The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

Author:Chuck Klosterman [Klosterman, Chuck]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

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There’s no way to engage with a song like “Achy Breaky Heart” without fixating on the incongruity between the magnitude of its popularity and the overwhelming consensus that it was terrible. This was not a case of backlash, where people started making fun of a song as a result of its omnipresence—people ridiculed “Achy Breaky Heart” the first time they heard it, as it was climbing the charts, while they were dancing to it. Written by a Nashville songwriter named Don Von Tress in 1990, the title of the song was changed to “Don’t Tell My Heart” when recorded by a country group called the Marcy Brothers in 1991. The Marcy Brothers altered the chorus, changing the words “achy” and “breaky” to the more formal “aching” and “breaking.” Their version tanked. A year after that, an unknown singer in California named Billy Ray Cyrus released his own cover of the track, arranged almost identically to the Marcy Brothers’ version but with the folksy syntax of the original composition. Its success was seismic.

“Achy Breaky Heart” became the first country single in almost ten years to sell a million copies. It hit not only number 1 on the country charts but number 4 on the Billboard pop charts, higher than the zenith of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It reintroduced the phenomenon of line dancing, where people in bars would align in parallel rows on the dance floor and simultaneously mimic the same steps. The song itself was a chemical compound of sonic guile: It was musically and lyrically repetitive, with every chord change and verse laser-focused on catchiness and immediacy. Its singer was often classified as a one-hit wonder, although that’s not true (Cyrus would ultimately have over thirty songs that cracked the charts). “Achy Breaky Heart” is sometimes considered a novelty tune, though that ignores its homogeneity (the song’s themes and construction were rote interpretations of most mainstream country music from the period). The only novelty was its hugeness. And what it was, really, was an example of what happens when culture moves in two opposing directions at the same time.

Rock, despite its supremacy, was ideologically moving away from itself. The idea of chasing fame and trying to look sexy was suddenly embarrassing. Grunge musicians openly disdained the posturing of longhaired arena rock, most notably its relationship to masculinity. Kurt Cobain appeared on MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1991 wearing a yellow dress. The band Mudhoney made of fun of singers they saw “shirtless and flexing” like “a macho freak.” But the public appetite for those qualities was still there, and country artists increasingly encroached upon the classic tropes of classic rock. Cyrus was a caricature of that migration: He wore his hair in a mullet, often performed in sleeveless shirts, and appeared to be more influenced by polished eighties power rock than the roots of country music. There was a level of calculated redness to his neck: It was erroneously publicized that he’d tried to cash a $1.6 million royalty check at his local bank’s drive-through window.

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