Boogie aahhhnnnn

There was a sort of interesting documentary on BBC4 last night about a genre of popular music called ‘Southern Rock’ — ie what we, back in the 1970s, called Southern Boogie — Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Bros, Charlie Daniels, and so on. It was interesting for mainly two reasons. First it reminded me of how truly, staggeringly, awful most of the music was — perhaps as much as 98 per cent of it. I am a catholic sorta guy when it comes to music, open to any genre, by and large. But this stuff, with its endless, interminable, identical guitar solos over the same three chugging chords and vacuous lyrics which veered between the swaggeringly and bone-headedly macho and the lachrymose and saccharine…oh, just awful.

In their pomp, there was no band more boring than the Allman Bros. Apart from Lynyrd Skynyrd, when they weren’t playing Sweet Home Alabama (which constitutes, almost by itself, the acceptable two per cent of southern rock). Has there ever been a band in any genre more incompetent than Black Oak Arkansas? The music in this doc was largely unlistenable unless it veered towards straight country, which it did from time to time with the likes of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils.

But more interesting, though, was the BBC’s take on the genre. They felt the need to pretend that it was music coming from the political left, presumably because they couldn’t bring themselves to praise a genre which was racist and reactionary. And so it was implied that the likes of Skynyrd and Charlie Daniels were in some way campaigning liberals, desperate to overthrow the redneck southern hegemony. Incredible. Charlie Daniels is, in fact, a gung-ho right winger every bit as a conservative as his horrible music; a vocal supporter of George W.