My Interview with Paula Escobedo Shepherd

My mom, apart from being my mom, is also kind of my ongoing sociology experiment–a window into the mind of a 68-year-old, high-school-educated politically conservative woman, who doesn’t use the internet. Her primary news sources are Fox News Network, and the Wyoming Eagle-Tribune. It is through her that I am able to understand a certain Middle American mentality which I’m mostly shielded from in the quasi-leftist quasi-utopia that is the Portland metro area.
Today we discussed music for the first time in probably ten years, when she overheard Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” and was offended by its sacreligious nature. She has recently started purchasing CDs:
Toby Keith
Clay Aiken
Michael Buble
2 albums by Rod Stewart
Huey Lewis
George Strait
Alan Jackson
Her favorite Toby Keith song is “I Love This Bar,” because of the lyrics, which she thinks are funny, and include the lines: “I like my truck/I like my girlfriend… but I love this bar” and “If you get too drunk just sleep out in your car.” Which pretty much sums up the majority-rule Wyoming experience. Especially the thing about the truck.
When pressed further about her love of Keith’s everyman-for-his-own, rigid/rowdy neo-con chutzpah (I believe politically that would be termed “rugged individualism”), our test subject effused,
“He went over and entertained the troops. I thought that was pretty nice of him. Of course, everyone’s doing that now. Tom Cruise is going over there. But what’s he gonna do–swordfight?”
[Wartime blase: Toby Keith was being cutting edge by entertaining the troops, but now that Tom Cruise–who is clearly unentertaining unless confined to the screen and bound by a character–is doing it, entertaining the troops has suddenly become passe.]
And then, the inevitable:
“What kind of music do you like? Is it rap?”
Me: “I like a lot of rap music, yeah.”
Mom: “Rap’s not music. It’s rhythm and poetry. What’s hiphop? Is that rap?”
My mom is so Captain Beefheart, it’s sick.
In the old switcheroo, I scored on the vinyl this weekend–three public demand promos on the cheap–decent Agent X, a fab Bitin Back 12, PD Syndicate w/Elephant Man which is just okay, and this amazing track “Big Bad and Heavy” by Heartbeat Family featuring Jigsy King, which is apparently an old jungle classic reupdated w/2step beat in 2001— really sparse with a subtle subbassy thing that is, I swear, Marva Whitney’s “Unwind Yourself,” sped up and compressed, and Jigsy King’s killer crushed glass-on-flint vocals. Meanwhile, someone somewhere mentioned that grime is very much a regional assertion/answer/backlash to US hiphop–here’s my girl Shystie backing up that theory, explicitly.