this song blew my guy debord clean off

Without knowing for sure, I’m wild-guessing that Guy Debord is resting peacefully in academia’s “out” column. But Middle America doesn’t give a dialectical crap on that. For all my money: the prime example of spectacle (now wrapped uncomfortably in capital excess’ gilded foil), is currently trolling America’s reaches in a tour bus w/heisted Alabama plates—dippitying, do’ing, practicing dramatic entrances, and ponderously fingering the crosses on leather bands coiled round their necks.
Where is Rascal Flatts?
Per Southern music’s greatest ambassador to the North, Partymanica (a Yankee), I have been enlightened to the amazing excess of this live phenomenon-en-proceso. For your personal records, RASCAL FLATTS HAS OUT ON INTERLIBRARY LOAN: great coifs (the singer has a hairdo which cascades out and up, like a spot of bluegrass pressed to the earth by a fat behind in repose), and sets that look designed by the art director of the “Every Little Step” video, and star laser-show designers, and a fog machine, and a fiddler hired from the Montana militia for fashionable fiddler/survivalism (okay, he was totally wearing a camoflague cowboy shirt), and a guitarist from the “If you like Taking Back Sunday, you’ll like this Christian version better” poster for Cornerstone, and a carefully metered stage presence from the “Stars of Tomorrow” presentation/congeniality team, and a look on the lead fellow’s warbling face that betrayed a mixture of pain, self-satisfaction, vaguely auto-erotic grimaces and godly narcissism…
Yes, it was all those things at once, whing-dinging and alarm-system-rigged like a slot machine, pelting forth shiny dollares into an audience of rapturous ten-galloned proles who were screaming, or singing, or both. I was totally caught up in the fronds of the dream by its throbbing light-tricks, beaming mighty and blinding like heaven on high.**
Basically, they are a punky-dressing gestural country act that is kind of watery, with lots of AAA radio pop and slick. But Rascall Flatts’ live EXPERIENCE is put best by their guitarist, Joe Don—a sex symbol by his bio’s own admission. “This song blew our hair back,” he states on their website*, communicating the passion he feels for his own music.
And it’s so true. When a billow of fog cued vibratoed, lite pop-country hits—there in the Rose Garden where I’ve seen Blazers, Cher and Nader—it blew back my hair.
They played one good song. I cannot rightly identify it from their album, but I think it is the one titled “Mayberry,” a bittersweet ode to old hometowns lost to the building of freeways and nuke plants. It could also have been “You,” a whispery love song executed, on record, surprisingly sans bombast. I know for sure it is not “Dry Country Girl,” the one about the Xtian hottie at the altar. Whichever it was, its live intro was like, hella avant-garde, an improvised, crescendoing fiddle ambiance. It started getting really hot when Joe Don busted out a solo, the singer stopped singing out his nose and started feeling from his diaphragm, and right as the green lazer pattern flicked on, a bunch of pink squares lit up on the white tile backdrop.
Their closing song, from their new album to be released September 28, was a dedication to “ALL THEIR FANS, WHICH ARE the GREATEST FANS IN THE WORLD!!!!!!,” and I misheard the lyric “flashing titties,” or at least I hope I did— but considering the amt of t-shirts in the house sporting self-identifying taglines like “drunk chicks dig me,” “titties and beer,” and “rascal flatts are my broncos and I am seriously bucking right now” or whatever, I will not discount the potential for a titties lyric.
[* Also noted on their website: the boys grew up in Columbus, Ohio. Clearly the only way to explain their onstage Bible Belt twang is that they’re “flagrantly recreating language.”]
[** “When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling colors, a moment of life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated with dazzling colors. It can only be evoked as a memory. The greatness of art begins to appear only at the dusk of life.” —Debord]
[Quote of my life, while we’re on situationist texteses: “A school in which life becomes boring teaches nothing but barbarism.” —Raoul Vaneigem]
p.s. if you know if the situationist line of thinking has been effectively rebuked, please send me a reading list