Good rural, bad rural

North, South, stereotypes, kindness, etc, etc

Happy Monday folks,

All weekend here was filled with the kind of bright cloudless days that make the sun feel as if it is right before you— almost summer, almost burning. Yesterday I went for a ten mile walk through the forest, wandering through the new piles of leaves, seeking shade and some kind of quiet that feels rare now that I live in a downtown area again. As I took this walk I listened to— from start to finish— Noah Kahan’s excellent new album, Stick Season.

I’ve been seeing this album everywhere on social media lately, with hundreds of TikTokers sharing videos of themselves singing along to the lyrics I would leave if only I could find a reason / I’m mean because I grew up in New England, taken from the song Homesick, which is a gorgeous ballad on loving and leaving one’s hometown. I appreciate in this song the way Kahan examines his home of rural Vermont up close, not shying away from the complicated parts of rural life: Well, I'm tired of dirt roads / Named after high school friends' grandfathers / The motherfuckers here still don't know they caught / The Boston bombers / Time moves so damn slow / I swear I feel my organs failing.

It’s interesting to me that the part of the song that has stuck out most to listeners is not Kahan dealing with his complicated sense of home, of both loving a place and wanting nothing more than to leave it behind. Instead, the lyric that has become symbolic of the new album is the piece about meanness, a trait Southerners commonly associate with Northerners, reinforcing a whole slew of stereotypes I don’t have the words to get into here. It’s assumed that all Southerners are warm and friendly, people who smile at you on the street; Northerners, by contrast, are cold and independent. Kahan himself makes a direct comparison to the climate of both places in the album’s opening track, Northern Attitude: If I get too close / And I'm not how you hoped / Forgive my northern attitude / Oh, I was raised out in the cold / If the sun don't rise/ Til the summertime / Forgive my northern attitude / Oh, I was raised on little light.

There’s a sentiment here that the North is a harsh place, full of long winters and cold nights, and that in order to survive there, one must become harsh too. It’s the same kind of logic that paints the heat of the South as a tropical paradise, when anyone who has ever experienced a Southern summer knows that you have to grow harsh to survive that, too. I’ve heard it said before that Southerners are nice, but Northerners are kind, and I can’t help but wonder how much of that thinking is tied to the idea that kindness breeds in difficult places— and I also wonder how much of that idea of kindness is tied specifically to small-town rural life. It seems to me that the idea of Southerners as fake-nice, the type of people to say Bless Your Heart and then gossip behind your back the moment you leave the room, is rooted in the urban South, the old cities full of wealth and oppression. I certainly felt that way spending my teenage years in downtown Charleston, SC. But I have never felt that way in my time in rural spaces, and especially Southern ones; I have felt more cared for in Southern rural spaces than anywhere else I have ever lived. And I’ll admit that I have not spent much time in the rural North, but for the many friends I have who live there, who grew up there, and who call it home, it seems to me a similar story.

There are 2,510 videos on TikTok listed under the snippet from Homesick. The top video is this one, which has nearly 175,000 likes and over a thousand comments:

@elizagrosei thought this was funny

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Here’s a sampling of some of the comments:

There’s a reason NY had to make “if you see something, say something” into an ad campaign.

Stranger saying hello? Immediately no. Not trying to get robbed.

My friends dad is from New England and he jumps out of his car and chases people to curse them out and beat on windows during traffic

new england 🤝 pnw refusing to acknowledge that there are other people on the street

I ignore people because they aren’t entitled to my attention

This is when you tell them that they are not trying to make conversation, they are trying to take your money

I’ve already written before about the PNW, and how it’s viewed as a rural place for “good” liberal hippies, despite the fact that it was actually founded as a type of utopia for white people and that Portland currently ranks as the whitest city in America. There’s something strange and a bit sad to me in these comments, the way people are proud of their meanness, which correlates directly to their sense of home. Let me be the first to say I’m not interested in making conversation on the street any more than the next person, but I don’t see any problem with people liking the idea of greeting one another. Furthermore, nearly all of the comments start talking about Northeast urban centers like New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, when what Kahan is actually singing about is rural Vermont.

It leads me back to something I think about all the time: good rural spaces vs bad rural spaces. The popular cultural narratives in America don’t, in face, argue that all rural spaces are bad. It’s cool and trendy these days to vacation in Wyoming and Montana and Colorado, and wealthy people have always sought out second homes in rural spaces such as the Coast or the Mountains. Some of the cities with the highest growth rates are ones which had formerly been surrounded by small rural towns and had attracted the kinds of people who enjoy rural activities such as hiking, skiing, kayaking, or rock climbing— think Asheville, Boulder, Denver, and even Austin. There’s the kinds of people who move to these cities and enjoy access to rural spaces because of their relative quiet and proximity to nature, and the common assumption with these people is that they are liberal, hippie, granola. They are often artists, or athletes, but they aren’t treated with nearly the same vitriol as rural Southerners, who are culturally viewed as backwards, redneck, hillbillies stuck in their ways, holding the rest of the country back. Rural life might be relatively similar in West Virginia and Vermont, but the presence of an Appalachian accent alone will significantly dictate how you will be treated in the world. I can’t help but wonder if this album had been written by a rural Southerner what the cultural reaction would be.

This past weekend I also attended the Blue Ridge Folklife Festival in Ferrum, Virginia, an annual celebration of the “rich heritage and traditions of the region.” The website says— and I can confirm— that it is a day of “musicians, moonshiners, craftspeople, cooks, motorheads, mule jumpers, horse pullers, coon dog racers, antique tractor buffs, and old-time gamers.”

At the festival your options for drink consisted of Mountain Dew, moonshine, Dr. Pepper, fresh-squeezed lemonade, coffee, and water, and for food you could find tents selling BBQ, fried catfish, fried apple pies, a variety of breads and apples, and sides such as mac and cheese, coleslaw, or baked beans. I listened to bluegrass music and drank bourbon and watched mules jump over wood platforms as if they were horses. Grown adults and children alike were outfitted in overalls and cowboy boots, and yes, there were a fair amount of pro-Trump outfits. These are aspects of Southern Appalachia that are true to the culture here, just as much as they are symbolically stereotypical of it. These are not “good rural” symbols. The question then becomes: are we allowed to appreciate them the same way?

I can only imagine the people I once knew in New York City at this festival; I know they would laugh at it, or feel out of place. Most of this country likes to imagine that with the rise of the internet we are all somewhat urbanized these days, or that we at least all have some understanding of what’s dominating modern cultural spheres; those same people then ask, every election season, how this country could feel so divided and distant, as if we are all living in two entirely different Americas. And you know what? Sometimes I think we are; there are certainly parts of this country that don’t care what is trending on Netflix or which celebrity got cancelled this week or any of the niche internet drama that we often mistake for real life (I appreciated Hayley Nahman’s thoughts on that this week in Maybe Baby). America is vast, and full of all kinds of different viewpoints on the world. Who are we to say what’s worth appreciating of home, and what we should do away with?

I think it all just comes down to seeing it up close. There is good and bad everywhere, and we can’t keep pretending that isn’t the case. There is kindness in the South and kindness in the North and cruelty and meanness in every part of this country. There are things to appreciate in rural spaces and things that are far too rooted to their histories, things which no longer need to survive. We get to choose what we believe in, what we pay attention to. But I firmly believe our work now is just that— to learn how to pay attention, not looking for what we might assume or want to find, but instead looking at what is in all its ugliness and beauty.

When thinking of the Southern equivalent to Kahan’s album, I keep coming back to Tyler Childers, who is, in my opinion, one of the best musicians out there right now. I play Whitehouse Road every single time I am driving to see my family, and I think both he and Kahan are doing that work of paying attention, and then translating it into art. As he sings: Get me drinkin' that moonshine / Get me higher than the grocery bill / Take my troubles to the highwall / Throw'em in the river and get your fill / We been sniffing that cocaine / Ain't nothin' better when the wind cuts cold / Lord it's a mighty hard livin' / But a damn good feelin' to run these roads / It's a damn good feelin' to run these roads…

FIVE THINGS THAT BROUGHT ME JOY THIS WEEK

1. Off the Stick Season album, the song Orange Juice, which made my jaw drop when the bridge kicked in.

2. Lots of great points raised on what we deem as beautiful in this Southern Cultures article on sausage I read for a class this week.

3. The constant wisdom I get from the Taco Bell Quarterly Twitter:

   Taco Bell Quarterly @TBQuarterly

   You're a writer. And you're going to make it. Somehow. Maybe. You just keep crafting those beautiful sentences. Or just completely stumblefuck your way through it. You're good. Gorgeous. Live más.

4. I took home my first batches of mugs I’ve made in pottery class on Friday, and I’m currently sitting at my desk drinking a pumpkin oat latte out of one, and there is no feeling like knowing you made something useful with your own hands.

5. This old photo of my grandma and great-grandma. (and can we talk about the hair?!?)

   

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