
The Paris, Texas of the Second Empire
Compiled July 2012 by Lawrence Kumpf
The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. He is thus in the same
situation as the commodity. He is unaware of this special situation,
but this does not diminish its effects on him, it permeates him
blissfully, like a narcotic that can compensate him for many
humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the
intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of
customers. -- Walter Benjamin, 1938
A phantasmagoric journey through mid-20th century Country-Western
music inspired by Walter Benjamin’s "The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire."
Like the poet as flâneur in Benjamin’s essay, the country singer holds
a position as the susceptible vessel that embodies the incongruities
and ruptures characteristic of modern life. Neither an active symptom
nor proprietor of a solution for the social ills, the singer finds
himself drawn into the intoxicating world of empathetic relations to,
with and as commodity. We hear, perhaps more clearly then in
Baudelaire, a voice speaking not from the elevated position of a
social commentator or critic, but as the desire of the commodity and
commodified. Connoisseurs of narcotics sing empathetic odes to
inanimate objects and intoxicants, fortifying themselves in homes that
are really bars. Hobos, trashmen and ragpickers walk the street
collecting and picking through the worn out, exhausted items that have
escaped our economy of exchange: the antiques of modernity, the images
of obsolescence. The perpetual peregrinator, a rambling man,
heroically stripped of the comforts of modern life finds himself
stalking graveyards and mourning a loss that has yet to occur, the
final refuge of his own death. In a way these songs embody the last
gasp of a failed American politics, the moment before county western
music slips into an emphatic listing of personal property as banal as
Rick Ross’ "Trilla." The tragedy of our era is that the latent
revolutionary desires present in Hank Williams Jr.’s "Fax Me a Beer"
(not included in this mix) are forever doomed to find their outlet in
an inane fantasy of endless technological advancement.
1.Porter Wagoner - The Wino
2.Jim Ed Brown- Bottle, Bottle
3.Porter Wagoner – Shopworn
4.Hank Williams – Men with Broken Hearts
5.Leon Rausch – Glass of Pride
6.Don King – Live Entertainment
7.David Allen Coe – Sad Country Song
8.Don Silvers – Play me another Hank Williams
9.Porter Wagoner – Bottom of the Bottle
10.Merle Haggard – Swinging Doors
11.Porter Wagoner – I Just Came to Smell the Flowers
12.D. Sheridan – Don’t Make Me Laugh (While I’m Drinkin’)
13.The Willis Brothers – Gonna Buy Me A Jukebox
14.David Frizzell – I’m Gonna Hire A Wino to Decorate our House
15.Frank Lowe - "Trash Man"
Lawrence Kumpf is a curator at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY.
READ ON »
Yamil Orlando