The Edge of the Window Frame

Viewing music straight on or from the side?

In an obvious lesson on perspective the other day, I asked some students how the inner workings of a place appear differently when viewed straight on or from the very edge of the outer frame.

For instance: walk up straight to that picture window on the side of a beautiful or ordinary clapboard house and peer in while standing as much in the center of the frame as you can. What all do you see, and what limits on your sight do you note, if any?

Next, sidle on up to the window’s edge. Stay there, left or right, it doesn’t matter. Now look in again. What else do you see? Same room, same window. Same you. Everything else, either skewed or maybe more normal, depending on…

We lose sight of the ways we can and maybe should shift perspective. And it doesn’t take much energy or time to do so. Just move a little bit to the side, or to the center if, like me, you prefer the sides anyway.

Be careful that what you’re viewing is not transgressive, or if it is, that you’re ready with excuses or at least have decent shoes on to aid your escape.

I thought of this scenario while re-reading music critic Amanda Petrusich’s 2008 road trip to discover what’s out there in America, musically, in the years to come, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (Faber & Faber).

In the chapter titled “I’m Going Where There’s No Depression,” she interviews lead singer JD Wilkes of Th’ Legendary Shack-Shakers, a man who hates the monicker “alt-country,” though it’s often used to describe him and his band.

Wilkes loves Nashville and old-style country music, though the music the band produces isn’t exactly that. In fact, he likens their sound to the marriage of old country and punk rock. The two genres have more in common than you might think, if you think about that twain at all. And by old country, he’s speaking of the days before “The Nashville Sound” made everything too lush, polished, and homogenized.

Here’s Pierce from his own perspective on how to see what so many of us deem too provincial and too quaint:

Old-timers get out and square dance, they’ll have a cake walk, and there’s a hillbilly band playing George Jones’s music, and they’ll start it all off with a prayer. It’s just this vestige of a bygone era that I really like, little jamborees in small towns, where old-timers and youngsters gather and square dance and two-step. To me, that’s counterculture. All these people who shave their hair into mohawks and talk about hardcore country! We’re gonna fuck it all up! They think they’re the real counterculture. Punk rock has kinda gone the way of Green Day, and gone the way of Wal-Mart — you can go get a faux-hawk or a mall-hawk, there are Hot Topics in every mall. So that’s not counterculture anymore, that’s part of our culture. You can have uncensored cursing on cable TV — there’s nothing taboo anymore. So the real counterculture to me is the square dancers, the people playing acoustic music, the devout, the homeschoolers, the Amish. They’re the ones who are really fucking the system” (132–3).

That’s a real mouthful there, JD. Sure, this was published over 15 years ago, so maybe we’d like to argue or redefine counterculture for our current moment. I might disagree with some of his notions, but the main thing is, from which angle of the window are we viewing these remarks, this statement, this counterculture frame?

Which detail in his litany of counterculture framed paintings jars you the most? Where did you recoil, and where did you shout “Amen?” And did anyone catch you looking in and nodding along?

I read this passage to my Creative Nonfiction, Writing About Music class. They’re all roughly 20–21 years old, and to a person, they nodded their heads. Nodded up and down in agreement.

“That’s really cool,” one of them said.

Another informed us that a hardcore group of students is trying to start a campus square dancing/contra dancing society. Who knew?

The discussion enabled me to remember — and these memories aren’t that far out of my window view ever — not only square dancing and Virginia reeling during PE in elementary school back in Alabama (usually on rainy and cold winter days when we couldn’t go outside), but also, in the early days after we’d moved to Greenville, contra dancing in an organized society.

Whether it was in an old rec center near the zoo or later, removed to an out-and-out barn in deeply rural Marietta, fifty or sixty, perhaps even more, adults of various ages and persuasions would gather, dance to a live band and listen to the calls of a real live square dance MC.

Sometimes, the old dance veterans could get a little snooty if novices like us flubbed the proper execution of the twirl or some other step. Mainly, though, everyone smiled and danced their hearts away. After our first daughter was born, one of us would wear her in a snuggly, and we’d dance together, and I wonder now if this is why our daughter prefers the music of John Prine and Steve Earle and The Chicks and Kacey Musgraves and especially Taylor Swift over virtually anyone else?

Sure, people would flirt with each other at these shindigs (or were they hoedowns?), and you were told that when doing twirls, the best way to keep from getting dizzy was to stare into your partner’s eyes, a technique my wife found hard to embrace, given her natural shyness.

These dances would last for hours, and the hardest part was leaving and making what was often a 45-minute drive home in that vast country darkness.

Listen: I’ve danced in some pretty mean places in my life, where slam dancing in mosh pits felt like never having to think about being sorry again. I have felt transgressed, and perhaps transgressive, and certainly on the outs with mainstream culture when I’ve entered certain underground and clandestine spaces. I considered these nights cool, for sure, even when I never felt very angry or destructive or punk myself (and for a time, I did sport a mohawk of sorts, though I’ve never shopped at Hot Topic or liked Green Day; nor did we homeschool our kids).

Since these barns and rec centers did have windows, I wonder what any passerby — one who was just wandering or curious or amazed at the music filtering out into the night — might have seen and felt on peering in at the goings-on. You could think, for instance, that you were watching a bunch of old flanneled hippies cavorting through their spirit-moved-me drug of choice.

Or if you took a few sidesteps, you might think that you had traveled back to a mountain home, where Saturday night did mean Barn Dance, and with the cakes sitting on that long table, you might meet your life partner if you just bid the right amount on that sweet angel food delicacy. Kind of like what we saw in Coal Miner’s Daughter when Loretta met Doo over the cake she sort of baked.

And what I really want to say, aside from wondering why we ever stopped attending these moments out of, or perhaps very in, time, is that, yeah, I know ol’ George Jones had his issues with abusing whiskey and women, and I sure don’t advocate that style of life. But I do love his voice, his beautiful, plaintive cries about the day he stopped loving her, or the very wistful absurdity that he was a one-woman man. I prefer to listen to Tammy Wynette actually, but if I’m at a bar or in another old barn and someone plays either, I know what I’ll be thinking and which end of the window I’ll be standing near and moving my two feet in front of.

When I look in, I hope I’ll see us dancing along the edges or maybe in the very center of the floor.

Thanks to the Riff for publishing, and I wonder if anyone else, from Kevin Alexander to Madeline Dovi, can relate?