On the final night of the Democratic convention, at the conclusion of the nominee’s acceptance speech, Barack Obama beamed and waved to 80,000-plus supporters as they danced and sang along to…”Only in America” by Brooks & Dunn?
Wow. Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Willman (author of Rednecks & Bluenecks: The Politics of Country Music) has outlined the background of that musical selection in a blog entry I highly recommend. As Willman notes, the Brooks & Dunn hit has been a staple of Republican campaigning for several years: Dick Cheney exited the podium to the song at the 2004 Republican convention, and George Bush frequently used it to pump up supporters at campaign rallies. The Democrats’ appropriation of the number, then is either a supreme example of pandering or one more iteration of their convention’s consistent plea to “take back America.” Or both.
“Only in Amerca” is an odd selection, though, for Democrats and Republicans alike, and one that may well anticipate the lesson many will draw from the Obama nomination, whether he wins or loses. In his blog entry, Willman notes parenthetically that the song (written by self-declared Democrat and longtime Mavericks producer Don Cook) actually expresses “an ambivalence about the American dream.”
I’ll say. Though the chorus emphasizes that in America “everybody gets a chance, everybody gets to dance” and “we dream as big as we want to,” its verses consistently leave those dreams conspicuously deferred. In the last verse, in fact, the woman who went to LA to be an actress and her new husband, the son of a welder who wanted to be rock star, decide “they just might go to back to Oklahoma and talk about the stars they could have been.”
This has been a well-worn contradiction of country radio for several years now: First assert that you can be anything you want to be; then ask…really now, why in the would you want to be anything more than what you already are? So the message of “Only in America” is go ahead, dream of a new life all you want, but eventually you’re just going to have settle for the one you were born to.
Or worse. After the record’s crunchy opening power chords (I love the sound of the thing; it’s a Hot New Country version of the Bottle Rockets!), Ronnie Dunn describes kids on a school bus, “the promise of the promised land,” then sings:
One kid dreams of fame and fortune, one kid helps pay the rent
One could end up going to prison, one just might be president
Those are some scary options in that last line, huh? Though the phrasing suggests the chances of becoming an inmate or a president are something like even odds, we know the current ratios are far grimmer: One in every one hundred Americans is in prison today while one in every three hundred million Americans is president. Good luck!
Willman quotes Ronnie Dunn as saying “[‘Only in America’] was apolitical.” I’d argue it’s actually anti-political. It doesn’t rally listeners for any sort of better world or more widespread opportunity, however defined. Rather, to redeploy Christopher Small’s characterization of the American musical, “Only in America” merely “reinforce[s] the dreams that support the status quo.”
I fear this might just be the lesson many take from an Obama candidacy. If a black man can be nominated for president here, and especially if he can become president, then why does America need to dream of change at all? This country is great, or at least good enough, just as it is.
Only in America…
