Time Well Spent: Lou Waxman on the Nashville Soundtrack

Lou may have stopped watching movies, but he has not stopped reading about them.  Even collections of movie reviews.  In the last few years, Lou has read all four volumes of Roger Ebert’s Great Movies series.  That was hundreds and hundreds of pages.  He also read Farber on Film:  The Complete Film Writings of Manny Faber from Library of America, which was a neat thousand pages.  Lou still needs to track down James Agee and Andrew Sarris.  Fuck Leonard Maltin.  Hack.

Looming above them all is Pauline Kael.  Lou read every single collection of her reviews that was ever published.  This accounts for thousands and thousands of pages.  One wonders why Lou can sit and read all these words about film, but can’t sit down for a couple of hours and actually watch a movie.  Screens.  Lou thinks he hates screens.  In any case, reading Kael is an absolute pleasure.  She is one of the great non-fiction writers.  (Sidebar:  The best non-fiction book of the last twenty-five years and on Lou’s shortlist for all-time if Geoffrey Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage:  Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence.  It is on the level of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.  A pure delight.)  Kael is awonderful stylist.  And funny.  Full of hot takes.  Lou finds that he loves female non-fiction writers.  Kael, of course, but also Joan Didion, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson, Rebecca Solnit.  The list is long.  Some of Lou’s favorite poets are also women.  Elizabeth Bishop heads the list, but also Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Anne Waldman.  Women write a great short story.  Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Tillie Olson, Katherine Ann Porter are just the ones Lou read in college that have stayed with him.  Just as there are few great women comedians in the wild (according to Norm MacDonald), there are very few great women novelists.  Lou is aware that he is a pig.  Lou reads like a hog, and women novelists are not to his taste.  That said, at the top of the heap and one of the best of all-time, regardless of gender, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is wonderful as well.  

In any case, Lou has read a ton about movies.  But one of the movies highest on his to-watch list that he might actually sit down and watch is Robert Altman’s Nashville.  Lou can’t believe he did not see it back in the day when he watched movies.  Lou has read a ton about it.  Pauline Kael’s review of the film is one of her signature essays.  Right up there with her essay on Bonnie and Clyde and Last Tango in Paris.  In some respects, Lou feels like he has seen Nashville.

So, Lou was happy to see the soundtrack to Nashville in the two-dollar bin.  Lou knew all about the fact that Altman encouraged the actors in the film to come up with their own songs for the movie to be performed in character.  Kael makes a big deal about this in her essay.  This myth has been largely debunked as many of the songs were written well before the movie was filmed.  Print the legend, dude.  It makes for a good story and fits in with the loose, improvised nature of Altman’s directing style.  Now, Lou has not seen the film, but he has listened to the soundtrack, and he would put the soundtrack up there with The Rutles and This Is Spinal Tap.  It is pure genius.  The Nashville soundtrack is a step above that of these great mockumentaries.  They are merely parodies played for laughs.  The songs in Nashville are satires that criticize not only the Nashville music industry but also America itself.  Lou hopes the song “200 Years” plays on July 4, 2026, all across this great nation.  Lee Greenwood could do it.  Of course, all these songsalso function as parodies, but to be honest, to Lou’s untrained ear almost all country music sounds like a parody.  This shit cannot be serious.  There are exceptions like Johnny Cash and Townes Van Zandt, but by and large country music cannot be parodied because their reality is already so ridiculous and silly.  The same goes for a lot of music when you come to think of it.  Folk, surf, punk, funk, heavy metal, rap, goth, death metal, bubblegum pop etc, etc.  Just about all of it is silly at its core.  Plenty will disagree with Lou and speak of popular music as a serious and important art form.  Lou finds that it is just plain, old fun.  Then again Lou finds reading Pauline Kael to be fun.  Reading her reviews is like talking with her at a bar about movies.  It doesn’t matter.  It just passes the time.  Some of this shit is time well spent more than others.  Nashville and its soundtrack are a couple of those things.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

Kael on Nashville:  https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/nashville-review-pauline-kael/

Pitchfork on the Nashville Soundtrack:  Revisiting the Strange and Wonderful Soundtrack to Robert Altman's Nashville | Pitchfork

More on the Soundtrack:  In Robert Altman's Nashville, music soothes, satirizes, and distracts

The Academics Weigh In:  (PDF) “You Don’t Belong in Nashville!”: Politics, Country Music, and the Reception of Robert Altman’s Nashville

— Lou Waxman