Elvis impersonators and gig listeners

What makes an 'entrepreneur'?

And what's the difference between Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg? One could be on trial for greed and the other for war crimes.

The 'gig' economy is heading toward a worker-led rebellion pioneered by Caesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. It's heartening to see so many unions--union halls, union signs, openly union declarations of unionism on beer cans, cars, recreational vehicles, motorcycles, paper cups--as righteous as seeing a church on the side of the road somewhere between Pikeville, Kentucky and Moundsville, Virginia. A Church means something, as does a union.

Music can mean anything, and that music can mean anything is a big chunk of its beauty. But music can't mean nothing as so much of the music that calls itself 'country music' does these days.

Listening to David Byrne of/and The Talking Heads, is listening to three, maybe four music's at once, as is listening to Hank Williams and Johnny Cash and Lucinda Williams. Each still sounds like three, possibly four types of music--the folk music of The Highlands of the northern British Isles, the blues of North America, and the radio-induced hit parades of the post-war 1940s & early 50s when music was just beginning to become commercial enough to build, and then to maintain, Graceland.

Country music was a perfect blend of music's, and not the near-bottom/bottom feeding music of the 'gig' economy that is now called country western music. Country music now has no partralineal resonance, and so it all sounds very much the same. We who listen to this country music have every right to be critical of what we're hearing in restaurants and bars across the USA, particularly, but not excluded to, the swath through Appalachia running from western North Carolina thru WVA and on into Maryland.

Even if we critics are wrong we're right: they've made 'gig' listeners of us. We're the ones--the listeners--who now have to provide the meaning to the music! And we're forced to hear it everywhere, this current country western music, in restaurants and bars, in the bathrooms inside the restuarants. Even if we should choose to eat and drink outside in the screened in 'porch' the restaurant provides, the restaurant pipes the music from inside to outside so we have no choice but to hear it as music and provide some meaning to it. 

Imagine if David Bowie had made country music the way David Byrne is making it? Yeehaw! Imagine if Eudora Welty had married Lyndon Johnson! It's time we listeners demand country western music that has the verve, daring, and improbability of such a coupling.

Listening to The Talking Heads while driving into Baltimore, MD on the way to the Museum of Art to see The Cone Collection and then the grave of Edgar Allen Poe, is the only way to go. 

Billiard room, Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee. May, 2019.