Let’s Dance!
April 1, 2024
Another in a series of observations of life as I know it.
Let's dance
Let's dance
For fear your grace should fall
Let's dance
For fear tonight is all
Let's sway
You could look into my eyes
Let's sway
Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight.
-David Bowie
~~~~~
For anyone who might be remotely interested, I like Beyoncé’s new venture in Country music. Texas Hold ‘Em is a heel and toe tapper that can get even the most languid two-stepper onto the dance floor. Catchy, kinda flirty, it defies the inflexible genres we tend to fall back on. In short, it’s good. Most musicians who work within the Nashville sphere will tell you that the goal is to get the audience to dance. To whirl around the crowded confines of a dark roadhouse barroom. Isn’t that the reason for all music? To inspire movement and euphoria, however fleeting.
Well, apparently the New York Times intelligencia feels otherwise. Instead of listening to the call of insistent feet, they have surgically eviscerated the album Country Carter. And Beyoncé. To which I reply, get a life. The inference is that this is a Deutsches Grammophon recording of Lang Lang or Emmanuel Ax playing Saint Saens. The critic’s nose is above the horizon or somewhere darker perhaps. This is country music, played by a black diva. You were expecting maybe Ode to Joy? While she is mining new and fertile ground, we’re also talking about a distinctly fundamental American sound, developed over centuries. What Beyoncé is doing is returning to her black country roots. Nothing more, or perhaps much more. But it ain’t no body’s business but her own. Twang and slang. Come and git it while it’s hot.
Criticism. This is why I have not and never will join a book club. Upon finishing the final page of a novel, a biography, historical fiction or just plain old non-fiction, I like to sit in silence. Oftentimes it’s with wistful sorrow, slowly reading each word near the inevitable ending. Or I race ahead to discover clues and conclusions. Sometimes I don’t finish at all because the author has failed to keep my attention. Even so, I faithfully move on to the acknowledgments, because it takes a village to write and publish a book. Having toiled in the vineyards of print media, I appreciate photo editors, proofreaders and typesetters and feel a debt of gratitude to each and every person involved between the covers. And then I carefully turn the last endpaper, review the author bio on the paper shroud that envelops most hardbacks. And I breathe it all in, just for a moment. The volume then takes its place on ever crowded shelves, unless I have promised it to a friend.
Here is what does not happen. Discussion. An overly diligent parsing of the narrative. A desperate search for symbology. Nope, no, nyet. After completing Faulkner’s Snopes saga in college, I swore off the practice of literary autopsy. Of finding the underlying societal premise of Edna St Vincent Millay. Or the function of the Messianic figure in the Old Man and the Sea. I don’t want to know and I most definitely do not want to talk about it. The End. So too with Beyoncé’s venture into country music. I want to listen, not talk. She’s a Texas girl, a black woman, a media mogul. With a rich sounding set of pipes and an octave range. Her lyrics can be memorable after several turns of the record or several beers. Or not. Who cares? So what if her prose isn't pretentiously Proustian? Or her themes unmindful of the precedent set by fellow Texan Larry McMurtry. Frankly, if it’s good enough for Dolly, then it’s good enough for me. Just move along. Nothing to see here. I honestly don’t give a hoot if there is an underlying zeitgeist in her album’s new song, Ya Ya. Rock and roll highbrow cynicism akin to an exegesis on Sympathy for the Devil as demonstrated by Hell’s Angels at Altamont. Really? A rock critic is the penultimate oxymoron. The only thing I want to do is dance, lipsync and move. Or fling open the car windows with the radio on full blast. And that should be enough. Period. Full stop. Enough already.