The Western History Association

Rock Music and the New West, 19802010 Author(s): Todd M. Kerstetter Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 1 (SPRING 2012), pp. 53-71 Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of The Western
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Rock Music and the New West, 19802010

Todd M. Kerstetter
This article traces the use of western imagery in rock music from 1980 through 2010 and explores the Wests growing role as an influential producer of culture. While musicians continued to rely on iconic figures and mythical imagery, they increasingly depicted the region more realistically.

hen the all-star blues band of Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues opened their gig at Bobs Country Bunker with Gimme Some Lovin in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, the bars rowdy patrons jeered and hurled beer bottles at the stage. Sensing they had misjudged the audience, Jake and Elwood directed the band to play the theme song from the television show Rawhide. The cowboy-themed favorite soothed then delighted the crowd and paved the way for a parade of country and western favorites that allowed the band to connect with its strikingly different audience.1 In 1981 the San Francisco Bayarea band Dead Kennedys released an album titled In God We Trust, Inc., a sonically, visually, and lyrically vicious commentary on American society, organized religion, U.S. foreign policy, and the Reagan administration. The band concluded the album with a hardcore punk rendition of the Rawhide theme.2 The songs persistence and versatility points to the ongoing vitality of western images in popular culture, especially rock music. Richard Aquila used rock n roll to investigate U.S. social history and its relationship to the West from its birth in the mid-1950s to the publication of his 1980 article Images of the West in Rock Music, and he extended that analysis in 1996s Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in
Todd M. Kerstetter, associate professor of history at Texas Christian University, thanks anonymous readers, WXDU-FM, D.U.M.B., John Galt Band, Liz and the Tomcats, Electoral Dysfunction, and Elmer Thudd.
1 2

John Landis, The Blues Brothers, DVD (1980; Universal City, CA, 2005).

Dead Kennedys, Rawhide, In God We Trust, Inc., Alternative Tentacles VIRUS5, 1981, 45 rpm. Western Historical Quarterly 43 (Spring 2012): 5371. Copyright 2012, Western History Association.

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Popular Culture. During this era, the genres western imagery ranged from cowboys to surfers, skiers, and hippiesall of whom enjoyed the West as a promised land of opportunity, exoticism, and romance, where good guys wearing white hats triumphed over bad guys wearing black hats. But by the late 1960s, complicated new heroes and villains had appeared. Aquila argued that producers of popular culture beat western historians to the major themes of new western history by about two decades. As if to emphasize the point, a San Diego band named the Beat Farmers released an album titled Tales of the New West in 1985. Patricia Nelson Limericks important statement of new western history, The Legacy of Conquest, would not appear until 1987. And the Trails Conference, another critical moment in the creation of new western history, would not happen until 1989. Limerick expanded on Legacys themes in 2000 when she urged historians to resist categorizing westerners as heroes in white hats and villains in black ones and acknowledge them instead as morally complicated gray hatwearers. Richard W. Etulain and Michael P. Malone synthesized Aquilas and Limericks analyses in coining the term New Gray West, his label for morally and mythically ambiguous popular culture artifacts.3 Music of and about the West since 1980 reflects that white-gray-black range as well as more visible shades of brown, thanks largely to the regions proximity to Mexico and the Pacific Rim. Following Aquilas lead, especially his assertion that rock lyrics provide valuable insight to the thoughts, needs, and dreams of performers and their audiences, this article explores western imagery in rock music from 1980 through 2010. Images of the West as a magnet for musical migrants and immigrants, a center of music industry production, and the birthplace of influential new styles, demonstrate the regions significance as a popular culture producer and tastemaker. The endurance of the romantic and mythical West as a cultural touchstone remains even as these images reveal the myths dark side.4 Research uncovered far more bands and songsin an astonishing range of subgenresthan I could use. With few exceptions, examples in this article conform to the broad category of pop/rock as defined on allmusic.com and in American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, a textbook by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman.5
3 Richard Aquila, Images of the West in Rock Music, Western Historical Quarterly 11 (October 1980): 41532; Richard Aquila, ed., Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture (Urbana, 1996), 13, 103; Beat Farmers, Tales of the New West, Rhino Records, RNLP 853, 1985, 33 1/3 rpm; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987); Patricia Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York, 2000), 21; and Richard W. Etulain and Michael P. Malone, The American West: A Modern History, 1900 to the Present, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, 2007), 299.

In this essay, I will follow Aquilas model of analyzing rock music only. See Aquila, Wanted Dead or Alive, 113, 191215. Pop/Rock, allmusic, accessed 26 January 2011, http://allmusic.com/explore/genre/d20 and Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, 2nd ed. (New York, 2007), 9. For rocks social significance, see David P. Szatmary, Rockin In Time: A Social History of Rock-and-Roll, 7th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2010), xixvi and Sheila
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Todd M. Kerstetter
My study focuses on songs I deemed to have special cultural, social, or economic significance. Debating my choices and filling the gaps in my musical timeline makes a fun exercise for individuals or students. The United States entered the 1980s with Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, economic woes, and culture wars lurking in its recent past. The 1980 presidential election saw Ronald Reagan, who would use his Santa Barbara ranch as a Western White House and cultivate an image of himself as a cowboy, promise a new day for the country and link the West with a national rebirth. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Secret Service assigned Reagan the code name Rawhide. At the cinematic Bobs Country Bunker, the Blues Brothers and Gimme Some Lovin symbolize the 1960s urban counterculture, with the audience playing the role of the rural and suburban residents of Reagans America. The music from Rawhide allowed the hostile camps to enjoy a dtente in the West of their imaginations.6 From its inception, Rawhide embodied the Wests appeal to musicians, who used the song to tap into the countrys enduring fascination with the western myth and which provided common ground for ethnically and geographically diverse folk. The song sprang from the minds of Ukrainian composer Dimitry Tiomkin and lyricist Ned Washington, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Chicago native Francesco Paolo LoVeccio, better known as Frankie Laine, sang the original recording. These artists, not one of them a cowboy or even a westerner, helped the Southern California television industry create a modern-day western icon rooted in the short-lived western phenomenon of the trail drive.7 The Dead Kennedys version of Rawhide, and its intended audience, represented yet another America, one disillusioned by corporate influence, commercialization, and the malaise of the Jimmy Carter years. By the mid-1970s, rock music had transformed from a socially dangerous rebellious expression of the 1950s, and a vital component of the counterculture in the 1960s, to reside at or near the center of popular taste. Dissatisfaction among some young rock musicians spawned alternative movements in rock, notably punk. Scholars and fans debate punks origins but generally credit West Coast musicians with developing hardcore punk during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Cal (as in California) Punk bands, which combined Beat generation and flower child
Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (New York, 1997), xiiixxxvi. Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies, eds., Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: Perceptions, Policies, Legacies (New York, 2008), 113; Del Quentin Wilber, Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan (New York, 2011), 46; and Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York, 2005), 25, 66, 74, 83, 228, 270, 416, 487. Matthew Greenwald, Rawhide: Song Review, allmusic, accessed 18 September 2011, http://allmusic.com/song/rawhide-t2299657; John Bush, Frankie Laine: Biography, allmusic, accessed 18 September 2011, http://allmusic.com/artist/frankie-laine-p3115/biography; Hal Erickson, Dimitri Tiomkin: Biography, allmusic, accessed 18 September 2011, http://allmusic .com/artist/dimitri-tiomkin-p1449/biography; and Joslyn Layne, Ned Washington: Biography, allmusic, accessed 18 September 2011, http://allmusic.com/artist/ned-washington-p136219/biography.
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influences with energy drawn from the East Coast and British punk bands, formed a hybrid marked by a heightened sense of desperation. The Dead Kennedys and Los Angeles bands Black Flag and X created simple riff-based songs played at breathtakingly fast tempos and decked out with nihilistic lyrics often containing biting commentary.8 Exemplifying San Francisco hardcore, the Dead Kennedys provide insight to the Wests significance as a region as well as a source for musical imagery. Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, the bands debut album, described by one reviewer as a hyper-speed blast of ultra-polemical, left-wing hardcore punk, served as their signature statement and spoke volumes about 1970s politics, culture, and society in California. The best example, California ber Alles, lampoons Edmund Jerry Brown, Jr., who served his first two terms as the states governor from 1975 through 1983 promising to bring a new spirit to Sacramento. While he supported many socially liberal causes, Brown governed as a fiscal conservative. A former Jesuit seminary student who also studied Zen Buddhism in Japan, he earned the nickname Governor Moonbeam from newspaper columnist Mike Royko because of his interest in space exploration and colonization. The song sarcastically refers to his always-happy aura and his presidential ambition. The band fantasized that Brown wished to be Fhrer and institute a regime of Zen fascists who would command the nation to follow New Age practices such as meditation and exercise and wear happy faces. They feared a Brown administration would establish an Orwellian state ruled by suede/denim secret police that would round up the uncool, the unhealthy, and the unhappy and send them to death camps.9 These lyrics reflected outsider concerns with the mainstream but also tapped into Californias increasing importance in the country. In their textbook on the American West, Etulain and Malone refer to imperial California in the years from 1945 to 1987, arguing that the Wests designation as the most powerful region in the country in 1960 came when Californias population surpassed that of Texas. They also note that Reagan pioneered a California style of personalized, show-business politics that influenced politics nationwide. When the nation sent the former California governor to the White House in a landslide victory in 1980, the Dead Kennedys reworked California ber Alles into an angrier vision decrying what seemed an even more frightening future. The result, Weve Got a Bigger Problem Now, appeared on In God We Trust, Inc. In the Reaganite dystopia the band feared, the government would
Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 3612, 364, 381, 442; Peter Belsito and Bob Davis, Cal Punk, in Hardcore California: A History of Punk and New Wave (Berkeley, 1983), 7; and Dewar MacLeod, Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California (Norman, 2010). Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 4414; Robert W. Cherny, Richard Griswold del Castillo, and Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Competing Visions: A History of California (Boston, 2005), 376, 4023; Jesse McKinley, How Jerry Brown Became Governor Moonbeam, New York Times, 6 March 2010; Jonathan Curiel, The Reincarnation of Jerry Brown, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 July 2004; and Dead Kennedys, California ber Alles, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Alternative Tentacles Records, 1980, 33 1/3 rpm.
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Todd M. Kerstetter
force students to pray in school and conscript them. The militaristic United States would risk World War III to improve the profits of multinational corporations that supported the administration.10 Influential hardcore band Black Flag released its first full-length album in 1981, the critically acclaimed Damaged. Although the band had signed a contract with a division of MCA, the labels representatives refused to release the album, claiming the contentsferocious songs about alienation, boredom, and disfranchisementtoo vulgar and too likely to subvert and corrupt impressionable young listeners. The band issued the music on SST (their own label) instead. SST became the flagship label for L.A. punk and other styles as well as an important West Coast force in cultural production. Critics credit Damaged I and an alternate take, Damaged IIlamentations on confusion that had little to do with the West per sewith introducing Kurt Cobain of Nirvana to punk and therefore shaping the soon-to-be-born grunge movement in the Pacific Northwest.11 Disillusionment with Southern Californias consumer culture spread beyond punks and inspired Frank Zappas scornful musical criticism in his 1982 single Valley Girl, which ironically scored the prolific artist his sole Top 40 hit. Zappas then-teenaged daughter, Moon Unit, narrated the song with samples of slang spoken by young female denizens of the San Fernando Valley. Valspeak such as totally bitchin, Im so sure, grody, and gag me with a spoon spread across the country, skewering the emptyheaded narrator and those like her while simultaneously creating a new mythical girl to rival the Beach Boys Surfer Girl of the 1960s. The song also tapped into the shopping mall culture that made the Sherman Oaks Galleria an icon in period films Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Valley Girl (1983). Its influence lingered into the 1990s, as reflected by a headline reporting the closing of the Galleria in 1999: Like, totally, the end of one malls era.12 Moving from fringe to center, rocks mainstream currents changed significantly during the 1980s and 1990s, as West Coast influences reflected imagery of both traditional/mythical Wests and the New Gray West. Heavy metal, for instance, pioneered in the 1960s and 1970s by bands such as Led Zeppelin, declined by the late 1970s as
Etulain and Malone, American West, 2823, 298 and Dead Kennedys, Weve Got a Bigger Problem Now, In God We Trust, Inc., Alternative Tentacles VIRUS5, 1981, 45 rpm.
11 John Dougan, review of Damaged, by Black Flag, allmusic, accessed 26 December 2007, http://www.allmusic.com/album/r1955; Ned Raggett, review of Damaged I, by Black Flag, allmusic, accessed 26 December 2007, http://www.allmusic.com/song/t2281489; and Black Flag, Damaged, SST Records, SST007, 1981, 33 1/3 rpm. See also Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Black Flag: Biography, allmusic, accessed 26 December 2007, http://www.allmusic.com/artist /black-flag-p3689/biography. 12 Frank Zappa, with Moon Unit Zappa, Valley Girl, Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch, Barking Pumpkin Records, FW 38066, 1982, 33 1/3 rpm; Steve Huey, review of Valley Girl, by Frank Zappa, allmusic, accessed 8 August 2011, http://www.allmusic.com/song /valley-girl-t2677879; and Anne McDermott, Like, Totally, the End of One Malls Era, CNN Interactive, 15 April 1999, http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/views/y/1999/04/mcdermott.mall.apr15. 10

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disco ascended. And a new generation of heavy metal bands, including arguably the two most importantfrom Los Angeles and San Franciscoprepared to propel heavy metal into the mainstream.13 The same time and place that spawned Cal Punk also produced Van Halen. The band owes its existence to the familiar westward migration theme that demonstrates ongoing continuity in national and international demographic shifts. The families of all four band members settled in and around the Pasadena area, where the band formed in the early 1970s. The Van Halen brothersdrummer Alex and guitarist Eddie came from the Netherlands. Bassist Michael Anthony moved from his native Chicago, and flamboyant singer David Lee Roth migrated with his family from Indiana. The bands 1978 eponymous debut album went platinum (sold more than 1 million copies) within a year, has sold more than 10 million units since its release to become a rock classic, and established the band as an important pop culture institution. Van Halens style and success set the template for hard rock and heavy metal for the 80s. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame credits the band with reinvigorating hard rock during a period of doldrums by bringing youthful, West Coast bravado and blistering virtuosity to the genre.14 The band cultivated and traded on its image as Los Angeles party animals and used vivid visual and lyrical western imagery on its 1982 album Diver Down. The albums inner-sleeve photograph shows Roth wearing a bandanna around his neck and sporting a bandolier for a belt. The photo collage on the sleeves flip side includes an image of Eddie in a neckerchief and several more of Roth in a neckerchief and an oversized cowboy hat. The albums second song, Hang Em High, refers to the well-known Western of the same name, and its lyrics dramatize a rogue loner who roams the land with a price on his head. The album closes on a quintessentially western note: the Dale Evans sing-along Happy Trails, which the band often used to conclude its concerts.15 These contributions alone would earn Van Halen a place in this discussion, but their album 1984 marked [o]ne of the most important moments in the mainstreaming of heavy metal. Much of the bands early popularity and heavy metal credibility came from Eddies guitar prowess. 1984 marked a turning point because it included the Number One pop single Jump, with its iconic keyboard riff. By paving the way
13 14

Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 393.

Van Halen Biography, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, accessed 23 April 2008, http://www.rockhall.com/inductee/van-halen and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Van Halen: Biography, allmusic, accessed 8 August 2011, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/van-halen-p133911 /biography. See also Robert Walser, Van Halen, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo (hereafter GMO) and Van Halen, in Colin Larkin, ed., Encyclopedia of Popular Music, 4th ed., Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_epm (hereafter EPM).
15 Van Halen, Hang Em High and Happy Trails, Diver Down, Warner Brothers Records BSK 3677, 1982, 33 1/3 rpm and Ian Christe, Everybody Wants Some: The Van Halen Saga (Hoboken, NJ, 2007), 80.

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Todd M. Kerstetter
for more synthesizer use in heavy metal, the song popularized the genre with a larger, more diverse audience. Sales of heavy metal records jumped from 8 percent of U.S. record sales in 1983 to 20 percent in 1984, making it one of the most popular genres. MTV began airing Headbangers Ball in 1987, and soon after it became the networks most-watched show.16 In the 1980s, the Sunset Strip scene in Los Angeles delivered a plethora of glam or hair metal bands along with the wildly successful Guns N Roses, whose style blurred the boundaries of hard rock, heavy metal, and glam metal. Music writer Ian Christe linked region and style by labeling the movement Hollywood Glambangers. In an encyclopedia article on heavy metal, musicologist Robert Walser cites two West Coast bands as epitomizing the genre: Poison and Mtley Cre. Poison migrated to Los Angeles from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Mtley Cre, an L.A. band from its inception in 1981, played a major role in commercializing the genre and saw its first five albums go platinum.17 The San Francisco Bay area brought the world speed metal in the early 1980s, notably by Metallica, whose music departed from an earlier regional sound created by bands such as Jefferson Airplane (later Starship) and the Grateful Dead. California audiences that had embraced West Coast punk prodded the band to speed up their songs. Metallica really created a form of music, according to Brian Slagel, founder of Metal Blade Records. When they came out, there was no speed metal or thrash metal. They were doing something new. Master of Puppets (1986) made the band one of the most influential of the decade, and Metallica (1991), which sold more than 7 million units, demonstrated the bands mainstream appeal and showed western film references creeping even into speed metal. The album included The Unforgiven, which reflected the influence of Ennio Morricones spaghetti Western movie soundtracks and allowed singer James Hetfield to explore a newfound cowboy persona. Although Metallica continued to enjoy success, tastes were changing. A Texas band named Pantera dropped the hair metal approach it adopted through most of the 1980s in favor of metal-rap fusion, featuring it on its 1990 album Cowboys from Hell, which played on the bands roots.18 Across the continent in New Jersey, Bon Jovi achieved multi-platinum success in the 1980s with its commercial hard rock, or pop metal, thanks in part to doors opened by Van Halen and a song oozing western imagery. The album Slippery When Wet reached the top of the charts in 1987 and was the years biggest seller. Since its release,
16 Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 393, 394 and Van Halen, Jump, 1984, Warner Brothers Records, 23985-1, 1984, 33 1/3 rpm.

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Ian Christe, Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal (New York, 2003), 153; Robert Walser, Heavy Metal, GMO; Barry Weber, Poison: Biography, allmusic, accessed 13 September 2010, http://allmusic.com/artist/p5162; and Andrew Leahey, Mtley Cre: Biography, allmusic, accessed 13 September 2010, http://allmusic.com/artist/p4964. Brian Slagel quoted in Szatmary, Rockin In Time, 302; Walser, Heavy Metal; Robert Walser, Metallica, GMO; Metallica, Master of Puppets, Elektra, 1986, 33 1/3 rpm; Metallica, Metallica, Elektra, 1991, compact disc; Pantera, Cowboys from Hell, Atco Records, 1991, compact disc; and Christe, Sound of the Beast, 217, 2289.
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17

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it has sold more than 9 million copies in the United States. The album featured a hit power ballad titled Wanted Dead or Alive. The lyrics compare the life of a touring musician to that of a cowboy and lament the loneliness of the road, sleep deprivation, and monotony. Rather than packing a six-shooter, the songs narrator carries a loaded six string [guitar] on [his] back. The chorus likewise updates cowboy imagery: Im a cowboy/on a steel horse I ride/Im wanted/dead or alive. The song enjoyed a rebirth in the twenty-first century as the theme for the television show Deadliest Catch, which stars Alaska crab fishermen as yet another breed of cowboy riding another kind of steel horse on the Bering Sea. The song charted again in 2007, hitting Number 25 on the Hot Digital Songs chart, the twenty-first anniversary of its first appearance.19 Moving deeper into the mainstream, Bruce Springsteen, another Garden State musician and one of the most influential musicians of the past forty years, issued albums with strong western themes in 1982, 1995, and 2005. His 1982 album Nebraska featured a black and white cover photoas bleak as the albums lyricsof winter plains broken by a dashboard, a two-lane road, and barbed wire fences. (See Figure 1.) It was kind of about a spiritual crisis, in which man is left lost, Springsteen said of the album, which came out of the same era of greed and Me Decade narcissism that produced punk and new wave. Its like he has nothing left to tie him to society anymore. Hes isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family. In the title song, Springsteen tells a story of murderous mayhem from the perspective of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather, who, with Caril Ann Fugate, killed eleven people in Nebraska and Wyoming in 1957 and 1958. Springsteen issued what critic Robert Palmer called a challenge [to] big time rocks colossal failure of nerve in his imagined Nebraska and used itsthe Westsopen spaces to depict crisis and isolation.20 On 1995s The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen drew more heavily and regularly on western imagery and added new currents to traditional themes. Nine of the albums twelve songs contain obvious western images and depict a region clearly touched by its proximity to Mexico and the Pacific Rim. The stark reality of Springsteens West contrasted with the romanticized mythic one, shattering any paradigm focused on black and white or shades of gray and imposing one that reflects shades of brown. Critic Jon Pareles called the album a hi-fi, West Coast sequel to Nebraska. The title track refers to the male protagonist of John Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath and places typical
Bon Jovi, Wanted Dead or Alive, Slippery When Wet, Mercury Records 830 264-1, 1986, 33 1/3 rpm; Larkin, ed., Bon Jovi, EPM; Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Bon Jovi: Biography, allmusic, accessed 2 May 2008, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bon-jovi-p3734/biography; Bon Jovi: Charts and Awards, Billboard Singles, allmusic, accessed 2 May 2008, http://www.allmusic.com /artist/bon-jovi-p3734/charts-awards /billboard-singles; William Ruhlmann, review of Slippery When Wet, by Bon Jovi, allmusic, accessed 8 August 2011, http://www.allmusic.com/album /slippery-when-wet-rock-milestones-dvd-r855942/review; and Larkin, ed., Jon Bon Jovi.
20 Bruce Springsteen quoted in Szatmary, Rockin In Time, 282; Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska, Nebraska, Columbia Records 38358, 1982, compact disc; and Robert Palmer, Bruce Springsteen Fashions a Compelling, Austere Message, New York Times, 26 September 1982. 19

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Figure 1. Cover art for Bruce Springsteens Nebraska (1982). The albums musical and visual imagery depicted a stark West. Photo by David Michael Kennedy. Photo courtesy of David Michael Kennedy.

Springsteen working-class themes firmly in the West. The truly New West theme of immigration since 1965 appears in Galveston Bay, which can be read as a dual biography based on real-life events in Seabrook, Texas. One character, Le Bin Son, fought alongside Americans in Vietnam. After Saigons fall in 1975, he brought his family to the promised land, settled in coastal Texas, and bought a shrimp boat. The other main character, Billy Sutter, also served in Vietnam and came home after being wounded in 1968. He returned to his Texas home and took over his fathers fishing boat. The two fishermen find themselves competing in a western arena as familiar as the California gold rush, but with a late twentieth-century twist on location, resources, and ethnicity. The conflict turns violent, but when Sutter opts not to kill Le Bin Son, the men survive with their hopes for a brighter western future intact.21 Sinaloa Cowboys tells the story of two Mexican brothers who come to California looking for work and, presumably, better lives. They work in orchards in the San Joaquin Valley until a Sinaloa drug cartel offers them a lucrative deal as methamphetamine cooks at an abandoned chicken ranch in Fresno County. The brothers save $10,000, but an explosion at the meth lab kills the younger brother, who ends up buried in a eucalyptus
Bruce Springsteen, The Ghost of Tom Joad and Galveston Bay, The Ghost of Tom Joad, Columbia Records, CK 67484, 1995, compact disc; Jon Pareles, Arena Rock Loses One Voice and Gains Another, New York Times, 19 November 1995; and Jim Cullen, Born In the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (New York, 1997), 702.
21

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grove. This tale vividly illustrates themes of the New Gray West. The Mexican border and immigration to the West play significant roles; the promised landfor the protagonists, to the north, not to the westoffers undesirable, low-paying work and undesirable, illegal, and deadly high-paying work. The definition of cowboy also expanded to include those engaged in the borderlands drug trade and showed that the men from Sinaloa also saw opportunity in the Westjust not the type traditionally celebrated in history or popular culture. In many respects, this New West offers nothing new at all. Going to and living in the West often meant risking life and limb, and cowboys had been a diverse lot all along. But this tale also offered a new twist in the form of methamphetamine and in its acknowledgment of people and stories often invisible in other tales of the West.22 Devils and Dust, released ten years later, portrayed the cowboy and the mythic West in even grimmer terms. The album strikes a forlorn Old West tone with sepia images of cattle skulls and a shot glass on a bar as well as a stripped-down sound. Reno graphically describes an encounter with a prostitute in a New West culture known for a wide-open sense of possibility, freedom, and pleasure. The johns mind wanders to an idyllic time he spent in central Mexico riding with vaqueros and an idealized woman named Maria. Here, Mexico plays the rosy-hued role of Eden so often linked to the West. Reno depicts the West not as Eden but as a loveless sexual marketplace. Black Cowboys tells a familiar story with a twist. A mother raising a boy in the South Bronx struggles to protect him by keeping him at home. He develops an interest in the West from watching Westerns on television, and his mother feeds his curiosity with books about the black cowboys of the Oklahoma range [and]/The Seminole scouts who fought the tribes of the Great Plains. After his mother takes up with a criminal, the boy steals $500 from the boyfriends stash and buys a train ticket to Oklahoma.23 Although African Americans appear infrequently in western imagery and rock music about the West, a song written nearly twenty years earlier by Living Colour, an all-black hard rock/heavy metal band, illustrates how broadly the regions myth of opportunity permeates American culture. Living Colour formed in 1984 in New York City and became known for provocative but intelligent expressions of urban concerns. In Which Way To America?, the lyrics note disparities perceived by guitarist and vocalist Vernon Reid in late Reagan-era America. I look at the T.V./Your Americas doing well/I look out my window/My Americas catching hell, he sings in the opening verse. Later he asks, Where is my picket fence?/My long, tall glass of lemonade?/ Where is my VCR, my stereo, my T.V. show? After the second rendition of the chorus, which forcefully and pointedly asks, I just want to know which way do I go to get to your America?, the song answers: Go west young man, go west young man, go west.24
22 23

Bruce Springsteen, Sinaloa Cowboys, Ghost of Tom Joad.

Bruce Springsteen, Reno and Black Cowboys, Devils and Dust, Columbia Records CN 93900, 2005, compact disc. See also Jon Pareles, Bruce Almighty, New York Times, 24 April 2005.
24

Larkin, ed., Living Colour, EPM; Living Colour, Which Way to America?, Vivid, Epic

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Figure 2. Promotional photograph of Nirvana, 1993. The band found itself at the epicenter of a musical and cultural phenomenon: grunge. Photo by Anton Corbijn. Collection of author.

Struggling urban African Americans, the band suggested, should head west in the footsteps of black cowboys of the trail-drive era and Exodusters to find a better America. By the late 1980s, the West stood poised to make another far-reaching contribution to American culture that arguably has the strongest link to the region: grunge. A subgenre of alternative music, grunge originated in the Seattle area, where people used the term to describe slow punk played by a band called the Melvins. Grunge gained national and worldwide recognition after Nirvanas 1991 album Nevermind scorched sales charts on its way to selling more than 10 million copies. (See Figure 2.) The music spawned a fashion movement, thanks in part to Nirvanas heavy exposure on MTV and an appearance on Saturday Night Live in January 1992. Ripped jeans and flannel shirts epitomized the look of grunge, some Gap and Next stores added grunge sections, The Los Angeles Times printed a feature titled Grunge-a-Go-Go, and Vogue magazine ran a ten-page spread on grunge wear.25 Grunge also played a significant role in musical feminism by introducing bands such as Bratmobile and Bikini Kill, both from Olympia, Washington, who pioneered the Riot Grrrl movement. These radical feminists opened stage mics at performances
Records EK 44099, 1988, 33 1/3 rpm; Larkin, ed., Living ColourVivid, EPM; and Greg Prato, Living Colour: Biography, allmusic, accessed 14 April 2007, http://allmusic.com/artist /living-colour-p4771. Robert Walser, Grunge, GMO; Robert Walser, Nirvana, GMO; Everett True, Nirvana: The Biography (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 443; Gaile Robinson, Grunge-a-Go-Go: Anything Old, Full of Holes, Even Downright Grubby Fits New Look, Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1992; and Steven Meisel, Grunge and Glory, Vogue, December 1992, 25462, 313.
25

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to allow audience members to discuss sexual abuse and asked men and slam dancers to create a safe space for female spectators near the stage. The three women and one man in Bikini Kill played punk music with lyrics that tackled sexual politics, most famously in the bands anthem, Rebel Girl. The lyrics do not mention the West explicitly but celebrate a trait often linked to the region: individualism, notably for women doing as they wish, social conventions be damned.26 Alternative/grunge band Hole also addressed feminist issues and concurrently critiqued the Riot Grrrls. Formed in Los Angeles in 1989 and fronted by Courtney Love, who married Nirvanas guitarist/singer/front man Kurt Cobain, Hole won acclaim for their second album, Live Through This. The albums final cut, Olympia (mislabeled Rock Star), criticizes the citys feminist scene and its ties to Evergreen State College: Do it for the kids some more/Fascist sexists/I went to school in Olympia.27 Bikini Kill, Hole, and Nirvana did not often tap western imagery for lyrics, but the movement they created illustrates the Northwests power as a cultural trendsetter and calls attention to a region not stereotypically associated with western mythology or identity. The significance of place, even for grunge, remains debatable. Some critics dispute the existence of a Seattle sound and argue that the Northwest as place had little to no influence on grunge; they credit timing, circumstance, and, most important, the vigorous promotional activities of Sub Pop Records for bringing fame to Seattle bands in the 1990s.28 Others, including musicians, have testified that place affected them. Cobain grew up in Aberdeen, Washington, a city that hit its peak population of 50,000 early in the twentieth century. When Cobain came of age, the town had lost about two-thirds of its residents, and high unemployment and alcoholism plagued the city. Aberdeen was apocalyptic in the way old industrial towns are when the economy dies and there is no money or jobs, Tobi Vail, Bikini Kill band member, told author Everett True. Krist Novoselic, Nirvanas bassist, moved with his family from Southern California to Aberdeen at fourteen and shared Vails sentiments: Its cloudy and rainy, theres mud in the streets from all the trucks. The buildings are all kind of dirty. Its like an East German town or something.29 Nirvanas music reflects the fact that the band did not come from a West of sun, fun, and opportunity.
Mary Celeste Kearney, The Missing Links: Riot GrrrlFeminismLesbian Culture, in Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove, 20729; Marion Leonard, Rebel Girl, You Are the Queen of My World: Feminism, Subculture, and Grrrl Power, in Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove, 23055; Larkin, ed., Bikini Kill, EPM; and Jason Ankeny, Bikini Kill: Biography, allmusic, accessed 28 July 2008, http://allmusic.com/artist/bikini-kill-p44904.
27 Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Hole: Biography, allmusic, accessed 20 May 2011, http://allmusic.com/artist/hole-p13208/biography and Hole, Rock Star [Olympia], Live Through This, Geffen DGC 24631, 1994, compact disc. 28 Thomas Bell, Why Seattle?: An Examination of an Alternative Rock Culture Hearth, Journal of Cultural Geography 18, no. 1 (1998): 367 and Kyle Anderson, Accidental Revolution: The Story of Grunge (New York, 2007), 102. 26

Aberdeen information and Tobi Vail quoted in True, Nirvana, 56 and Krist Novoselic quoted in Michael Azerrad, Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (New York, 1994), 50.

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Todd M. Kerstetter
Perhaps those factors, as well as the regions notoriously gloomy climate, contributed to the sound that Cobain described as [h]ard music played to a slow tempo. Another interpretation attributes the Seattle music scenes cultural exceptionalism to its physical isolation from the musical hotbeds of New York and Los Angeles. According to this theory, area musicians believed no one paid attention to them in their corner of the nation, which left them free to ignore big-city trends and to innovate.30 Whatever sound the Northwest created, Southern California bands helped inspire it, and the states music industry had a hand in producing it. Cobains earliest punk influences came from bands such as Black Flag and Flipper. Nirvana recorded Nevermind in Van Nuys, California, and studio engineer Andy Wallace infused the bands sound with L.A. influences. Cobain later said the album embarrassed him because it sounded more like a Mtley Cre album than a punk album. By many accounts the bands massive success proved too much for Cobain to handle and contributed to his suicide in April 1994 and the bands demise.31 [Cobain] and his band Nirvana announced the end of one rock & roll era and the start of another, Anthony DeCurtis wrote in Rolling Stone. David Fricke echoed DeCurtiss sentiments and lined up with those who heard in Nirvana the voice of a generation disgruntled with the world: Teen Spirit sent Nevermind into platinum orbit, broadcasting the dark side of the 80s Reagan-Bush gold rushdysfunction, disenfranchisement, diminished expectationswith an almost contradictory vitality.32 Those themes reflect the dominance of gritty realism rather than mythic romanticism in songs by western bands. The same characteristic appeared in female rock Wests, too, as mapped by Sheryl Crow on her 1993 album, Tuesday Night Music Club. Leaving Las Vegas, a midtempo melancholy stomp, opens with the optimistic lines Life springs eternal/On a gaudy neon street but immediately turns dark as the narrator reveals, I spent the best part of my losing streak/In an Army Jeep. The character bemoans the muddy line between/The things you want/And the things you have to do as she deals blackjack and works as a dancer while standing in the middle of the desert/Waiting for my ship to come in. The song betrays a loss of hope, or at least an unwillingness to secure a rosy future through gambling, and the singer leaves Las Vegasfor good, she assures the listener. Crow rendered Los Angeles barely more brightly on All I Wanna Do, an easy-gaited, catchy tune with the memorable chorus, All I wanna do is have some fun/Until the sun comes up/Over Santa Monica Boulevard. That sounds like a stereotypical L.A. good times pop culture story. But the songs protagonist narrates from a bar where she sits next to a man plain ugly to me. He does not
Kurt Cobain quoted in True, Nirvana, 69. For more information about Pacific Northwest musical exceptionalism, see ibid.
31 32 30

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True, Nirvana, 237, 244 and Azerrad, Come As You Are, 31, 180, 239.

Anthony DeCurtis, Kurt Cobain, 19671994, Rolling Stone, 2 June 1994, 30 and David Fricke, Heart-Shaped Noise: The Music and the Legacy, Rolling Stone, 2 June 1994, 66.

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fit Los Angeless reputation for beautiful people, and the two outsiders drink away a workday watching people in suits and skirts carefully washing their mobile status symbols at a carwash.33 A tough reality also corroded the iconic cowboy in a series of songs, beginning with Paula Coles Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? in 1997. The song, which reached Number Four on Billboards Adult Top 40 chart, laments a failing relationship, and its female narrator looks for solace in a romanticized West. The opening verse reflects on the couples rosy beginnings and ties them to wholesome images. Coles character offers to do the laundry if her partner pays the bills. The chorus follows: Where is my John Wayne?/Where is my prairie song?/Where is my happy ending?/Where have all the cowboys gone? The womans disappointment deepens in subsequent verses and concludes with Cole sneering bitterly about her real-life partner and posing questions that reveal her ideal man: Where is my Marlboro Man?/Where is his shiny gun?/Where is my lonely ranger?/Where have all the cowboys gone? The songs action could take place anywhere, but the Massachusetts-born Cole relies on cowboys of cinema and Madison Avenue as male role models, pointing to the West as the place where a better man exists.34 Two years later a wildly different western ideal hit the charts in Kid Rocks Cowboy. The songs plaintive harmonica and honky-tonk piano alludes musically to Old West motifs, and its lyrics play on classic images of frontier wildness, uttered by a modern rock-and-roll character reminiscent of Al Swearingen, the prominent saloon owner in HBOs Deadwood. The protagonist in the song, written by Michigan native Robert Ritchie (aka Kid Rock, whose stage name echoes western outlaws such as Billy the Kid and the Sundance Kid) describes pursuing happiness in California by chasing women with fake breasts, partying with stars, and getting rich by running an escort service. He also tells those he meets, You can call me Tex, suggesting real cowboys come from Texas or that Tex is a real cowboy name. For Kid Rock, the opportunity of a manly, misogynistic, and illegal kind awaits men who can make it to California to party and pimp and play in the sunto be a cowboy. The song cracked the top 10 in Billboards Mainstream Rock Tracks and Modern Rock Tracks in 1999, indicating its music and imagery connected with a wide audience.35 Sheryl Crow created a similar character on Cmon, Cmon, where she staked a unisex claim to freedom and empowerment in the song Steve McQueen. Although the
Sheryl Crow, Leaving Las Vegas and All I Wanna Do, Tuesday Night Music Club, A&M Records 3145401262, 1993, compact disc.
34 Paula Cole, Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?, This Fire, Warner Brothers/Imago 946424-2, 1996, compact disc. For chart statistics, see This Fire: Charts and Awards, allmusic, accessed 8 August 2011, http://www.allmusic.com/album/this-fire-r241541/charts-awards /billboard-single. 35 Kid Rock, Cowboy, Devil Without a Cause, Atlantic 83119-2, 1998, compact disc. For chart statistics, see Devil Without a Cause: Charts and Awards, allmusic, accessed 8 August 2011, http://www.allmusic.com/album/devil-without-a-cause-r372664/charts-awards/billboard-single. 33

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Todd M. Kerstetter
lyrics associate those characteristics with a hypermasculine male film star (Like Steve McQueen/All I needs a fast machine/Im gonna make it all right), Crow exudes swaggering confidence when she sings, I wanna rock and roll this party/I still wanna have some fun/I wanna leave you feeling breathless/Show you how the west was won. Later in the song she announces, I aint takin shit off no one/Baby that was yesterday. Crow claimed western female space in the same neighborhood as Kid Rocka link solidified by an ascending guitar lick on her CD that appears in both songs.36 The Wests border with Mexico and the substantial presence of the recording industry in Los Angeles fostered unique musical hybrids. Hispanic influences, for instance, appear in the work of Los Lobos, which formed in East Los Angeles in 1973 and has toiled productively there for decades. The bands major-label debut, 1984s How Will the Wolf Survive?, reflects rock, Tex-Mex, country, Spanish, and Mexican influences, emblematic of their hometowns cultural diversity. Los Lonely Boys, a band with roots in San Angelo, Texas, formed in 2000 and plays music in the same vein but with stronger blues-rock roots. Stylistically these bands show a degree of continuity with Ritchie Valens, best remembered for his hit La Bamba. In contrast to Valens, who adapted his surname (Valenzuela) to disguise his Hispanic heritage, Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys emphasize and capitalize on their ethnicity, reflecting a more accepting time and place.37 The Red Hot Chili Peppers wedded funk, punk, and other elements to create a distinctive sound and drew on their insider perspective to paint lyrical images of a decidedly realistic West. The song Hollywood on their 1985 album Freaky Styley glorifies the city while American Ghost Dance shows the dark side of U.S. westward expansion. It begins by quoting the iconic Home on the Range before turning bleak: Oh give me a home/Where the buffalo roam/And the death of a race is a game/Where seldom is heard/A peaceable word/From the white trash/Who killed as they came. Almost fifteen years later the band called up a non-mythic West in Californication, from the 1999 album of the same name; the title refers to a term for haphazard, mindless development that dates at least to the early 1970s. One verse neatly sums up the states role as cultural trendsetter: Its the edge of the world/And all of western civilization/The sun may rise in the east/At least it settles in the final location/Its understood that Hollywood/Sells Californication. While acknowledging that dreams draw people from around the world to Hollywood, the song focuses on how those dreams cannot be met and that the myth of California is more likely an illusion crafted in a special effects studio or by a plastic surgeons scalpel. Nirvanas Cobain appears as a symbol of shattered dreams, referring to the recording industrys
36 Sheryl Crow, Steve McQueen, Cmon, Cmon, A&M Records 06949932602, 2002, compact disc. 37 Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Los Lobos: Biography, allmusic, accessed 16 August 2008, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/p99039; Mark Deming, review of How Will the Wolf Survive?, by Los Lobos, allmusic, accessed 16 August 2008, http://www.allmusic.com/album/r11957; and William Ruhlmann, Los Lonely Boys: Biography, allmusic, accessed 16 August 2008, http:// www.allmusic.com/artist/p573312.

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commodification of Nirvanas music and the grunge scenea musical Californication that crushed Cobain in real life. It also alludes to the Beach Boys, calling earthquakes just another good vibration.38 Rage Against the Machine, established in Los Angeles in 1991, created another musical hybrid: an aggressive mix of heavy metal and hip-hop supporting angry, confrontational, political lyrics that decried urban deprivation, racism, censorship, and the plight of Native Americans. On their 1996 Evil Empire album, Down Rodeoreferring to luxury shopping mecca Rodeo Drivepresents a brown-skinned man driving down Rodeo with a shotgun, maybe for his own protection, maybe to assert his place in a country that he perceives to have violently oppressed minorities and the poor. Three years later, on The Battle of Los Angeles, Maria focuses on the political and economic turmoil in Central America that has led countless numbers to migrate to the American West, often under horrendous circumstances. Many, including this songs titular human contraband, find instead sweatshops and brutal living conditions akin to slavery.39 Polyglot, multiethnic bands such as Ozomatli and Dengue Fever show how the Wests borders influenced the regions demographics and enriched its cultural output. Ozomatli, formed in the mid-1990s, earned a description as a new kind of American band, a band reflecting the multiracial and multicultural One World demographics of the 21st century. The bands members hailed from diverse ethnic backgrounds, and its music displayed elements of rock, salsa, hip-hop, jazz-funk, and reggae. By the release of their third album, Street Signs, in 2004, the band added Middle Eastern influences as well. Dengue Fever, a group of L.A. indie rockers dedicated to 1960s Cambodian rock fronted by Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian immigrant who sings in Khmer and English, offers a different taste from Los Angeless musical melting pot. Thanks to changes in U.S. immigration law, and Californias inviting climate and location, the state became the top destination for Southeast Asian refugees between 1975 and 1985. By 2000 half of all Laotians, Vietnamese, and Cambodians in the United States lived in California, the state with the largest Cambodian population in the nation. Dengue Fever draws on a combination of Eastern-influenced melodies played on organ and reverb-drenched guitarsa sound very similar to classic California surf music described by The New York Times as the Beach Boys gone Bollywood. The band also reflects the industry trend of migrs directly affecting music rather than a U.S. artist channeling international influences into the scene. Here again, Los Angeles shows the West on the musical cutting edge
38

Greg Prato, Red Hot Chili Peppers: Biography, allmusic, accessed 26 December 2007, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/red-hot-chili-peppers-p5241/biography; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hollywood and American Ghost Dance, Freaky Styley, EMI America Records E2-90617, 1985, 33 1/3 rpm; Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication, Californication, Warner Brothers Records 47386, 1999, compact disc; and The Great Wild Californicated West, Time, 21 August 1972.
39 Larkin, ed., Rage Against the Machine, EPM; Rage Against the Machine, Down Rodeo, Evil Empire, Epic 57523, 1996, compact disc; and Rage Against the Machine, Maria, The Battle of Los Angeles, Epic 69630, 1999, compact disc.

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Todd M. Kerstetter
and contributing to the creation of a region more in tune with reality than mythology.40 Western mythology underwent yet another revision in 2004 with the release of Brian Wilsons SMiLE, which resurrected vintage 1960s imagery while simultaneously expanding its boundaries to include the dark side of history. Wilson, the musical genius behind the fun-in-the-sun Beach Boys, began the project in the 1960s but abandoned it as personal and professional problems overwhelmed him and the group. From 1967 through its twenty-first-century resurrection, the most famous unreleased album in rock history assumed mythical proportions. Wilson allegedly intended SMiLE to rival the Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and change the path of popular music. But the tapes remained locked away, and the legend of the album grew while Wilson rehabilitated himself for the next two decades. After a European performance in 2004 drew excellent reviews, Wilson went back to the Hollywood studio the Beach Boys had used in the 1960s to rerecord the album he once described as a teenage symphony to God. The projects completion and its critical and popular acclaim rejuvenated Wilson in the same way that the masses viewed mythical California.41 SMiLEs music and lyrics include multiple references to western themes in what a Wilson biographer called [Wilsons] own American gospel from a Southern California point of view. According to lyricist Van Dyke Parks, the albums lyrical themes reflected an infatuation with the American dream and the American century depicted through an epic of the taming of the American continent, from Plymouth rock to Waikiki. The lyrics prove difficult to penetrate, but it seems clear that several songs aim to relate Wilsons American gospel through impressionistic images and evocations of a West that would resonate more with new western historians than with Frederick Jackson Turner.42 Colonization themes appear in Heroes and Villains, Roll Plymouth Rock, and Cabin Essence. Heroes and Villains serves as the albums overture and refers to Spanish colonization with charactersheroes and villainswearing easily distinguishable white and black hats. Roll Plymouth Rock chastises progress and the development of land with the comment Just see what you donedone to the church
Steve Leggett, review of Street Signs, by Ozomatli, allmusic, accessed 7 February 2008, http:// www.allmusic.com/album/street-signs-r693356/review; Steve Huey, Dengue Fever: Biography, allmusic, accessed 25 February 2008, http://www.allmusic.com/artist/dengue-fever-p559274 /biography; Cherny, Lemke-Santangelo, and Griswold del Castillo, Competing Visions, 374, 418; Matt Gross, All the World, Onstage, New York Times, 1 October 2006; and R. J. Smith, Theyve Got Those Mekong Blues Again, New York Times, 20 January 2008.
41 Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, SMiLE, Nonesuch 79846-2, 2004, compact disc; Dave Marsh and John Swenson, eds., The Rolling Stone Record Guide: Reviews and Ratings of Almost 10,000 Currently Available Rock, Pop, Soul, Country, Blues, Jazz, and Gospel Albums (New York, 1979), 26; Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 265; Billy Altman, For the Beach Boys, It Wasnt All Platinum, New York Times, 25 July 1993; David Leaf, liner notes, SMiLE; and Bernard Weinraub, Rebuilding Brian Wilsons Smile, New York Times, 12 September 2004. 42 David Leaf, The Beach Boys and the California Myth (New York, 1978), 96 and Van Dyke Parks quoted in Philip Lambert, Inside the Music of Brian Wilson: The Songs, Sounds, and Influences of the Beach Boys Founding Genius (New York, 2007), 261. 40

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of the American Indian! The song revisits Hawaiis conquest, and its lyrics include a prayer of Thanksgiving rendered in Hawaiian.43 These songs acknowledge the power of the West as a place and of westward expansion as an important theme in U.S. history but demand that the listener consider the cost and legacy of a globalnot just nationalconquest. In Blue Hawaii presents the Aloha State as a place of refuge, revitalization, and salvation. The songs narrator complains of heat, misery, and thirst and meditates about life after death. As he sinks into a dreamlike state, he envisions relief far away. Various parts of SMiLE relate to the four elements, and In Blue Hawaii fits into the water theme. On one level, water symbolizes the Pacific Ocean and the end point for the transcontinental journey; on another, Wilson said that it also depicts the mood of being in heaven. For Parks and Wilson, the nations westernmost and newest state symbolizes the Edenic refuge for body and souleven its arrival in heaven.44 Western mythology received another update in 2010 from Katy Perry, a Santa Barbara native who used the West and California as cultural touchstones thriving in popular music. Perry rewrote a gendered western myth in her Number One single California Gurls. The states name comes from a sixteenth-century romantic novel that describes a mythical island paradise ruled by beautiful Amazons. The Beach Boys recorded their wholesome homage to California women, California Girls, in the 1960s, but Perrys song empowers and hypersexualizes that image for the twenty-first century. In Perrys California, a place/Where the grass is really greener, the girls have Sun-kissed skin so hot/Well melt your popsicle, are Fine, fresh, fierce, have sex on the beach, and dont mind sand in their stilettos. Perry claims ownership of this western female icon, and although the image continues the tradition of exploiting a certain kind of appearance, this modern-day California gurl has power and agency. She might like to party with Kid Rocks Cowboy and might very well set the terms.45 (See Figure 3.) The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries showed the West, especially California, as a powerhouse in the wing of popular culture occupied by rock music. In assessing rock musics significance, one might heed the words of R.E.M.s Michael Stipe: Rock n roll is a joke, people who take it seriously are the butt of the joke. Or one might heed music scholars Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, who argue that music offers a window on culture and that millions of people around the world have come to know the United States through a song-map produced and consumed domestically and exported globally.46 That song-map reflects the Wests importance
43

Wilson and Parks, Heroes and Villains, Roll Plymouth Rock, and Cabin Essence,

SMiLE.
44 Wilson and Parks, In Blue Hawaii, SMiLE and Brian Wilson quoted in Lambert, Inside the Music, 282.

Katy Perry, with Snoop Dogg, California Gurls, Teenage Dream, Capitol Records 5099968460129, 2010, compact disc and Aquila, Images of the West, 420. Michael Stipe quoted in Larkin, ed., R.E.M., EPM and Starr and Waterman, American Popular Music, 4756.
46

45

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Figure 3. Cover art for Katy Perrys single California Gurls (2010). Perry sexualized an image that has circulated in rock music since a wholesome incarnation by the Beach Boys in the 1960s. Photo by Emma Summerton. Photo courtesy of EMI Music.

as producer, trendsettereven Californicatorand features many well-worn paths through iconic symbolism. But these days, the map guides us purposefully into the bad neighborhoods. Musical trends reflect a booming region constructing highways to new places ranging from Cal Punk to speed metal to grunge to the eclectic output of multiethnic bands to the mellowness of older songwriters. That map shows the enduring strength in the American mind of the mythical West and the mythical cowboy, not only on their own terms but as important foils to illustrate both aspirations and dreams not achieved. The song-map of the American West, much like the recent output of western history, leads to a region central to American identity that is still under construction. Despite the orange cones, lane closures, and detours, the map still points to powerful cultural common ground, where Moon Unit Zappa, Sheryl Crow, and Katy Perry are all California girls; where cowboys come from Mexico, Michigan, and New Jersey and can cook meth, ride steel horses, and fish for crabs in the Bering Sea; and where the Rawhide theme song can bring us all together.

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