Hard Life, Bonnie “Prince” Billy
“I remember just being real impatient with [country music]. Until I’d been living here about a year. And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? ‘Since you left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.’ That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.”
- David Foster Wallace on country music. (via Hannah Might)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Notes
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neutralangel reblogged this from countryandwestern and added:
At least he didn’t footnote it.
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countryandwestern reblogged this from viafrank and added:
I think Wallace was overthinking it. Hard to believe, I know.
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notsolinear reblogged this from thenewinquiry and added:
weren’t enough? Sometimes, DFW, I just don’t get you.
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