This Week It's "CeeGees Light": 5 Current Events Heads-Ups...
...in lieu of a full music-news-music CeeGee. Pushin' hard to get back on schedule next week, but until then.......
One of the handful of reasons I’m turning in a mini-CeeGee this week (and turning it in a day late) is: on Publication Day yesterday I was tracking bass (see above) in a friggin’ crazy-amazing studio owned by a moderately famous country music figure. And the unrealistic thinking was that in my down time I could still write the day’s CeeGee. But alas, there was no down time, really, and I wanted to give my all to the recording. And I also wanna give my all to each CeeGees post. And then the reality came to me that my all this week would only be able to produce a mini-CeeGee.
But! I don’t want the five potential topics I earmarked for the week to disappear into the ether, so let me give you a heads-up on them and some links for you to follow at your discretion. And then we’ll get back to normal format next week.
HYPOTHESIS: White rural rage, while justified, is what’s killing democracy.
Following is a gift link (so you can bypass the paywall) to an opinion piece from economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In “The Mystery of White Rural Rage,” Krugman reviews a new book called White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy. I definitely recognized a bit of condescension toward rural folk when I read it last Monday, but this is probably the biggest topic CeeGees exists to contemplate, so, I take his point:
“…loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected—why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.”
Then at the end of the week came a searing criticism of the piece from former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi. I used to really dig Taibbi’s writing. He was a hero of the left during the years leading up to Trump, but has since devoted his Racket News Substack newsletter to takedowns of the smug liberal elite (I get it, but…) and hammering away at how wrong Russiagate was (I get it, but…) and how right he was that Russiagate was wrong (I get it, but…for such a talented writer to prioritize this stuff when there’s so much more important stuff to cover is a huge bummer).
Anyway. Maybe “The Turning of Taibbi” will be a future CeeGee. But in the meantime, here he is on Krugman:
Nobel-winning columnist Paul Krugman of the New York Times spent the last year telling “ignorant” Middle America its negative feelings about the economy are “demonstrably false,” because despite what their bank accounts or home evaluations might say, “Bidenomics is still working very well.”
Taibbi touches on a point that Krugman and all opponents of the MAGA right would do well to internalize and take deadly seriously: it doesn’t matter how “demonstrably false” it is that the economy is good overall right now; it doesn’t feel good to an enormous block of voters in rural America. What does feel good to them, unfortunately, is to rally around the figurehead of a movement they believe speaks for them, and just for them.
Being a part of MAGA means your pain is being felt, and acknowledged, and taken seriously. And as the authors of White Rural Rage say in an MSNBC interview Taibbi rips apart (and deservedly so, for the most part): if neither party is going to do anything for Middle Americans, at least MAGA gives them a way to vent.
In that Morning Joe interview (embedded below), the authors’ argument sides with rural folks in substance, but I agree with Taibbi that the primary impression they give is one of utter disdain for rural whites as a demographic. The truth is the truth, but it’s not helpful for Rage co-author Tom Schaller to have immediately started the interview by angrily, aggressively, breathlessly defining heartlanders as the most:
racist
xenophobic
anti-immigrant
anti-gay
conspiracist
anti-democratic
anti-free press
anti-free speech
violent
The majority of white Middle Americans and Southerners are not those things (well…not all those things), despite the fact that I don’t doubt they are more those things than other comparable demographics.
But what is the mission here, gentlemen? To piss rural white people off even more? Or to sound the alarm that we need to do more things to actually help them, and to help them feel it helping them, so they can maintain more of their dignity and make better voting choices?
(Hint: it’s that last option. Or at least it should be.)
P.S. The Rev. Al Sharpton asks the authors a question in the below Joe clip that I’ve always wanted CeeGees to address, as well: isn’t much of what the New Right is doing geared toward keeping middle- and lower-class Americans from coming together as a multi-racial majority to rise up against those intent on instilling authoritarianism and oligarchy?
These guys seem to answer the rev in the affirmative, but their attitudes sure don’t seem likely to inspire anybody to do anything productive about the problem. They don’t have any answers, and Krugman admits at the end of his piece he doesn’t have any answers, either. And I don’t have any answers either, but I hope to at least keep from pouring salt on the wound like these dudes are.
P.P.S. Taibbi likens this Krugman point—“Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are?”—to late Eighties/early Nineties hellfire comedian Sam Kinison’s legendarily controversial bit, “Live Where the Food Is.” AND I TOTALLY MADE THAT CONNECTION WHEN I READ IT, TOO! I don’t love how this one’s aged, but…it is a classic.
Speaking of the New Right pushing authoritarianism and oligarchy…here’s a gift link (good for 14 days) to “Defense Contractors Are Bilking the American People,” Bernie Sanders’ article on the need for Congress to reinstate the Truman Committee on war profiteering so we can end corporate greed in the defense industry.
“No one denies that we need a strong military,” Bernie says. “But, like every other agency of government, it must be run efficiently and cost-effectively. It cannot simply be a cash cow for a handful of giant corporations.”I don’t have a gift link for this Rolling Stone piece on the music industry failing to properly address sexual abuse, “Survivor Groups Call On Music Industry to Address Sexual Abuse.” But you should be able to copy the link and open it in an incognito window to read it. (Sorry to expose that secret hack, RS…)
As we watched the film industry have to own up to sexual abuse within its ranks, all I could think about was how the music industry had to be at least as bad, and probably worse.
When I revisit the stuff I loved as a pre-teen—the music that made me want to be a musician myself—so much of it is subtly chauvinist at best, violently misogynistic at worst. Every industry has this issue, but the music industry has directly profited from it more than anybody else, so it’s far beyond time we get the same #metoo treatment as the film industry has.Here’s a link to a MoveOn petition that demands for country music radio to, “Stop the racism and gatekeeping! Play Beyoncé’s new country songs on your radio stations NOW!”
MoveOn goes on to say, “Demand that the country music industry acknowledge country music's roots in Black music history and stop the racism and gatekeeping. Beyoncé’s new music IS country music.”
Now, I signed the petition, but…here are the songs in question if you haven’t heard ‘em yet:
“Texas Hold ‘Em,” I get. There is a banjo in it, after all. But it’s not really country. And “16 Carriages” is really not country.
But guess what? Neither is most of the stuff on country radio! And country radio listeners are requesting Beyoncé, you say? And you’re not playing it because it’s not real country?? Sorry, but I can’t buy that suddenly the conglomerates in charge of country radio programming these days have suddenly become purists and won’t play a Black woman’s music solely because it doesn’t fit their format.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: I did my own extremely scientific research, pictured below, a couple days ago by examining a big Nashville country radio station’s playlist preferences. During the 9:40 a.m.-to-6 p.m. time slot I investigated? Guess what! The good news is…they totally played “Texas Hold ‘Em!”
Once, around 3 p.m.
Also in that timeframe they played Morgan Wallen 11 times (!!) and Jason Aldean four times, twice back-to-back. Both those dudes have a problematic history of questionable judgment, at the very least, when it comes to racial issues.
So maybe they played Kane Brown, who is Black, four times, too, just so they could say they played a Black guy as much as they played Aldean? (Not.)
And finally, here’s a link to a newsletter from everybody in the music business’s favorite curmudgeonly former entertainment lawyer, Bob Lefsetz. I certainly don’t always agree with the guy, but this entry was super-helpful to read for me—because I have to force myself to get out there and meet new people. My default setting is to remain in my “hidey-hole,” as my therapist calls it. To stay in an environment I know I can control.
And it sure seems like that’s where society is headed, too. Whether it’s because we don’t wanna get shot, or we don’t wanna get anybody’s cooties, or we’re just too lazy to bother to leave our homes (or all of the above), it seems inevitable that in a decade or so we won’t need to leave our homes for anything, and, therefore, we won’t.
So Lefsetz’s “New People” entry is worth a read. See ya next week. ~Dean