Rare indeed is the headline-and-dek combo worth noticing, or caring about. In many publications, these aren't even written by the same person who wrote the actual blog; at any rate they're many hundreds or thousands of words shorter than the blog itself. Caring about the headline and dek is to some extent like close-reading the movie poster inside the multiplex. Probably it's better to just go inside the theater and watch the movie.
Possibly Economist culture correspondent Jon Fasman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, is not solely to blame for the following combo, atop his baffling Thursday column about Johnny Cash:
It's Finally Time to Give Johnny Cash His Due
Compared to Dylan and Springsteen, the country-music legend can seem deeply uncool. It took years for me to appreciate his profound, plainspoken strength.
My eyeballs rotated a full 180 degrees in protest when I first read this, pointing themselves back at the deep dark of their sockets and for long minutes refusing to return to their normal orientation. It's finally time ... to give Johnny Cash ... his due? The man is one of the very most celebrated and admired figures in all of American popular music. This is like saying it's long past time to give Martin Scorsese his due. Tell you what, buddy: Nobody wants to say it, but it is time to admit that Ludwig van Beethoven had bangers.
Here is a good test for any "it's finally time to" blog formulation. Simply insert the phrase "for me" in between "time" and "to." If this makes the headline a better representation of the blog's contents, or a more reasonable description of the overall situation, simply delete the blog and do a different blog about a whole other subject. Alternatively, paste the blog's headline into your personal calendar, so that you remember to do whatever the thing was. Hey, Jon Fasman, don't forget to give Johnny Cash his due today! You haven't taken care of that yet. All of the rest of us have already completed that task, collectively.
It is not finally time to give Johnny Cash his due! Johnny Cash, as Fasman's blog notes before you have reached the bottom of its second paragraph, was the subject of an Oscar-winning, prestige biographical feature film 20 years ago, in which he was portrayed by a gigantic movie star at the height of his beauty and fame. (The Bob Dylan biopic Fasman leads with, in an apparent attempt at demonstrating the culture's greater reverence for Dylan, depicts Dylan as a worshipper of Cash—whose own glamorous star-studded biopic, by the time Dylan's came out, was already old enough to have graduated high school.) He is one of the best-selling musical acts in history. His covers of other artists' songs are more famous than the originals. He has the unique distinction of having been inducted into not only the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but also those of country and gospel music.
This is not to object in any way to the idea of celebrating Johnny Cash! I come not to bury Johnny Cash, but to praise him. Johnny Cash whipped impossible amounts of ass, from his rockabilly early days and his outlaw country and gospel years all the way through the vulnerable, lovely, heartbreaking American Recordings at the end of his life that introduced him to a younger generation of listeners.
In fact the single most horrifying part of Fasman's entire blog is the idea, expressed in the dek and then reiterated in the body, that Cash could ever "seem deeply uncool" compared to Bruce Springsteen. Are you fucking kidding me??? Johnny Cash on his uncoolest day—Johnny Cash accepting an invitation to sing to Richard Nixon at the White House; Johnny Cash literally guest-starring on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman—was cooler than Bruce Springsteen cubed. Next to that apple-polishing dorkwad, Johnny Cash is Thelonious Monk. Johnny Cash made his bones getting Beatlemania treatment from guys doing hard time. He tossed Nixon's requested setlist and played protest songs at him. He wrote "I Walk the Line," for chrissakes. He isn't just cool compared to Springsteen. He makes Bob Dylan look like Carrot Top.
"I’ll admit that I'm a late arrival to the Church of Cash," Fasman writes. (No shit, buddy.) "I grew up in the blandest possible northeastern suburb, listening to classical music at home and '90s punk at school. Country music was as foreign as qawwali, and a lot less cool." It is very funny to me when people pretend the United States has been regionalized like this any more recently than, like, 1950. This is the defensive converse of when people pretend you have to have grown up in South Texas to have had good migas in the 21st century. They have Johnny Cash in the northeast, man. Believe it or not, there are now overland routes all the way to Tennessee, where he recorded many of his albums! Why, by the year 30-aught-three I bet there will even be Americans who have been to both California and Vermont in a single lifetime.
"Cash never got the same respect for his writing that Dylan (or Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen) did," Fasman writes, attributing this to a cultural bias against country music. On whose part? Yes, OK, fair enough: Johnny Cash never won a (ludicrous, laughable) Nobel Prize like Dylan. Neither did any other songwriter, ever. But you have to define your terms here, pal. Once you account for the people who have vocally preferred Paul Simon's songwriting over Cash's from inside of school lockers or hanging by their underwear from the top of flagpoles, who is even left?
The entire context for Fasman's column is the upcoming release of a "complete catalog of [Cash's] lyrics, along with some poems and musings, from the 1940s until his death in 2003, in a single volume—black, of course, and beautifully embossed." By what standard can anyone seriously argue the guy whose collected lifetime writings are being reprinted in collectible Bible form lacks for appreciation? I suppose it's true that we haven't yet etched Johnny Cash's face onto the moon. There's only one moon, man! Some people might want Willie Nelson on there.
Here is the precise point in Fasman's blog where I made a sound like a humpback whale going tail-first through an industrial printing press: "He was never counterculturally cool, and he could seem a little square." Fasman makes this (insanely false!) observation in service of some lame culture-war bullshit: Cash, he writes, was "deeply Christian and unashamedly patriotic," and "a Christian and a patriot"—all true, but never anything the counterculture held against a guy famed for his outspoken advocacy on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, the imprisoned; who battled his record label to get protest songs about the government's treatment of indigenous peoples onto his albums; who wrote songs chastising his own generation for sending its children off to kill and die in Vietnam. The guy whose most famed and popular concerts took place inside literal prisons lacked for counterculture cool?
Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson idolized him in the 1960s; punks and antiracist skinheads were bumping him in the '90s; in the aughts, a rockabilly resurgence formed around his image and style. When the makers of The Simpsons, at or near the peak of their show's cultural prominence, were looking for somebody to voice an all-knowing psychedelic spirit-coyote for an episode inspired by the works of drug-culture god Carlos Castaneda, they cast Johnny Cash. Dylan made a reverent appearance on his TV show; so did Neil Young, Roy Orbison, Joni Mitchell, and frickin' Louis Armstrong. Ray goddamn Charles played "I Walk the Line" and "Ring of Fire" for him on live television in 1970. Social Distortion covered "Ring of Fire"; so did Blondie. Halsey covered "I Walk the Line"; so did Alex Chilton; so did Dolly Parton. The Mekons covered "Folsom Prison Blues"; the Dropkick Murphys play it at shows; fucking Pete Rock remixed it. What the hell are we even talking about here?
I am amazed that an editor did not immediately reject this blog, with a simple "I am happy for you, but everybody knows Johnny Cash." This is the "But I was told Steph Curry wasn't a good shooter" of blogs. It's the music journalism blog equivalent of when the New York Times sent Bari Weiss to Australia, and she wrote about how Australians like to wear flip-flops (her best work). Do Miles Davis next. I can't wait to hear what Soldier of Fortune's senior theater critic thinks of an under-appreciated playwright by the name of Eugene O'Neill.
