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November 19, 2004
Hayseed Dixie
This album is all AC/DC covers done bluegrass style ñ all acoustic, banjo, fiddle, etc. It's interesting in terms of my research in that it illustrates how content can move through a conventional boundary. The content is the same but it is transformed to some extent by its application within a new set of conventions. Bluegrass is a fairly strict convention requiring particular instruments and ways of playing to actually be labled 'bluegrass' (ask Mr Bill Monroe about that!).
What I really like, and what cracks me up, about this particular mutation (if it is that?) is that while highlighting the huge differences between the original convention and the new one, it also plays on (and in fact it's effect relies on) the similarity between the specific contexts these seperate conventions inhabit. I'm talking, affectionately of course, about White Trash here. It works because AC/DC are bloody hillbillies. Or perhaps citybillies. Whatever the hillbilly became ñ that's AC/DC. That's the mutation. The poor white working man is still the poor white working man . . . he hates his job and when the weekend rolls around he wants to drink some piss and rock out.
Does anyone remember 'Cotton Eye Joe'? Fucking awful, but same thing. Hillbilly-house music. It's funny precisely because it makes sense. The whole cubbing scene is essentially just a contemporary mutation of the hillbilly hoe-down. Poor white trash getting smashed (pills or moonshine, doesn't matter) and trying to forget how crap their daily living is.
Posted by Luke Wood at November 19, 2004 11:51 AM