Toby Keith - Red, White and blueneck

Vietnam was the first televised war, and the first time many people saw that iconic image from the inside of a Chinook helicopter sweeping low over a combat zone, a lone crewman standing, silhouetted, ready by the open tailgate as the jungle wheels below. 

Successive conflicts have changed the landscape glimpsed out of the tailgate, but not the image, or the message; if you are a bad guy, the very, very best you can hope for is that they’ve rigged up a tail-gun and you are about to be sprayed with bullets, the alternative is that the thing is going to touch down on it’s rear end, rearing up like a begging dog or a prancing stallion depending on how you like your imagery, and a bunch of hard-ass soldiers are going to pour out of that tail gate, determined on making your life interesting for the next few minutes.  That’s a moment that’ll have you revaluating your life choices. (Remember kids, pick-up trucks are for transporting lumber and dogs, not weapons or youths in flip-flops carrying automatic weapons).

General rule, you had better be terrified of whatever comes out of the back end of a Chinook, and yes friends, that includes country singer Toby Keith strumming his guitar in the video for ‘Courtesy of the red, white and blue’.  Because Toby Keith has weaponised folk music.

I first heard of this chap way back, when his video ‘I wanna talk about me’ was featured on Jonathan King’s (a teevee personality judged to be so odious that he was convicted of being a nonce or whatever many years before Yewtree was even set up) show ‘Entertainment USA’.  But it took twenty years and a global act of terrorism before I heard another of his songs, ‘Beer for my horses, whisky for my men’.  Thanks to Youhootube, I was able to see what else the guy had been up to.

Keith is, it would appear, the epitome of a country rock star.  His songs, at least the ones that are popular on Hoooeeeeeetube are either rich with folksy charm (‘I love this bar’ is about, well, take a wild guess, and ‘Trailerhood’ is an affectionate tribute to those sorts of communities that can be regarded as ‘tornado fodder’) or essentially pissed off promises to kick bad-guy ass, of which ‘Courtesy of the red white and blue’ is probably the best example.

Country is an interesting medium.  In terms of sentimentality, only one other music genre comes close – hip-hop.  Who can fail to be moved by the exhortation to put the bonds of friendship before carnal desire or even romantic attachment (or possibly gardening equipment) or, as it’s so neatly encapsulated, bro’s before hoes?

Country music allows men to sing with real feeling about the sort of things that men feel passionately about but, as men, are not allowed to express feelings about, and ignore completely those asinine things that men, generally, do get overly worked up about in public.  This is why there are great country songs about family, home and every variation of woman trouble known to man but, thankfully, none about football.

It’s also the music of the cowboy, the tree with a convenient branch, the length of rope and the hemp fandango, in short, frontier justice.  Keith does righteously-pissed-off really, really well.  If you were about to jump out of the back of a Chinook to give the sort of arsehole who thinks kidnapping schoolgirls is a proper occupation for a man, you’d probably not have ‘Courtesy’ on your iPod for the simple reason that you’d want to set your rifle down and settle the thing with your bare hands, but I bet it makes a hell of a tune to get everyone singing on the way back from a successful mission.  He channels the sort of baffled anger many people feel when they watch some atrocity unfolding on the news, and conveys perfectly that guys who love their bar and their trailerhood are the very, very last people to annoy, because when they saddle up and start rolling, God help the unjust.  Shakespeare had something to say about self-depreciating hard-asses in Henry V, but Keith’s take on it isn’t bad.

Of course, if you want a really angry singer, you need to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Wrecking Ball’.  It sounds like he recorded the entire album after somebody took away his punchbag and his medication, simply astonishing.