https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bE3DVMwjfw
Sometimes picking the searchable musical tags for these countdown posts is easy. "Indie pop" ropes in Los Campesinos! and Dowling Poole and Gentleman Auction House; "alternative rock" has both recognizable sonic characteristics and MTV certification for the Pixies and Mary Timony; "heavy metal" clearly fits Queensryche and Savatage. Joni Mitchell's "the Jungle Line" was tricky, but once I thought of "experimental pop" I immediately recognized several occasions I'll have to re-use it later in the countdown. James McMurtry ought to be straightforward: he's a country music songwriter, albeit a culturally rebellious one, so certainly here's the first use of the "folk/ country" tag I'd intended all along. But ideally you've clicked the link to play the song, in which case you can also sense the incompleteness of that label.
For one thing ... Okay, I'm initiating what I'll call the "heartland rock" tag (it'll look stupid later when I apply it to the Who, but if I minded looking stupid sometimes, I wouldn't write in detail about my tastes in music to begin with). "How'm I Gonna Find You Now" may have banjo and vocal drawl and a defective car on an open road; but it also has a nimble high-notes electric guitar solo, a synthesizer, and a firm beat, like a metal lid that needs to be slammed twice in order to close, that's meant to be played loud. Tris McCall has pointed out that country music radio in general is the new home of rock music, now that city listeners are all into Electronic Dance Music, but country music is also the home of country music, so the distinction seems worth maintaining.
For another -- three musical tags for a single song -- I'm going ahead and adding it to the "hip-hop" tag, right along with the post where I wrote about new releases from Saul Williams, Kanye West, Aesop Rock, and a Tribe Called Quest. Partly it's the beat I already mentioned (and the skittering noises behind it, like you really *want* the metal lid shut firmly so the hyperactive mice on the other side don't leap out through the air onto your forehead). But mostly it's the similarities in the way I respond to a quick-tongued MC (Eminem or Twista, say) and to McMurtry's over-caffeinated narrator here, a Talking Blues that, despite mild concessions to melody, is more of a Speed-rapping Handful of Greenies. (The chorus is sung, like the words have been thrown fiercely up the clef and are wearily bouncing their way back down.)
Hip-hop in a musical sense is obviously a technological creation -- one of the more fascinating chapters in David Hajdu's Love for Sale: Pop Music in America demonstrates the instantaneousness with which a series of new or newly affordable machines were explored by DJs as ways to make new forms of music -- but rapping itself is a performance variation on a long history that includes such folk/ country standards as Johnny Cash's "a Boy Named Sue", Simon & Garfunkel's "a Simple Desultory Phillipic", and the Charlie Daniels Band's "the Devil Went Down to Georgia". Like the Tom Hanks character in Saturday Night Live's skit "Black Jeopardy", the core fandoms of country music and hip-hop have more in common than the remaining large differences might leave them comfy admitting. Sometimes including "Rag in the gas cap flapping loose, it never fails/ Cell phone's down cuz they didn't get the check I mailed". Sometimes including "I've got a mad coming on and it's gonna be dreadful/ Now I'm washing down my blood pressure pill with a Red Bull", too -- some commonalities can extend all across America's many glorious class stratifications, united by convenience store shelving.
"How'm I Gonna Find You Now?" benefits from a good music video, btw -- nothing innovative or brilliant or (I'd bet) notably expensive, but an intelligent tableau of the story. James McMurtry writes plenty of songs establishing his skills as a people-watcher, a small-town chronicler, a relationship analyst, and an occasional political rabble-rouser; but he has no trouble physically embodying his narrator's unnerving over-amped stare, his obsessive interest in a pretty bartender, and his disdain for anyone not useful to his courtship. Maybe we can't quite root for the narrator; if so, that's okay. As long as the chemicals hold out, he's got conviction enough for the both of us.
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