Laughing at Americans

Willi Carlisle rattlin' the bones of US soft power

So a buddy and I drove up to Auckland for the Tyler Childers show at Spark Arena. Tyler was awesome! But this is about his opener, another country singer named Willi Carlisle. Some Kiwi blokes laughed at him and called him a name. They name they called him—the insult, the punchline—was American.

So there’s your collapse of Yankee Soft Power, yeah? But it’s complicated. This was a sold-out concert of explicitly American country music, full of Kiwis in cowboy hats and boots they otherwise never wear. I snuck photos. I was laughing with ‘em, I swear.

And hell, I’ve caught the American epithet plenty over the years, in countries and languages where it carried a sting far worse. But these are strange days. The word is already changing in our mouths. And it don’t feel good.

First, the context. Neither Tyler or Willi run with the trucks-and-fascism machismo of mainstream U.S. country radio, but neither do they match the sincere lefty roots-rock of Americana. I’d toss them in a basket I think of, fondly, as neotrad vamp. They worship the old stuff, and sing with both brimming heart and a loving wink. I’m all your’n, we belted along with Tyler, using a dusty regional grammar few living Americans have ever heard. His wild-eyed wail sounded like George Jones with an ounce of shrooms in the van, and he played the whole show in a cardigan sweater.

Willi’s further down the folk side of the genre—a clear, ringing voice, talky lyrics, and even more trad style. He did his solo set in high-waisted dungarees, thin suspenders and a tiny cowboy hat, looking like the flustered mayor of a small southern town set upon by vicious bootleggers. Nothing flustered about his set, though. Willi held the restless crowd up there all by his lonesome, switching effortlessly between banjo, guitar, harmonica, and freakin’ cowbones. I was blown away. A lot of folks were.

in the beer line

Then the Kiwi blokes behind us started laughing.

Oh, he’s a big boy, they said. And he brought a banjo!

Laughing with him, or at him?

Willi has a playful streak himself. He’s got a funny-but-not song about living in a van.

And then Willi launched into a talking blues done in gorgeous acapella, accompanied with only those dang cowbones. That’s some crazy oldtimey shit! I’ve never seen cowbones played live. They’re just beef ribs, cleaned and cut to size. Snap your wrist and they clack like castenets. Wow, I thought. This dude is awesome.

The blokes couldn’t go there.

American! they hooted. Look at that American!

I froze.

At him, then.

At me, too. Five years here I’ve never felt a dagger like that.

Not just me. An Auckland friend we’d met up with at the show heard it just clear as I did. How do ya like the racism? he said.

Was it racism? What do you call white settlers laughing down at another white settler? Nationalism? Class is in here somewhere, too. Cruel laughter across an identity line, anyhow. The sort white boys like me are usually blessed to escape.

Did I wheel around and put up my dukes?

Did I shout Fuck you, Kiwi! Let’s roll!

Eh. I got out my notebook.

Michael Jensen

and

Brent Hartinger

worried last week that Trump will make it more difficult for Americans to travel. Their source was an American kid describing a night out in Copenhagen, catching heat over our sudden, creepy twitch for Greenland.

More of this stuff will come, even in NZ. But these boys laughing at Willi—that wasn’t anger at America, and it wasn’t fear of America. It was a reduction of America.

The same reduction, to be fair, that Americans have thrown at smaller countries for lifetimes now. Go watch those old Speedy Gonzalez cartoons. Better yet, don’t.

But this reduction of Willi—to what, exactly? I’ll never see us through a Kiwi bloke’s eyes. White Trash, I expect. Hillbilly. Hick. Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade. Three stereotypes and an Oscar nomination, all of ‘em way smaller than American.

There’s just too many of us, and too much. Willi went to grad school for poetry. He’s digging in a deep and braided stream of Old Weird America. You wanna laugh at old-time American music, take it up with Roscoe Holcomb, the high lonesome godfather himself, and Roscoe ain’t give a good goddamn what you think. We got a million more genius preachers like him, of every color and creed, all swept up in tornado too mighty to pin down. That’s our soft power.

i have been a moonshiner / via the NYer

Or it was, anyhow. We got tired, we got lost, we gave up. We voted in a damn king. The great reduction has begun with a bang—in government, in difference, in power, in magic. They just fired the guy who explains the Effigy Mounds, sacred earthworks built by prehistoric Americans on a bluff above the Mississippi River. The mounds are shaped like a long line of marching bears. The new king doesn’t like bears. The new king would boil American down to a Diet Coke and a picture of his own face.

When Willi’s set ended I turned around to see the blokes. They were babies, y’all. Born after 9/11, many beers deep, girlfriends draped on their arms. The boy closest to me had a blond starter moustache and a Western snap shirt open to the pounamou around his neck. A koru shape, the spiral that in Māori tradition signifies creation, life force, endless change and the endless return.

I could’ve yelled at ‘em about Roscoe Holcomb and marching bears. But you can’t tell someone you’re mysterious and powerful and awesome. They gotta believe it all on their own.

Are we? Are we still?

My buddy drove us home the next day. Eight hours down the North Island, and past Hamilton it’s all two lanes. Sun beating down on a hangover, grass burned gold, sheep huddled in the shade. Clapboard houses and the King Country hills. Pine plantations in dead-eyed rows. In Taihape the Wild Bean ladies were on a smoko vape. Just north of Vinegar Hill a woman hauling laundry out to the line, nobody watching, a honest-to-goodness cowboy hat on her head. Drive across any country, even this little country, and you feel just how big a place is. Bigger and weirder than any one man.

Willi knows the feeling. Willi knows it in his bones:

Lord knows where I’ll go
When the road cries out what the rocks don’t know
Road cries out what the rocks don’t know
Road cries out what the rocks don’t know
Road cries out what the rocks don’t know.  //