Kiss’s Gene Simmons and National Public Radio’s Terry Gross had a verbal punch-out on the air a few years back that outed Simmons as a sexist troglodyte and made Gross seem arrogant and disingenuous. But before their interview descended into name calling, Simmons observed that when he started Kiss, he wasn’t interested in having a band; he wanted a brand.
There’s wisdom in that, especially today. Digital media and our entertainment-obsessed culture have created a dizzying plurality of choices for consumers. To survive, let along thrive, artists have to be savvy about marketing themselves. Otherwise they’re just trees in the vast creative landscape.
Hank Williams III’s new two-CD Straight to Hell (BRUC) raises a question about the effects of necessary posturing on art. What happens when a savvy creative person starts believing his or her own hype?
For Williams, a talented songwriter blessed with granddad Hank Williams’s beautiful hound-dog voice when he applies himself, kicking against the pricks of the music industry has seemed a necessity. Although his craft and legacy are rooted in country, at 33 he’s a child of the punk and new-metal eras and rightly believes that he can stake a claim in any camp or combination of styles he chooses.
His record label has disagreed. Williams’s first Curb album, 1996’s Three Hanks: Men with Broken Hearts, used studio overdubbing to pair Hank III, as he’s known, with his father, Hank Williams Jr., and his grandfather. It was the kind of abomination that could have come only from Nashville’s corporate music establishment. (Unless, of course, you remember the “Unforgettable” pairing of Natalie and Nat King Cole.) And it was a potential career killer. Forced to set himself apart or become just another hack, Williams turned his songs and his shows into country-punk bonfires and then added metal to the flame. But the tattoos, the power chords, and the drooling booze-and-pills-saturated lyrics that he’s used to straddle country and indie rock are poised to consume him. On Straight to Hell, the artifice is threatening the art.
The title plays the bad-boy game, as do most of disc one’s songs. “Drinkin Problem” ends with Williams ODing; “Dick in Dixie” rants against the country-music establishment. Which raises another question: was Hank really naive enough to believe he’d find creative freedom on a major country label, or did he just go for the money and then recoil when he saw the awful result? That said, these tunes, recorded in his East Nashville home on a cheap portable digital machine, are also irreverent fun — if, ultimately, no more memorable than the similar novelty music of ’80s indie-rootser Mojo Nixon.
Disc two is even more dispensable. This 50-minute sound collage weaves together trains, barking dogs, preaching, answering-machine messages, Williams’s singing and strumming on acoustic guitar, and other ambient and found sounds. It’s a tedious, unlistenable rip-off, and so aimless, it seems like an attempt to break his recording contract, in the tradition of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (RCA).
But if that’s his ploy, Williams may have fallen into a pit of his own bullshit. Curb previously refused to release numbers that were full of swearing and doping, even canceling a 2003 album as he was going on tour. But BRUC is Curb spelled backward. And now that his label has co-opted his rebellion, what’s a self-made bad boy like Williams got left to call his own?
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On the Web:
Hank Williams III: http://www.hank3.com/
