Nashville Star is the country-music version of American Idol—its new season premiered last night on NBC. I hate American Idol (all that florid over-singing; melisma delpoyed as a bludgeon; Simon Cowell as a bludgeon trying to pass as a critic), but I like a lot of country music, so watching this was, in more ways than one, a no-brainer: stupid fun that made you think about how words are used.
Yes, Nashville Star‘s format is complete Idol rip-off: contestants sing a few bars, then are critiqued by a panel of three judges. At the end of 12 weeks, as official new "Nashville Star" is anointed, complete with a record contract and crushing pressure to get a makeover that will force the the victor to resemble not Hank Williams or Tammy Wynette but Nashville’s current look of the moment: a 70s daytime soap-opera star, in boots. That trio of judges consists of John Rich, a producer and performer; Jeffrey Steele, a Nashville pro songwriter—he looks like the actor Bruce Greenwood with a dyed-blonde crinkle-cut—who has cranked out million-selling quatrains for the likes of Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, and Montgomery Gentry (that last is a group, not a person); and published poet Jewel, whose most eloquent comment last night, to one sorry melodramatist-with-a-twang, was, "I just don’t buy it."
The performance she didn’t "buy" was "I Like It, I Love It, I Want Some More Of It," a 1995 song in the great country tradition of containing an internal rhyme in the title (another one preceded it last night, when a different cowboy hat sang George Strait’s "All My Ex’s Live in Texas"). I agreed with the panel that the song as bellowed by would-be star Charley Jenkins was florid and drippy, but no more so than the composition we saw him penning in the biographical montage that preceded his performance: a ballad about his dead veteran father called something like "My Hero At Home." (Shameless? Who among us has not written some shameless doggerel in the service of saluting a loved one?)
A trio calling itself Third Town did a version of the Oak Ridge Boys’ "Elvira," a song that contains one of my favorite strained rhyme couplets ever (I’m transcribing it phonetically—"My heart’s on fire-ra/For Elivira"). Unfortunately, Third Town was so showy—so scrambling all over the stage, making imploring moues to seduce a crowd that already looked ravished—that one could hardly make out these deathless lines.
While my own taste in country music resides in the honky-tonk of the 1950s and 1960s as practiced by Webb Pierce and Ray Price (I offer as my bona fides a recent Apple Store iPod download of Ferlin Husky’s greatest hits), I realize that these artists have about as much to do with contemporary country music as Sam Cooke does to contemporary rhythm & blues. Not that I think all current country is slick junk. In fact, one of my favorite new singers—and writers—is 18 year-old Taylor Swift, who kicked off last night’s Nashville Star premiere with a typically kicky performance.
Swift’s glossy youth reminds me that gifted artists can create excellent work at a tender age. She’s no Rimbaud, but she’s awfully good at turning recent heartbreak recalled in anything-but-tranquility into lashing songcraft, as when she pours "Teardrops On My Guitar" and lets you in on her thought process leading up to those tears.
I’m not sure I’ll be watching Nashville Star every week, skeptical as I am that it will crown, in Jewel’s words, "not [just] a great singer, [but] a great artist." However, it’s already prodded me to listen to Webb Pierce more frequently.
–Ken Tucker