 27-year-old dairy farmer from nearby Darien, says, "It's the only place I can be in public and show my feelings." And now that promiscuity is out, says Gary Marcinkowski, 25, who owns a Buffalo-area painting business, the atmosphere in a country bar offers another advantage: "It's less of a pickup scene."

Country music seems right on time for the abstinent '90s. Randy Travis' first hit single, On the One Hand, set the tone in 1985, in an ambivalent lament that "on the one hand, I count the reasons/ I could stay with you/ . . . But on the other hand/ There's a golden band/ To remind me of someone/ Who would not understand." Today the title song of Mike Reid's album Turning + for Home is a tribute to his baby daughter; George Strait is praising the immutability of paternal love in Love Without End, Amen; Alan Jackson is chanting to his wife that I'd Love You All Over Again.