A-11. Johnny Paycheck. 1965. Hilltop

 When the Hilltop label released A-11 in 1965, racial segregation was so inseparable from the reality of life in the United States that it’s not impossible to now enjoy the record’s sensual dynamic with full cognizance and appreciation of its roots in Jim Crow demographics. Is it thrillingly perverse to untether your imagination from politesse and allow it to wander into the mind of a 1960s white supremacist? Did my first generation American uncles—whose parents immigrated, maybe illegally, to this country from Mexico—fight in the Pacific theater to win their queer nephew the right to fantasize over the same sex bodies of neo-fascists in tight denim jeans and western boots, leaning menacingly against a phantom jukebox inside of a smoky, mid-sixties, whites-only Tennessee honky tonk; according to mythology, so did American bigots fight for all queer white boys and boys of color to dream of one day licking men's boots. Listening to A-11 with twenty-first century ears you do get the sense that the song has been liberated from its pre-civil rights, separatist origins. It’s now a part of the seemingly endless stream of pop detritus from the last century, the bottomless jukebox of digitized songs with neither genre nor demographic to disrupt the binary data overflow. Yet historical context persists, and it’s a welcome intrusion because without it pop music becomes as inconsequential as gossamer, as shut off from lived experience as kitsch. It’s far from requisite to know the facts of a record’s history in order to enjoy it. But records do get passed around, and it’s possible to guess where they’ve been over time; from the hands of sexy, racist drug dealers to the homes and private occasions of the elected officials who once prosecuted them, A-11 is pop music in its truest demotic sense. It’s all inclusive, welcoming even those who live according to exclusionist principles. Ostensibly, A-11 was crafted for an audience of practicing segregationists, but the record’s buoyancy, its blithe charm, keeps us guessing at, and even transcends, its politics. It’s possible that I over revere A-11’s reputation as just another artifact from honky tonk’s and rock and roll’s golden age, a time when danger and drunkenness and music commingled, and recording artists often embraced aggression as a defining aesthetic principle. But I’m a fanatic, held together with heresies and idolatry, and when, in the age of the Trump presidency, I open online porn to find images of white uniformed cops and conservative, far right personalities, and hirsute figures in military and Nazi regalia, and big bellied athletes and rural, blue collar strangers, it’s music from the honky tonk that I hear; honky tonk as theater of gross American masculinity and power, of decadent fantasy, of Johnson’s and Trump’s America. Honky tonk, and rock and roll, as transformative engine.

March 31 021

These notes are for PR and for anyone who’s fed coins into a jukebox, desperately or jokingly hoping to alter reality.

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