If the Fred Durst List were not a list but a title belt that famous people would pass off to each other in the back of my head as The Ultimately Most Deserving of Raven Smashing Empty 64 oz. Private Stock Bottles Over Their Head, then without a doubt, Shooter Jennings would be the holder of that title for a few years running now. The popularity of Hank Williams III and modern "outlaw" country has been tough for me to swallow. I mean, the whole alt.country movement was bad enough, full of suburban sterilized souls and outright Canadians pretending to be rurally aware and full of the darkness that grows wild where I grew up like honeysuckle vines and Wal-Mart parking lots. But man, some of these fake outlaw country v2.0 guys fucking kill me. Kid Rock, for example. That Lynyrd Skynyrd/"Werewolf in London" song that played everywhere a couple years ago, oh lord man, it made me wish for more Al Qaeda funding from abroad. But, and this is probably an embarrassing admission on my part, Kid Rock has done like two or three songs that momentarily entertained me, although they all eventually faded into played outness (except maybe that "Only God Knows Why" song, which if it catches me just right, like driving to the river on a hot day with beer between my legs, it still makes sense to me).
But Shooter Jennings' music, if you've never listened to it, is the most pretentious wannabe outlaw bullshit that has ever been made. It's obviously music made by someone who doesn't really understand outlaw living at all. Being a wealthy kid who got into exclusive clubs as a teenager to get drunk is not really true outlaw behavior, and Shooter Jennings always comes across like someone who'd be more comfortable on an episode of The Hills than sitting around a picnic table with a beer cooler centerpiece. He had a show on the Sirius satellite that I listened to for about seven minutes a couple of weeks in a row, at the beginning because it must've came on after something good, maybe Hillbilly Jim's Moonshine Matinee on the weekend, and good lord it made me want to smash the world in frustration for not being able to kill the satellite sending the waves back to earth. Pretendery and pompous. And when you look at the dude, it's such a stylized ruffian look, with greasy looking hair that has grease added after washing with organic lavendar conditioner rather than actually left unwashed to get that natural greasy look going. (That's an interesting aside, the pretentious nature of "organic" as opposed to just doing it, like making three thousand degrees of extra effort to prove you are not doing the same stupid shit makes it better. On food, I understand the labeling, because I don't like feeding my children slow cancer, but at the same time if you're eating Angie's Organic Frozen Pizzas all the time, it's still processed and comes from a big nasty ass factory with giant vats of things being pressed into shape by machines operated by Mexicans.)
I have become certain that at some point I will cross paths with Shooter Jennings, and I will get to smash him, should I choose to live my dream, and I feel bad, because the best dog I ever had got his name from the dude's dad. But at the same time, later generations of awesome people end up sucking. I was supposed to paint a house for a dude who used to be the dentist for the family that the guy named Raven I got my name came from, and I was gonna get the gig because of that connection. But I never got back to the old dude, so he went another way, and I'm sure he was all like, "Man, this damn Raven guy is nothing like old Raven Speed was. These turkeys have turned this world all to hell." And then he'd complain about the Mexicans probably since a couple of them live on our road now and one of them has wrecked into the same embankment in a curve two times in the past five weeks. But he did it into the yard of the asshole former state trooper who lives down the road from me, so I think it's funny. That former state trooper dude used to call our old landlord when we didn't cut our grass. Now we own the place and let it grow all the time, and have junk cars and chickens and pigs and a tipi and a freezer on the front porch and a pile of scrap metal and there's nothing he can do about it. What's up now, bitches?
3 comments:
sYou might find Shooter's child's name interesting:
Alabama Gypsy Rose Jennings...
yeah i know, he bit the gypsy thing, and used four names and put it in the same spot as my firstborn. just another reason to playa hate his ass.
This hurts my heart cause I really enjoyed his first three albums but then again, I just listen for the music and don't try to read more into the character of the singer behind the songs. Little White Lines and Solid Country Gold and Blood From A Stone are really good songs.
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