    
Tonya
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Username: Tonya
Post Number: 310
Registered: 07-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Sunday, August 13, 2006 - 02:39 pm: | 
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‘Badonkadonk’ bridges cultural divide
KELEFA SANNEH; The New York Times
Published: August 13th, 2006 01:00 AM
A country singer’s drawling devotion to snug britches creates quite a sensation. What could possibly inspire a proud, seemingly virtuous man to “slap your grandma”? And if he’s feeling so slap-happy, then why is he so eager to “get the sheriff on the phone”? What would it mean, truly, for a young woman to have it “goin’ on like Donkey Kong”? And finally to address the young woman at the center of the controversy: “Lord have mercy, how’d she even get them britches on?”
These are just some of the imponderables you’ll find in one of the most inescapable country-music hits of the last few years. It’s a charming song whose name alone can make Coyote Ugly dancers whoop. It’s a clumsy song whose name alone can make radio programmers weep. (Or if not weep, then stare sheepishly at their shoes.)
To different listeners the seven syllables in the title seem like shorthand for the best, or the worst, or the weirdest that Nashville has to offer. So: how do you solve a problem like “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”?
Trace Adkins is the lucky singer who can expect those seven syllables to appear in the first paragraph of his obituary. He was a country star before he turned his attention to the subject of snug britches. But that song, from an album that was released in March 2005, has made him a celebrity. And while the iron is still hot, he’s striking again, with a new album, “Dangerous Man” (Capitol Nashville), due out on Tuesday. It’s hard to tell whether he’s trying to play down the success of “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” or play it up.
Only a few years ago “badonkadonk” was considered strictly hip-hop slang – sly onomatopoeia for the imaginary sound made by a decidedly nonimaginary asset. It was used by the black American comedian Tracy Morgan, as the single-minded Spoonie Luv, on Comedy Central’s “Crank Yankers.” Missy Elliott played with the pronunciation when she rapped, “Keep your eyes on my ba-bump-ba-bump-bump/And think ya can handle this ga-donk-ga-donk-donk.” And the rapper Twista tried to cash in with a song called “Badunkadunk” in early 2004.
The word was a black thing, and so, went the implicit logic, was the thing it described. The term evoked both black culture and black anatomy: like the concept of race itself, “badonkadonk” was a mishmash of nurture and nature. (Though Spoonie Luv never described it that way.)
Adkins mishmashed this mishmash some more. The “honky-tonk badonkadonk” he sings about has nothing to do with hip-hop: You can hear the cultural context in his country drawl, in the raunchy Southern-rock guitars, in the carefully chosen slang. (One word: britches.)
But what about anatomy? Do his “honky-tonk” women really look different? And if so, why? One presumes that they’re mainly (though maybe not exclusively) white. Do they also have to be Southern? Do they also have to be blue-collar? (Does this song turn a race-based asset into a class-based one?) Or will the combination of beer and country music make any object appear bigger than it really is?
Adkins didn’t write this song: It was the work of Jamey Johnson (who released his debut album, “The Dollar,” this year), Randy Houser and Dallas Davidson. But Adkins was hardly a blank slate or a desperate nobody. He has long been one of country music’s biggest personalities: a tough-talking former oilman who talked in interviews about his beat-up body. (The most notorious scar is a bullet hole; he says his ex-wife accidentally shot him in the heart.)
He has a robust baritone voice and a catalog of songs about his own country identity. One of his best pre-badonkadonk hits, “Rough and Ready,” shrank his autobiography to a series of country-music signifiers: “Scarred-up knuckles/Mack belt buckle/White T-shirt, ain’t afraid to work.” And the hit that changed his career came from an album called, pointedly, “Songs About Me.”
In that sense Adkins is a purist, and “Dangerous Man” offers yet more proof. In nearly every song he reminds listeners (as if they needed reminding) of his country credentials. “Southern Hallelujah” celebrates the women of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana and both Carolinas. In “I Came Here to Live” he sings about trading down-home hell-raising for down-home Christianity. And in “Fightin’ Words,” which may as well be a rewrite of Merle Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side of Me,” our hero swears that if you say a bad word about his God, his mother, his dog “or this flag that I wear on my shirt” – well, expect him to scar up his knuckles some more.
For listeners who didn’t get their fill last time, the new album includes the even more garish “video remix” of “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk”: There’s a fast, syncopated beat that sounds vaguely nightclubbish. The sequel is much easier to hate: It’s “Swing,” an awful novelty song that is the album’s first single. The chorus goes, “Swing, batter batter/Swing, batter batter/Swing, batter batter/Swing” twice; the verse uses worn-out baseball analogies to describe men trying to pick up women.
This is the central paradox of Adkins’ career: His image is pure country, but many of his best-known songs are gimmicky hybrids. (And sometimes, it must be said, ungimmicky ones; in the middle of “Ain’t No Woman Like You,” from the new album, a saxophone solo takes the song in a lovely new direction.)
Maybe only a hard-core good ol’ boy could have brought “badonkadonk” into the honky-tonk. Adkins’ old-fashioned identity might help explain his newfangled hits. His biography and his semibiographical lyrics give him a kind of musical freedom. Who’s going to tell Mr. “Rough and Ready” he’s not country enough? No doubt many of his fans feel similarly secure: They don’t need steel guitars to know who they are, or who Adkins is.
It would be unfair not to mention that Adkins has been known to wear tight jeans, and his female fans have been known to take notice. Adkins spends a good portion of “Dangerous Man” pandering to this constituency; the title track, for one, turns out to be a make-out song.
Through it all Adkins sounds more sheepish than lecherous. And when he performed “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” at the Academy of Country Music Awards in May, surrounded by Las Vegas showgirls, he looked slightly embarrassed.
He sang like a man who had a job he couldn’t afford to lose. Maybe that isn’t his favorite song, but as he said, he ain’t afraid to work. And what motivation could be purer than that?
http://www.thenewstribune.com/soundlife/story/6023460p-5289162c.html |
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