This is a most critically accepted CD offering from Lucinda Williams, the highlight of a magazine dork review guy's musical darling, and that turns me off. Plus, this is considered a classic of the "I like the idea of country music but hate those ignorant fuckers that actually listen to country music radio" alt.country genre. (You judgemental fuckers, how come ignorance is from social conditioning when non-white, but when it's white people, for some reason it's their own fault? I bet you don't want them dating your daughter either, you fucking assholes.) But the thing is, there's real shit in here, deeply embedded, deeper than your regular fucker with a guitar and a dollar store composition book to jot down lyrical ideas can even begin to scratch at. There's a certain fuckedness to it all; it's very downtrodden and sinking into some things. But there's also a pride about it all, that yeah this is bad, but I can fix it and it's better than the alternative. That basically is the white trash mindframe. And I don't pretend to be an expert or an authority or nothing; I am just who I am. I grew up how I did, and today my dumb ass was wearing a button down shirt tucked into some dumb ass khakis (from Goodwill, naturally) and walked into a goddamned soul-forsaken Whole Foods to buy two stupid fucking things, which of course cost almost $13. So it's not like I'm sitting around drinking beer and making bets on who's gonna win a fight between my down's syndrome cousin and simple minded son who sleeps with pigs in the afternoon for fun, which is nice, because it keeps the pigs calmer and more accessible. But I know real shit because I've stepped in enough real shit and was sprouted from real shit. And this album is some real shit, alt.country cul-de-sac PBR-drinker approved or not.
Thing is, none of the rural half-wild hopeless motherfuckers out there really like country music that comes on the radio. I've passed this CD along to a few people, and everybody who's heard it is like, "Man, who the fuck is this? I've never heard her on the radio." Again, people's ignorance is not completely their own fault all the time. Partially it is, yeah, that's true, but you can't blame people for not knowing something they've never been showed.
So yeah, one time I went into the indy dork record store a block off the downtown mall in Charlottesville, and there was a brand new copy of this in LP format, shrinkwrapped purity, and I was gonna get it, but new vinyl costs $15 (at that point), which is a hard pill to swallow, especially when I ended up digging through his used crates and finding six or seven go-go 12-inches for a dollar apiece, plus I bought a third extra just-in-case copy of The South's Gonna Do It by the Charlie Daniels Band. That right there is DJ/hip hop culture mixing with country music more than anything else in my life, the fact that I will buy any copy of that or Red Headed Stranger, just because. I think I have nine albums just of those two records. And some people don't even own nine albums total. I am the harbinger of retroactive stylages.
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