Country Rocks

(7 of 7)

Marriage counseling is in, and so is staying sober. The barfly characters who cried in their beer in classic country songs have been displaced by yuppified drinkers who, in the words of a Reid song, are content to be sitting on their porch and "sippin' some wine/ from my coffee cup." That is, if they're drinking at all. In the video Travis Tritt made last year for The Whiskey Ain't Workin', the character he plays pointedly refuses to drown his sorrows in alcohol.

The women of country music used to wait for their wayward husbands to come home, or stand by them even when they didn't. But to country music's postfeminist performers, both scenarios seem a waste of time. The middle-aged women in K.T. Oslin's work are busy warning their lovers that they are chronically fickle, are having careers while their ex-husbands have custody of the child, or are just plain contemplating the legacy of their past revolts. "Oh we've burned our bras and we've burned our dinners/ And we've burned our candles at both ends," is her bittersweet assessment in 80's Ladies. Meanwhile, Trisha Yearwood sings about a woman with such a sense of autonomy that she demands men "who will cry on my shoulder" but won't "follow me around." And in the new video for the song Is There Life Out There? Reba McEntire refuses to let a too early marriage be an occasion for whining: she goes back to college and gets a degree.

"Things don't always work out all right in country songs," says Kevin Phillips, author of the 1990 book The Politics of the Rich and Poor. "What a perfect backdrop for a recession that is undercutting the American Dream." Clint Black's One More Payment is a classic hard-times complaint about the rent, the banker at the door, and a roof that is crumbling. But the current country songs also hurl Molotov cocktails at the upper classes and the system that favors them. Brooks succeeded last year in making a national barroom anthem out of Friends in Low Places, which turned an abandoned lover's revenge into an act of social protest. "Blame it all on my roots," he sang. "I showed up in boots/ And ruined your black-tie affair."

Country's appeal is not a function of the leading economic indicators, however. It draws its power mostly from people like Jyne Kubas, 52, an Alan Jackson fan who is not embarrassed to say she still hurts from her divorce 10 years ago. " 'Cowboys don't die and heroes don't cry,' " she says, repeating the sardonic opening lines of Jackson's song Here in the Real World. "He says life is not like the movies. I used to tell people he took a phrase out of my life." For Kubas, as for many of the nation's still growing ranks of country fans, the songs are precious musical absolutions, forgiving them for the vanities they cherished and lost, and gently nudging them through middle age.