Country music, rednecks and paying dues
On last month’s debut episode of CMT’s celeb-reality competition “Gone Country,” (8 p.m. Fridays), mentor John Rich of the country duo Big & Rich sat his pupils around a dinner table to prepare them for the challenges to come. His charges are stars who have seen better days (Bobby Brown, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister) or who have yet to break through (Diana DeGarmo of “American Idol,” Julio Iglesias Jr.) -- all of them are on a quest to become country singers.
But rather than build them up for their foray into foreign territory, Rich tried a different tack. He played them a series of man-on-the-street interviews in which country fans expressed their, um, dissatisfaction at this latest crop of would-be crossover stars. For celebrities used to routine approbation, it was clearly brutal. Sisqo, best (only?) known outside the R&B; world for the 1999 incursion that was “Thong Song,” said humbly, “It felt like they chopped me a new one.”
On another network, this cruelty would be proof positive of the narrow-mindedness of the country audience, but “Gone Country” offers a neat inversion -- by systematically breaking down the performers who have signed on for the journey, the show asserts the primacy of the country point of view. It is superb propaganda.
And so has gone the show’s subsequent episodes, each one throwing participants into a rural (or rural-ish) task and slightly humiliating them in the process. First, they prepared and served a meal to Rich’s Musik Mafia crew, striking a note of subservience. They later cleaned horse stalls at the estate of country star Gretchen Wilson, washed cars and competed in a “hick chick” contest that included horseshoe tossing and watermelon-seed spitting (Brown excused himself, calling it “degrading”).
What “Gone Country” has largely lacked is actual music -- successfully delivering a country song, it seems, is more of a lifestyle accomplishment than an aesthetic one. (Music Row songwriters have been assigned to each star to co-write the song they must ultimately perform.)
Last week, the stars were brought to a Nashville children’s hospital to participate in music therapy with some patients. A young couple, fans of Brown and Sisqo, ask them to visit their baby, who isn’t expected to survive the night. After half an hour, the pair return to the group, evidently shaken and, if you believe Rich, primed for creativity. “It’s a mind-boggling experience,” he says. “It’s a very leveling experience, and you know what, you can take what you felt in there today and go put it into a song. That’s what country music allows you to do.”
“Gone Country” leads off CMT’s Friday night lineup of original programming, all of which reframes American society through a distinctly rural lens. Immediately after it is “Country Fried Home Videos,” a retread of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” with more pigs, though not as many as you might expect. Turns out not all acts of stupidity caught on video and submitted to CMT are redneck in nature -- in particular, no upbringing could explain away the woman who consented to be flung from a trebuchet onto a net many feet away.
The channel’s ideological coup de grace, though, is “My Big Redneck Wedding” (9 p.m. Fridays), which allows the country folk to strike back. CMT’s is a post-Foxworthy world, in which “redneck” is a denigration that can now be publicly embraced. And “Wedding” approaches its subjects in comfortable fashion, with slick editing and a distinct lack of judgment.
Each episode features a couple planning their wedding, invariably on short notice. The results can be comical -- flower arrangements in beer cans, mattress surfing as a reception activity, a farm auction for honeymoon funds -- but they are never short of sincere. And in a refreshing twist, the grooms are usually as engaged as the brides. The concepts that seem sui generis in isolation, though -- hay bales for seating, camouflage for clothing, arriving on horseback or on an ATV -- have been revealed to be much less so over the course of this season.
But what others might perceive as stereotypes, the couples revel in -- here, as in “Gone Country,” country mores and traditions come first. (And the rednecks here hail from locales nationwide. One episode takes place in the horse town of Norco in Riverside County.)
Host Tom Arnold -- survivor of at least one famously bad and possibly a bit redneck marriage -- occasionally pops into the frame to gently poke at the couples, but never with teeth. All together, “Wedding” is gentle, tender fun and easily the most endearing wedding show on TV. Dispensing with the fussing typically associated with the genre, it’s a corrective, a reminder that bridezillas and wedding planners aren’t the only means of getting hitched and that there are valuable lessons lurking where cameras rarely deign to tread.
