Hick is sexual. A Hick is the good daughter of the Mennonite couple that produces hyper-sexualized and corny Nashville country videos like an early Taylor Swift or the ‘Footloose’ daughter of a preacher man (I could do a whole blog on what is corn with Kevin Bacon).
Hick is obviously the Talladega nights, but also more sincerely Christian and less campy (Talladega nights is not camp per Sontag’s definition just camp-y… Thank you, baby Jesus).
Adam McKay Talladega Nights 2006
Hick is WWF (WWE) wrestling, it’s fake boobs (though it insists that Fake boobs are an “improvement,” rather than an assault on truth). Hick seeks justice, and demands satisfaction. No One in this sphere is pretending… No One is ashamed of pretense… Every last Hick is Proud.
The white daughter (when Armenia was White) that climaxes on YouTube for ‘likes’ and money with the black American male… is a Hick. I believe the honesty of her pleasure as her orgasm elevates the video to Hick.
The black male that make art, so-called “music,” for their mostly 12 year old white girl audience is just as Hick… just as Country… and just as “house slippers out at the Apollo” as Kanye and Kim and MAGA together… as the Ouoth of the Carter Family goes, “putting the cunt back in country.” (In all serious though, the number one consumer of hardcore Rap downloads in America are 12 year old white girls).
I should come back to the Holy Trinity presented in American Gothic for a moment before we get too far off course. I very much enjoy seeing the Trident as a metaphor as it reminds me of the India experience. The Trident which is the Devil’s pitchfork as it is Poseidon’s pagan truncheon is also here simultaneously the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. India seems to have a knack for presenting the absolute horrific as holy. The contradictions in this nation are ubiquitous and legendary.
To speak about Hick (Or India for that matter) is not dissimilar to my reaction to Grant Wood’s painting. I find these good folks rupugnant, as I am attracted and repulsed to the sensibility of Hick in almost equal measure.. I am reminded of the unforgiving aspect of living in the Baptist chicken and cornbread Homeland. Die Heimat.
India is hallucinatory which is exciting as that infinite consciousness projected as matter out over the universe is a working definition of God.
In India there is a mythic dynamic between Shiva and Vishnu. It’s generally understood that the deity representing all destruction is Shiva and the deity representing the maintenance of creation is Vishnu. All the different deities in the Indus valley civilization are simply metaphors for Brahman -- the Ultimate Reality underlying all phenomena and existence.
(Complicating matters slightly, is the name of that third deity, Brahma, this triumvirate represents the god of creation and is a lesser deity than the other two).
The Yogi walks a fine line in Indus civilization. Sometimes, it is a Yogi (dare I use pronouns?) like Arjuna, warring in pursuit of preservation of family, caste, and honour against his malignant half-brothers the Kauravas, in the Mahabharata. His own charioteer, Krishna, is an avatar of Vishnu himself. At other times, a Yogi manifests himself as Shiva swallowing the noxious stench of the Haalaahala, a deadly poison that began destroying the entire known universe after emerging from Mount Meru, and by doing so saves all beings alike; but then, in an act of paradox, he delightfully goes about annihilating the cosmos every 311 trillion years.
The tension for the Yogi is that the Yogi educates society towards health and pleasure and santosha (contentment). That is, the yogi teaches us how to both experience also also enjoy pleasure, in spite of its monotonous servility and our subsequent desensitization. The Yogi teaches us how to enjoy pleasure and accept its temporary nature.
How to live Life when given Life?
Paradoxically the Yogi in Indus civilization — that is… Every civilization, every society has the pattern of becoming inured, separate and alien from the food chain, and in response, chains itself to the stultifying bureaucracy that divvies up each single serving portion of canned Del Monte Yellow Cling Peach Slices – it is here then, that the Yogi must rip out the rot and putrefaction and awaken the God-nature of callow humankind… by Christlike violence if necessary.
Our American Treasure, the beloved Billy Ray Cyrus is also a like Christyogi savior. His mullet-cowboy-boot nature is consoling as paradoxically it also threatening. Overt Sexuality which is in service popular culture must walk Occam’s razor. As the figure who protects us and saves our American values is also a threat to seduce your wife and daughter.
Perhaps achy breaky heart represent the sacrifice that Hanuman makes to Rama? That is... is Billy Ray Cyrus the Krishna-consciousness savior? Wouldn’t he be doing us a favor by satisfying our women? We are brothers aren’t we? You and I?
Watch his daughter Miley teach the degenerate alcoholic Jimmy Fallon yoga and decide:
Ah… Billy, a square jawed, Christian Waylon Jennings, a reformed Arjuna – champion of society. Except that the contrivance of this affect is exactly opposite of Hank Williams. Hank Williams would never have done it this way. He is a fake. And therefor he is demonic.
Isn’t the fake, the contrivance, the self creation, the Colter Wall of country music, isn’t that self-construction sincere, tho?
Isn’t Billy Ray Cyrus demonic precisely because he is authentically Hick?
Was W. Bush authentically Hick? Or was he a Connecticut construction of a Hick in King Arthur’s Court?
All Hat, No Cattle. Just an F150 and 48 car payments to DollyLand.
You must understand the contempt in Texas for the affected Nashville cowboy (my family transplanted there twenty years ago) and yet the affected cowboy is the most sincere of cowboys.
Let me say here ala Jon Landau, I have seen Hick music’s future and it Colter Wall. This sincere construction is not an affected Cowboy. And yet he is. He is contrived.
Colter Wall’s parents are the most Canadian, polite and nasal of all Canadians. Colter’s Dad is a three time Premier of Saskatchewan and is the farthest person from Arkansas or the Carter family and cotton picking Cash as a man can come.
(Though his dad did attempt to move the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame from Ontario to Swift Current, Saskatchewan). He is still Regina’s most decorated and successful centre-right politician and as nasal and crisp as any cheese or melon head.
And yet, Colter Wall is beautifully, authentically country.
He, as the Brahmins will teach you, is born country. He transcends caste. He is born to power, to Kshatriya. And yet, he pursues Art, and the art of Hick sincerely.
He pursues the artist merchant class within the 18 substratum of Vaishya sincerely. His pretense as a Waylon Jennings devotee is complete, sincere, and believable. We as the viewer, the society, suspend belief before the spectacle of Colter Wall’s great sodden vibrating Voice. Just ask Baba on “Mid-Morning-Mojo” (CKUA Radio Network in Edmonton, Alberta) might say, “Oh yes, Colter Wall is truuly great.”
Colter Wall at the “Original 16 Canadian Pale Ale Brewery sessions” 2016
Colter Wall, who at this writing is wonderfully 23, and still thankfully alive, has a voice that, like Mrs. Cash, must have scared his mother to Betsy when it hit bottom.
As the story goes, Mrs. Cash was washing dishes in Kingsland, Arkansas, when she heard her son Johnny walking home from the cotton fields singing. She pulled the pan out of the sink to see what man was walking on her land and was plum shocked to see her own son standing there. Colter’s mom, a nasal naïf Tami Kildaw (Ok... yeah... pure country) must have done the same when Colter came home from his Dad’s photo op press circuits as a lanky 12 year old himself talking like a satchel of mud dried into the spit and sun and dirt and baked in molasses.
Colter seems to have a grammaphonic memory for outlaw country.
His musical style easily slips into Willie Nelson Waltz and Jimmie Rodgers and his stories have a distinction that Billy Jo Shaver would be proud of as would Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash. Steve Earle has stood up and applauded him. Though his songs are provincial to Saskatchewan they are not provincial in their pretense nor aspiration. They may appear nostalgic, but they are transcendently folkloric. Their aspiration is epochal not sentimental. So they cannot be kitsch, nor camp. They are Hick though. He just isn’t from Arkansas. He is a self-made Hick.
Hick is explicitly Republican. She is a xenophic to others which, as Robert Sapolsky says “is indicative of an amygdala bathed in an excess of estrogen.” Which is to Hick as tribal and fertile as a Venus of Willendorf. The Nashville Hick drapes herself in the flag ala Altman’s Nashville and stomps across the stage with her powerful ripped candy cane thighs and vajazzled blue and white crystal cunt.
Carrie Underwood, Nashville, and an example of Japanese Kuboki theatre
The Hick is now obviously also Alaskan. And if Colter Wall is a self-intentioned Hick, Sarah Palin is the Hick who constructs herself as the cosmopolitan maverick who will reshape National government. This self-construction is hashtag “fail”… perhaps the greatest of all Hick #fails we have seen in our lifetime. Not quite the fail of the Hick Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the bright neon lights of the Army Corp. Yet, still a soft dying fail like the blush of fat that rises in the jowls and cheeks of our favorite high school cheerleader bowed by a bucket of ice cream and Merlot.
It’s Clintonesque.
Speaking of soft conservative fails how incredible that the conservative social politics of the Hindutva so closely matches the hypocrisy of the subversive power agenda of the centre-right in Uhmerika.
Think of the Indians (real) running under the Republican banner: Nikki Haley in NC—now a disgraced former UN ambassador or Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, the least respected “man” in conservative politics. Small town conservative Indians in America are now Hicks. They have managed to transcend color and race in a way no other model minority has ever dreamed of. Save a few self-hating Jews who endorse and produce Tucker Carlson and run political campaigns for Trumpists.
Republican Indians, are in my own experience as small minded and bigoted as their brethren back home in India. Even in Communist Karnataka the newspapers run daily personal ads asking for light skin (the lightest skin you can find while still being steeping in Brahmin values and identity). Fucking hicks.
In protest, my high school friend Sumanth Gopinath founded the Gated Community. They are an amazing bluegrass and Country Western group (Sumanth also infamously started the first graduate student revolt against unpaid labor at Yale University). The Gated Community was Hipster Hick – Hick with a sense of irony.
The values of Hick would ordinarily be abhorrent to a multicultural group of hyper-educated democratic socialists and music professors at the University of Minnesota. But, “they kinda like the music and the girls are insane there,” and they are very good at making their own ‘hick-flecked’ version of sad country songs.
They are a bit like Willie Nelson that way:
Their pretense that they can contrive authentic and true to life divorce minuets is Hick as it comes.
Fake it til’ you make it.