by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 8 p.m. last night I
settled in to watch the 52nd American Country Music Awards on CBS —
this is the “rump” country music awards show produced by Dick Clark Productions
(unlike people, corporations really can live forever!) and brought to us from the T-Mobile Arena in that hotbed
of country music, Las Vegas. (The rival Country Music Academy Awards at least
take place in the city generally regarded as the center of the country-music
world, Nashville, Tennessee.) Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this year’s
American Country Music Awards was the person who wasn’t there: Blake Shelton. While the Country Music
Academy Awards (abbreviated as “CMA” to distinguish them from the show that was
on last night, which is “ACM”) at least included Shelton, though they scheduled
his performance literally hours apart from that of his ex-wife Miranda Lambert,
the ACM’s neither nominated Shelton for anything nor invited him to perform,
while they gave Lambert Female Vocalist of the Year (I, of course, was rooting
for Maren Morris, who knocked me out on the CMA’s with her great song “My
Church,” and ever since I’ve been a huge fan of hers) and awarded Album of the
year to The Weight of My Wings (a beautiful title which Lambert said was given to her by her mother),
which is essentially her equivalent of Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small
Hours: a concept album about her
marital breakup. In their acceptance speeches, both Lambert herself and her
collaborators on the record gave her points for artistic and emotional honesty
and said that the greatest music in the world is that which communicates
“truth” — and indeed, the one song Lambert performed from the record, “Tin
Man,” which uses Wizard of Oz imagery to feature Lambert telling the Tin Man that he is indeed better
off without a heart (as Frank Morgan said in the 1939 Wizard of Oz movie, “Hearts will never be practical until they
can be made unbreakable”), seemed heartfelt and genuinely moving,
understandable given what we know about what Lambert went through and why she
made the record but also universal enough that anyone who hears it who’s been
through a painful breakup can think, “Yes, that’s me.” I didn’t have any galvanic shocks from this show
the way I did when I heard Maren Morris do “My Church” on the CMA’s, but there
was quite a lot of good music on this show — indeed, there was quite a lot of
music, period; even more than most “awards” shows these days the awards
themselves seemed like merely an excuse for the performances (there were 30
songs performed over a three-hour time slot, less commercials, which didn’t
leave much time for awards presentations, and the relative unimportance of the “awards”
part was shown by the fact that CBS followed the damnable old tradition of
giving the show to us on the West Coast on a tape delay three hours later
instead of starting the telecast at 5 p.m. so we could see it in real time, yet
one more reminder that to the East Coast-centric people who run the U.S. media
we on the West Coast suck hind tit).
One of the best pieces was “Fast” by Luke
Bryan (who also co-hosted the show with Dierks — pronounced “Dirks” — Bentley),
a lovely song about how young people always want to go fast — they want to
drive fast, fall in love fast and listen to fast music —while as they age and
realize that they’re pressing up against life’s literal deadline, they complain that things are going by
too fast. I loved that song, though I’m not sure I would have liked it as much
if I were 40 years younger and closer to the “fast” end of the fast-slow
continuum Bryan was singing about! Most of the music didn’t sound particularly
like what one ordinarily thinks of as “country” — all too much of what’s
popular on country radio today is more like what we in the 1970’s called
“Southern rock,” owing more to the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd than
Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash — and as often happens in music
today, though most of the artists were male (and let’s face it, to this old
queen one of the appeals of a country-music show is all those cute young guys
in ultra-tight jeans!!), the women on the program — Lambert, Morris, Carrie
Underwood and Kelsea Ballerini — seemed to sing with more sincerity and soul.
Underwood stood out on the opening medley of five songs from the Entertainer of
the Year award nominees (the winner, for the second year in a row, was Jason
Aldean), belting out her contribution with real emotion and some killer high
notes while the men pretty much just ran through their songs professionally but
unexcitingly. One of the exciting moments was Bryan, Bentley and Joe Walsh of
the Eagles playing a tribute to Chuck Berry — rather than doing a medley the
three took turns on the various choruses of “Johnny B. Goode” — Berry wasn’t a
country singer but country was certainly part of his musical mix (his
star-making hit “Maybelline” began as a parody of Bob Wills’ country classic
“Ida Red”) and he’d have been flattered by the attention, especially if his
friend Bo Diddley was right when he said Berry always really wanted to be a country singer. (Charles asked me
if there were any people of color actually on the show, and the only one I
remembered seeing was Darius Rucker, who reinvented himself as a country singer
after the breakup of his pop-rock band Hootie and the Blowfish — and even he
was only invited as a presenter, not a performer.) Maren Morris did “I Could
Use a Love Song” — I give her points for performing other things than “My
Church” instead of running that stunning song into the ground (obviously she
doesn’t want to be seen as a one-hit wonder) — and later joined with Thomas
Rhett for a duet on the song “Craving You” (and she was obviously holding
herself back so she wouldn’t drown him out).
Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, the
most famous power couple in country music now that they’ve outlasted Blake and
Miranda, did a duet called “Speak to a Girl,” which was basically how you
should talk respectfully to your mother when you’re a boy so you’ll get good
training in how to approach women when you’re a man, and Cold Swindell did a
nice duet with Bentley on a song called “Flatliner” (and yes, it’s what you
think, about someone who’s been so beaten up by love it looks like any moment
it’s literally about to kill them), and
one of the high points of the evening was Reba McIntire’s duet with “Christian
music star” Laram Daigle (I think I’ve got her name right) on “Keep On Praying,” a self-consciously
“inspirational” song but one retaining enough roots in both Black and white
gospel music to be appropriately moving. (Charles later told me one of his
Twitter friends had tweeted that the ACM awards was “three hours of people
thanking Jesus,” which was a bit unfair — only a couple of the awards
recipients thanked God, and indeed on one of the Black awards shows you’ll
probably hear a lot more people praising the Almighty for having allowed them
to win an award than you did last night.) Maren Morris won the New Female
Vocalist award (as she deserved!) and someone named Tom Pardi (not exactly the
most “country”-ish name) won New Male Vocalist and did a song called “Dust on
My Boots” (as in he wants his girlfriend to dance with him so hard it shakes
the dust off his boots) which, like most
of last night’s music, wasn’t especially moving or intense but was appealing
and fun. (Another song in the “appealing and fun” category was Brett Aldredge’s
“Something I’m Good At,” given a music-video presentation which involved
Aldredge having to pass through a number of sets and enact situations
representing the things the song says he isn’t good at before he made it to the stage.) Keith
Urban did “Blue Ain’t Your Color” (a quite nice love song which lost Song of
the Year to the considerably less interesting “Die a Happy Man” by Thomas
Rhett) and then duetted with Carrie Underwood on “What If I Fall?” (and she was
considerably less conscientious as a duet partner than Maren Morris was later
with Thomas Rhett: with that huge voice and those killer high notes, she simply
overpowered him), and Chris Stapleton, whom I’ve described elsewhere as “the
Bruce Vilanch of country music” — the overweight schlub who started out writing and ended up singing and
becoming a star even though he’s hardly a male sex god — did a song called “Let
Me Be the Second One to Know” (that you’re leaving me, was the predictable
sentiment).
I also quite liked the Brothers Osborne, who won the Best New Vocal
Group award and “It Ain’t Too Far” — there seem to be three of them and two of
them look alike enough to be believable as brothers, though the third wears a
ZZ Top-style beard that blurs his facial features so it’s hard to tell how much
he looks like the other two, and as for new male vocal groups Old Dominion (one
of the many politically problematic names that get attached to country bands —
like Lady Antebellum, who when I first heard of them I joked, “I wonder what
they’re going to call their album — Slavery Was Cool?”) had them beat with “(There’s No Such Thing As)
A Broken Heart” (tell that to Miranda Lambert!). Lady Antebellum also performed
something called “You Look Good,” and Little Big Town appeared to do a song
called “Happy People” (as in happy people don’t frown, don’t get depressed,
don’t have bigoted prejudices and don’t hate other people) with a backdrop of
flowers that reminded me of those dorky sets the people on the Ed Sullivan
Show built for the white
psychedelic-rock acts they had on in the 1960’s. I was also amused by the film
clips from a previously organized concert for the ACM’s “Stand Up to Cancer”
charity, one of which featured Luke Bryan and others doing — of all songs —
David Bowie’s “Heroes,” in a version that utterly lacked the “edge” Bowie and
Nico brought to this song. (“Heroes” as safe supermarket music — who knew?) The
big, much-ballyhooed finale was an ensemble number by Florida Georgia Line (two
men) with the Backstreet Boys (five guys who are hardly “boys” anymore — like
the Bowery Boys, they’re having to enact the parts of teenagers even well into
their 30’s, and when they were announced as doing “a long residency in Las
Vegas” I thought, “It’s true! Old performers never die — they just end up in
Vegas”) doing a medley of the FGL hit “Unconditionally” and the BB’s “Rock Your
Body” that was O.K. but a disappointing conclusion.
