Pastoral Deception
When I first started listening to this I found it a comforting musical landscape of familiar songs defining America through this: a sense of past and present held together by, largely, the harmonica as a continuing, rooting reassurance of knowing who and what we are. It has, however, become more of a genteel pastoral whitewash in the current context of the President of the United States suggesting the injecting of disinfectant as a possible cure for Covid-19 and then backtracking on the absurdity of this by claiming, absurdly, he was being simply satirical. Framework is everything: music so soothing in its remembrance of an assumed certainty [in this case, a songbook of sorts] – through these tunes we recall instantly and they thus sound like a bedrock of continuance – are actually a deceit, the pastoral a lie as veil over the new wild west of political gunfights at the Not OK Corral.
A shame. History ruined by the present – ironic with Trump,
as similar, constantly trying to rewrite his perpetual fuckups as they happen.
Not the fault of these fine musicians.
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