A A Bondy

So I had to confess my endless love for country music this week – it’s my Achilles heal, it’s my vice. It’s as good as a slice of cake or a cup of tea, or them both, together. If I can hear steel wires brush a snare drum or the buzz of a handmade pickup on a classical guitar, I love it all like the love of a mother to her children.

A A Bondy, as I have it, is from the ‘I’m gonna seduce you to sleep’ school of country. There’s this slack drawl in the vocals that rocks back and forth like an intellect after a bottle of wine, eyes shut, trying to realise their thoughts and emotions. The style when repeated and imitated could qualify as feigned. That the emotions are just acted out for the purpose of disguising a false authenticity. Obviously this is not the case, that there are so many young male balladeers struggling to comprehend their inhibited emotions the only way for them to do so it seems is to act all dark and broody, to exist in some kind of halfway house between complex poet and sex object. As apprentices of De Sade disguising themselves as Ovid, so that they can cop-off without debasing themselves in anyway – because they take themselves too seriously.

The trouble is that these young troubadours are never willing to admit that they play guitar for the women. Maybe in all their emotional ways, if they were to have a partner it would zapp all their pent up sexual frustration creativity and their art would die, heaven forbid.

When he sings, “It’s love that’s tearing them down” a cute inversion of, “Why can’t everyone just get along, man. Why do we have wars and shit.” Hippie crap basically, but its attractive all the same. Between the lines I read, “so come on baby, lets make love not war.” Utter bullshit, but seductive in its own morbid way.

If I were to say this to Bondy’s face I believe that he’d be moments away from punching my lights out. Decking me before lecturing me on how we’re all doomed, how the end of the world is coming, that if we don’t bomb ourselves to death we will certainly gas guzzle our way into oblivion. It’s not that I see the world in a radically different way it’s just that, I don’t believe you! I don’t believe that preaching about Armageddon is going to achieve anything other than get you laid.

As I sardonically try to reduce these young Ovids to but a horny chap, in the case of many it’s in vein. For A A Brody, specifically he has struck a chord that few manage: The Boss Chord as I call it. It’s the note that few can strike, save for Bruce Springsteen. It’s about Levi’s 501’s, it’s about baggy shirts, it’s about being so fucking macho that everyone in the room wants to suck the testosterone from your sweaty brow. Yeah I think he’s phony, hell I think most of them are phony, there’s nothing even original or novel to A A Bondy, but if you have an obsession with country music, I defy you to not like it.