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University of California Press

Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music


by Nadine Hubbs (Author)
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Mar 2014
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 240
ISBN: 9780520280663
Trim Size: 6 x 9
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1

Anything but Country

Any judgement of the working class as negative (waste, excess, vulgar, unmodern, authentic, etc.) is an attempt by the middle-class to accrue value. That is what the representations of the working-class should be seen to be about; they have absolutely nothing to do with the working-class themselves, but are about the middle-class creating value for themselves in a myriad of ways, through distance, denigration and disgust as well as appropriation and affect of attribution.

Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture

There is a phrase I have heard on the first day of classes for the past decade, ever since-for ice breaking as much as informational purposes-I began asking my undergraduates, "What do you listen to?" Now, every semester, it issues from students of various sorts, a line so familiar as to be recognized by all, even when mumbled hurriedly by the shy and self-conscious: "Anything but country."

In discussions of popular music on campuses throughout the Midwest and in the Northeast, mid-South, and Deep South, college students have told me that this phrase prevails (it is the standard answer, one Alabama undergraduate attested) in response to questions about listening preferences-questions, as the students well know, that get at who one is and wants to be. The same "ABC" formula circulates off campus, too, among adults out in the world, when they are asked to declare their musical tastes. Indeed, across generational groups, country stands out as a music that Americans are often at pains to exclude in these culture-focused moments of social self-construction.

This chapter asks what is going on in such instances. Why is "Anything but country" such a common refrain? Who invokes it? What does it mean? And is it really about the music? My approach to these questions begins with an investigation of the meanings of country music-meanings not from inside the songs (the subject of chapter 2) but from outside. That is, I begin by examining the meanings that attach to country music as a cultural category and brand.

Country Music and the Phantom Hillbilly

Long heard as an affront by those targeted with it, the word hillbilly marks one as being from the country, originally, from Appalachia, and it bears connotations of ignorance and lack of sophistication. Notably, "hillbilly" was also for thirty years the standard industry label for the music now known as country. The music's name change to "country and western" in the 1950s recognized hillbilly's derogatory status, but it was not a complete image makeover. Country audiences are still associated with white working-class, provincial, and southern identities, as well as ignorance and, in recent decades, bigotry.

Bryson's 1996 empirical study yields perspective on the social meaning and function of country music in late capitalist U.S. society. The study confirms previous research finding that high-status individuals no longer brandish cultural capital by the means that reigned throughout most of the twentieth century-that is, narrow, exclusive involvement with classical music and "high" culture forms uncontaminated by mass culture. George Jones and Tammy Wynette's couplet "Our Bach and Tch'ikowsky / Is Haggard and Husky" stands as a relic of that defunct cultural order, serving in "(We're Not) the Jet Set" (#15 1974) as one musical metric among others-of geography, transport, food, society-that gauged the distance between the exclusive "jet set" and the less distinguished regular folk. By contrast, in the current cultural system (solidified since the 1980s), entitled middle-class subjects wield multicultural capital through knowledge and engagement in a broad range of global musics-deploying them as "potential ingredients in a singular and singularly distinctive cultural mix . . . [that] signals a high level of educational attainment, untrammeled access to cultural goods, and command over the time and resources necessary to master a variety of social and aesthetic codes." As I mentioned above, the new system of distinction-by-inclusion depends on crucial exclusions. The "cultural omnivores" in Bryson's study expressly excluded the categories of music associated with the least educated audiences, including country (published research identified country audiences as lacking in education and occupational status as early as 1975). In the light of her findings, a taste declaration like "Anything but country" appears first and foremost as a gesture of social exclusion. Musical exclusion is secondary, a vehicle and symptom.

And so, a half-century after shedding the "hillbilly" designation, country music continues to trail a phantom hillbilly. Country's cultural meaning remains tethered to the image of a certain kind of social subject. It is a figure stigmatized by ignorance and constitutive-by its exclusion-of middle-class status and entitlement. The racial and class (and sometimes geographic) designation "hillbilly" is one sign under which this figure is known. There are others, as we shall see.

"Unafraid to Get Political": Foo Fighters in Jed-Face

In the waning days of summer 2011, Foo Fighters, a celebrated, long-established alternative rock band fronted by Nirvana veteran Dave Grohl, released a video to promote and kick off a North American tour. Their tour promotion video "Keep It Clean (Hot Buns)" consists of two main scenes, both set in a truck stop. The first scene takes place in the truck stop diner, where the band's "faux country" song "Keep It Clean" plays on the P.A. system.The song is a broad parody of country music, sung in a voice as close to bass-baritone as Grohl can manage-with a phony drawl, references to "Momma" and "Daddy," steel guitar flourishes, and other musical and linguistic markers that signal country, southern, redneck, and hillbilly tropes in popular culture.

"Keep It Clean (Hot Buns)" weds sonic and visual parody to a mash-up of hillbilly, cowboy, and redneck identity. The video features band members costumed as "redneck truckers," according to the gay news site the Advocate. Alternately, they are "hillbilly cowboys," by Huffington Post's account. Using still another term to describe the costuming, the music magazine Spin invoked the slur white trash. In fact, it is impossible to untangle redneck, trucker, poor white, hillbilly, cowboy, and country music images in the video. And that is consistent with the way these images circulate in American culture, in a muddled blur of stereotypes that also at times includes fundamentalist Christian, racist, and homophobic elements as markers of provincial white working-class identity. My own label for the band's performance practice here borrows the name of Jed Clampett from The Beverly Hillbillies, combines it with the concept of blackface minstrelsy, and designates Foo Fighters' production as an instance of Jed-face (figure 2).

 

Scene 2 of the video takes

About the Book

In her provocative new book Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Nadine Hubbs looks at how class and gender identity play out in one of America’s most culturally and politically charged forms of popular music. Skillfully weaving historical inquiry with an examination of classed cultural repertoires and close listening to country songs, Hubbs confronts the shifting and deeply entangled workings of taste, sexuality, and class politics.

In Hubbs’s view, the popular phrase “I’ll listen to anything but country” allows middle-class Americans to declare inclusive “omnivore” musical tastes with one crucial exclusion: country, a music linked to low-status whites. Throughout Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, Hubbs dissects this gesture, examining how provincial white working people have emerged since the 1970s as the face of American bigotry, particularly homophobia, with country music their audible emblem. Bringing together the redneck and the queer, Hubbs challenges the conventional wisdom and historical amnesia that frame white working folk as a perpetual bigot class.

With a powerful combination of music criticism, cultural critique, and sociological analysis of contemporary class formation, Nadine Hubbs zeroes in on flawed assumptions about how country music models and mirrors white working-class identities. She particularly shows how dismissive, politically loaded middle-class discourses devalue country’s manifestations of working-class culture, politics, and values, and render working-class acceptance of queerness invisible.

Lucid, important, and thought-provoking, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of American music, gender and sexuality, class, and pop culture.

About the Author

Nadine Hubbs is Professor of Women's Studies and Music, Faculty Associate in American Culture, and Director of the Lesbian-Gay-Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI) at the University of Michigan; she is the author of the award-winning book The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (UC Press). 

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

INTRO

PART I. Rednecks and Country Music
1. Anything but Country
2. Sounding the Working-Class Subject

PART II. Rednecks, Country Music, and the Queer
3. Gender Deviance and Class Rebellion in “Redneck Woman”
4. “Fuck Aneta Briant” and the Queer Politics of Being Political

OUTRO
Notes
References
Subject Index
Song Index

Reviews

"The implications of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music go far beyond the social and sexual politics of a popular music form. . . . With a light and confident hand and an eye on historical context . . . [Hubbs] makes a strong plea for the redneck and the queer—not necessarily always different people—as significant and positive actors in American life."
Times Literary Supplement
"Intellectually stimulating."
Notes
"Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music is an intellectual tour de force that offers a nuanced exploration of the ways that white middle-class attitudes toward country music and white working-class modes of discourse have led to the marginalization of the white working class in political and cultural discourse."
Journal of the Society for American Music
"An important book that is . . . as much about moral questions as it is about political, social, and cultural concerns. Our challenge is now to act upon the kind of fortitude and consciousness of resistance the author finds at the heart of working-class culture."
Popular Music and Society
"Hubbs uses country music to uncover longstanding alliances between white working class and queer subcultures. Such alliances have been obscured by stereotypes of low-status whites, or "rednecks," as uniformly bigoted and homophobic, and of "middle America" as homogenous and provincial. Hubbs trenchantly critiques middle-class disavowals of working class culture (exemplified by the phrase "I’ll listen to anything but country"), and meticulously analyzes songs by the Foo Fighters, Gretchen Wilson, David Allen Coe, and others. Hubbs writes that "To hear country on its own terms, we must seek out the particular values and devalued culture of the working class.""
International Association for the Study of Popular Music
Books of the Year 2014: “A vigorously written study . . . whose argument is as tight as a groundhog trap in Tennessee.”
Herald Scotland
"One of the most important scholarly discourses on country music of this decade."
Wondering Sound
"Academics don’t pay enough attention to class. . . . Nadine Hubbs . . . makes the case for paying more attention . . . , suggesting the potential for real political collaboration between the working and the middle classes."
New Books in Pop Culture
""Opens up a conversation about class that’s long overdue."
Progressive Populist
"Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music" is a far-ranging, multi-layered analysis, full of provocative insights, packaged in crisp, engaging prose"
Agricultural History
"One of the most convention-busting books I’ve ever read. . . . Nadine Hubbs [has] extended the analysis of race and gender in country music beyond the black-white binary and into LGBTQ+ territory."
Country Queer
"Being a Deep-South redneck who adores country music and its history, I was on guard against how it would be handled by the Professor of Women’s Studies and Music from up North. . . . I found it . . . extraordinary that Hubbs . . . recognizes [the condescension here] and calls the elites on it by challenging views of 'class apartheid' and a 'segregation and opacity [that] allows middle-class people to presume that they understand the working class.'"
Abbeville Review
"A scholarly deep dive that is somehow still a page-turner and hugely thought-provoking."
Holler
“One of the most convention-busting books I’ve ever read.”—Joshua Friedberg, Country Queer

"It has been a long time since a scholarly book gave me this much sheer pleasure. Hubbs's dazzling discussions of songs and music history are like candy, and I consumed them eagerly. The focus on class is long overdue and entirely welcome. This book exemplifies a revitalized and analytically potent resurrection of class studies, and one that is rich, embodied, and granular. The bibliography and literature reviews are themselves a breathtaking contribution, but that pales before the book’s own innovative claims and arguments. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music vaporizes a whole collection of received assumptions about the relationships among class, musical cultures, and politics—most specifically, the pervasive characterizations of the middle class as queer tolerant and the working class as homophobic. A theoretical tour de force."—Gayle Rubin, author of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader

"In lucid, economical prose and in eloquent detail, Nadine Hubbs describes the cultural poetics of working-class subjectivity. She treats country music and the communities of taste (and distaste) to which it gives rise as rich sources of information about the symbolic language of social inequality in the United States. One of her brilliant insights is that toleration of homosexuality has gone from being a symptom of working-class pathology in the early twentieth century to being a manifestation of middle-class enlightenment by that century’s end, while homophobia has been transformed from an ostensibly reasonable and justified middle-class attitude to an allegedly bigoted working-class one. The result of this analysis of changing social attitudes is a major reconceptualization of the history and politics of sexuality in the U.S." —David Halperin, author of How to be Gay

"Stunning! With this serious and sophisticated examination of musical culture among working class people, Hubbs gives us another myth-busting book about American musicality's entanglement with American gender and sexuality." —Suzanne G Cusick, Professor of Music, New York University

"Rednecks, Queers and Country Music is a persuasive call to hear country music in totally new ways.  Hubbs boldly and baldly identifies what is really at stake when we imagine country as the sound of bigotry, whether racist, sexist, or homophobic. She compels us to listen anew for the genre’s unexpected echoes of distinctively white working-class gender and sexual identities and for its persistent reminders that all sorts of marginalization resonate on related frequencies. Her arguments will upend contemporary orthodoxy about the politics of country music." —Diane Pecknold, author of The Selling Sound: Country Music, Commercialism, and the Politics of Popular Culture

Awards

  • Honorable Mention for the 2015 Woody Guthrie Award, International Association for the Study of Popular Music - US Branch