Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
June 19, 2005 Sunday
POP NOTES Are we a music-loving nation divided?
BY MIKAEL WOOD SPECIAL TO THE DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
A few weeks ago, at the top of Billboard’s tally of the bestselling
CDs in the country sat a pair of albums by two artists who couldn’t
be more different: System of a Down, an Armenian-American heavy-metal
quartet from Los Angeles, and Toby Keith, the party-hearty country
singer from Oklahoma.
Diversity is nothing new for the chart, of course. The next week it
was headed up by the hard-rock supergroup Audioslave, the Chicago
rapper Common and the pop-culture trainwreck known as Mariah Carey.
But System and Keith represent more than the range of what the
marketplace determines as pop music in America. On virtually every
level – musically, stylistically, and most importantly, ideologically
– the two acts speak for different versions of America.
On Mezmerize, the System album (actually the first of two CDs the
band plans to release this year), guitarist Daron Malakian strangles
shards of noise from his instrument, like he’s squeezing a bone-dry
towel of its nonexistent moisture. The songs on Mezmerize start in
one place but end up in another. “B.Y.O.B.” courses from a thrashing,
full-tilt verse to a singsong chorus that grooves with rhythmic
elasticity. “Violent Pornography” injects pretty Armenian folksong
melodies into a goofy punk-funk rave-up. “This Cocaine Makes Me Feel
Like I’m on this Song” makes me feel like I’m on a theme-park ride
spinning out of control.
As anyone who has seen them at one of their actionpacked live shows
knows, System plays heavy metal. But the group approaches the form
like an abstract painter does his canvas: “How can I use the tools of
this form to create something new?”
Keith, on the other hand, plays conventionally rooted country music.
Where in recent years he has bulked up his material with lots of
hard-rock muscle, the tellingly titled Honkytonk University adheres
more firmly to twang tradition. Keith sings in his sturdy baritone
over strummed acoustic guitars and walking bass lines, and the tempos
are geared either for a boot-scootin’ boogie or a good, clean slow
dance.
Unlike System’s unpredictable experiments, Keith’s songs are
satisfying because they do exactly what you expect them to. In “She
Ain’t Hooked on Me No More,” a handsome duet with Merle Haggard, just
as Keith prepares to break down into his beer, he passes the mic to
steel guitarist Paul Franklin, who draws out the tune’s sensitive-guy
pathos so Keith doesn’t have to.
That reassuring machismo is what made Keith a superstar.
His 2002 hit “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” became a post-9/11
rallying cry for Americans grappling with the anger triggered by the
terrorist attacks of 2001.
He dials down the patriotic bluster on the love-song-heavy Honkytonk,
limiting it to his desire to “get down with [his] boys in Afghanistan
and Baghdad City.”
Still, compared to System frontman (and outspoken Bush critic) Serj
Tankian, Keith remains swaddled in the Stars and Stripes. “Why don’t
presidents fight the war?” Tankian wonders in “B.Y.O.B.” “Why do they
always send the poor?” The singer skewers Keith’s machismo in
“Cigaro,” conflating men fixated on their genitals with ”
propagators of all genocide, burning through the world’s resources.”
Last year’s election suggested that America had fractured into two
distinct countries with two distinct sets of values. In these two
best-selling albums – one progressive, the other conservative – we
can hear that sociocultural chasm deepening.