The Night Atlanta Burned

So, now we put on our contemplation caps and ask the question: am i being meaner, more judgmental, more critical about this collection than any other music i trashed? Skip and Sandra would probably say yeah, i'm unbottling a big batch of prejudice. My response would have to be "kinda hard not to when that's literally the purpose of this project." 

I'm still hearing interviews with our Sherriff saying that no one can prevent these kinds of tragedies, it's impossible to pinpoint who will actually "snap," so the best thing we can do is treat it like a fire drill or a tornado drill or like Russia might bomb us at any moment. Now, on the surface that might seem like rational talk from a benevolent authority figure dealing with a tough situation. It's not, it's actually antanagoge: when life gives you lemons, map out a strategy to hide from a murderous lemon rampage. I'm sure we can all find our favorite episode where Andy Griffith did exactly the same thing and we all got through our spats of grief in a healthy fashion, but you're putting blinders over the actual issue here. People "snapping" is now a totally normal part of existence. 

The classic example of this nonintuitive normalization is widening the highway to deal with traffic congestion. You add two more lanes and for a while driving to work is a little less frantic. After an adjustment period, however, more people take that newly widened freeway for all sorts of new reasons and we're right back to the original problem. In short, you haven't "solved" a problem, you've created the space for more traffic, made it bigger and even harder to solve in the future. Mass shootings are now a thing we regularly have to worry about because we refuse to deal with any of the issues that lead to them. Said another way, we tolerate them AND the conditions that lead to them happening more and more frequently. Historically speaking, the most common response to that phenomenon has been various forms of Right-wing Fascism. Heidegger, poster child for Phenomenology himself, was an unashamed Nazi. 

Regardless, i have a lifetime of filtering all that stuff out of all sorts of genres, separating the music from the celebrity if you will, but i don't have that with Country. It all appears to me to delight in presuming that humans are garbage exactly like they should be, but "we" have the secret to redemption and perseverance. I am not part of that "we." I can ignore that perception, but i can't actually make it go away. None of that feels honest, it feels sleazy and hypocritical. Of course that's not a fair assessment, and i've tried to highlight some of the real gems when i come across them. That, i think, is the difference. I'm telling you i'm wrong, and we're working through it with words instead of fists or bullets or deputy Fife getting involved. 

We've reached an important distinction. We can't really control how we feel, feelings are after all instinctual reactions, but we can to a large extend control how we act upon those feelings. The more we self-regulate those actions the easier it becomes to step away from the feelings behind them and choose a different path. 

Desensitization has an obvious downside, though, so we must always evaluate our tolerance, continually redraw the line in the sand. 

My object of study is of course "albums," but what comes out of them is not some essential truth about the object, but rather a complete reflection of my own experience, past, present, and future. What i learn is that i don't despise the music at all, nor do i despise the people who make it and enjoy listening to it, i instead despise the cultural function i perceive in it, the value assigned to it as a singular thread of our social fabric. That is not an objective perception at all, it is highly subjective and derived from my personal experience. 

So, we must unfortunately fast forward, skip all the intervening drudgery for (or postpone it until after) The Night Atlanta Burned. 

The album is of course a reference to General Sherman's burning of Atlanta near the end of the Civil War, presented as the story of the saving of instruments from the Atlanta Conservatory of Music. It's an instrumental album of Classical/Folk/Bluegrass presented as a kind of modern recreation of pre-war American culture. 

You're going to bring whatever you know about the Civil War into this album, and so will i. I don't want that to be this review, but it's unavoidable. You can hold up Sherman's decision to shift from a war between governments and military to total war on the economic infrastructure of the population as a terrible thing, but at the end of the day we're talking about a fundamental war about the economics of slavery. You can't hold up and view the artifact without grappling with the notion of nostalgizing the economics of slavery upon which it was built. You can choose to interpret the intended message of that concept in various ways, but you cannot remove it from your intellectual experience. 

War in America has always had the air about it as if it were a spectator sport. A golf tounament, if you will, where the people crowd the fairway and expect the combatants to have the decency to not collateral damage their family picnic. 

And so we reach our cerebral crisis. The music on this album is phenomenal, but what do we make of the album itself? Is it as vomitous as i may have led you to believe? Well, it certainly could be, but i think it's fair to defer to the much larger career of Chet Atkins the person. Believe it or not, he has a career long track record of publicly and unashamedly performing with great delicacy, honesty, and humanity the music of our supposed political enemies. Not only can i hear this album as embracing of the diversity of the music, culture, and people of the South, i have a hard time believing that wasn't his immediate intent. Just like it wasn't fair to force border politics on Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, i don't think it's fair to saddle 1975 Chet Atkins and his 47th album with the livery of our 1880s Civil War. It's entirely possible to see this album and its concept as a cautionary tale of what we can lose when we place our own self-righteousness on a pedestal. So thank you for toughing it out with me, i hope you enjoyed this executively-decided correctionary u-turn as much i did. Cheers.

A New Story