Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I've really dropped off the map with this blog in recent years due to a few major life circumstances, including miscarriages and job loss. I figure I will record my journey in a series of blog posts, poems, and short essays as I attempt to navigate my issues and write more for the blog. I have been continually working on academic articles and chapters along with editing fiction and hopefully working on my own book proposals for an edited collection and for a possible music/film book. I always have so many ideas, but my follow-through has been lacking.  Here are my proposals and goals for 2024: 1. Rework my Green Day 33 1/3 proposal in hopes of publishing some of it. Perhaps, I might put it on the the blog like I did with my Drive-By-Truckers Southern Rock Opera attempt a few years ago. 2. Write and publish a CFP on my favorite television show of the past few years for a possible edited collection. 3. Finish the two chapters for edited collections that I am currently working on. 4....

The final three songs focus on the plane ride and subsequent crash of both bands: the fictional one and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Cooley's “Shut Up and Get on the Plane” is a premonition of what is to come, as well as an excoriation of those that fear life and do not want to live it to its fullest. He sings, “We've been this close to death before; we were just too drunk to know it / Guess the price of being sobers being scared out of your mind.” Cooley dares listeners to get on the plane because death is inevitable and there is no use in complaining. The adventure the band is on trumps all. Even though the narrator would like to go home and lay around, he is a working man and needs to keep on moving. This theme continues through Cooley's songs; they revolve around men of action who move through less specific worlds. They carry on because they have to, despite the odds, not concerned with the specifics of history, but moving through a more generalized world. He writes songs for...

          Act Two opens with Hood's “Let There Be Rock,” which not only alludes to AC/DC's song of the same name but addresses how both Betamax Guillotine and Hood grew up in the shadows of great bands. While he never saw Lynyrd Skynyrd, he lists the bands he did see, while the band works up a rock frenzy. Like most songs that purport to introduce the power of rock music, “Let There Be Rock” attempts to be a blistering example of the form, yet Hood's clever, yet straightforward, lyrics temper it.               The narrator could be any young music fan growing up in America during the 1970s, listening to music, doing drugs, and drinking to excess. He drops acid at Blue Oyster Cult, is pulled over with weed and booze, drinks vodka and almost dies. He juxtaposes each binge with his experiences seeing classic bands. Both scenarios are equally important to his future quest at being a rock god, or at least, writing about...

                         Hood's next group of songs is firmly rooted in the historical and very personal south and centers on Hood’s concept of the “duality of the southern thing.” “Birmingham” describes the unemployment and stresses of living there and trying to maintain an authentic identity. “The Southern Thing” is told from the perspective of a proud man who realizes the complexities of the south from General Lee to Martin Luther King, juxtaposing different ideas that play into Hood’s concept of southern duality. Hood has continually written more personal songs about the south and his identification with it throughout his career.             “The Three Alabama Icons” is set in hell and presents the history of three famous Alabama figures, prefiguring his later look at other historical figures, especially The...

The idea for the album formed in a conversation between Hood and former bassist, Earl Hicks, in which they discussed writing a semi-autobiographical screenplay about their youth in the south and the plane crash that almost ended Skynyrd by taking the lives of vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and backup vocalist Cassie Gaines in 1977.   Their chartered plane, a 1977 Convair CV-300, converted from a CV-240 ran out of fuel and crashed in Gillsburg, Mississippi near the end of a flight from Greenville, South Carolina, where they had performed at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick, pilot Walter McCreary and co-pilot William Gray were also killed in the crash, while 20 other people survived, including guitarists Allen Collins and Gary Rossington. Bassist Leon Wilkeson, keyboardist Billy Powell, and drummer Artimus Pyle, who crawled out of the wreckage with members of the road crew, were also injure...