Recently my wife pointed out that I’m something of a hypocrite.
“Why do you play a cowboy game when you hate country music?”
It was a quiet Saturday morning. We were sitting on the couch, together but lost to our own interests. She looked up at the screen from time to time, usually whenever there was a lot of neighing. A horse will bring my girl to the yard, or at least the TV.
Her question snapped me out of half-dreams in which I’m a rugged outlaw who stops for little old ladies but shoots people dead for raising their voice. I reined up—literally—and looked at her. “What?” I asked, even though I’d heard her clearly. Sometimes the only valid response is to question the question itself.
It didn’t go down any easier the second time.
“Those are not the same things!” Beyond the bare facts—Red Dead Redemption, and its sequel, are self-evidently awesome, and country music is clearly not—the Western has nothing to do with country music. Other than maybe country music wishing it was a Western.1
This was one of those mild disagreements doomed to go unresolved, one that could easily spiral into something bigger if we decided to be stupid about it. Fortunately, we’ve been married long enough to know some things are Just Not Worth It. Most things, in fact. We both made our stances clear and returned to our separate business.
The question lingered, invading my thoughts like one of those nasty ear worms in The Wrath of Khan. The idea that I’d gotten well into my 40s harboring different opinions on two things that were maybe actually the same kinda bothered me. And if that was true, what else was I wildly inconsistent about? Is Han Solo not the best part of Star Wars? Is playing pretend elf games actually not very cool? Is Steve Rogers’s most important relationship Peggy Carter, not Bucky Barnes?
As I sit here, writing this several weeks later, I still don’t have a definitive answer. What does it mean to love Westerns but hate country? Nothing. As Walt Whitman wrote, “Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Even though it’s taken an outsized portion of this long intro, the validity of country music is not on the docket. What this piece is actually about is why Westerns have such a hold over me. Why do I love them so much?
My wife wasn’t totally wrong about the country music thing. Westerns evoke a bygone era of long horizons and complete self-sufficiency, unto the point of dispensing death. Those are the things that attract me. Well that, and obviously the whole outlaw thing.2 But apart from those huge exceptions, Westerns do share some DNA with country music. I didn’t recognize it until I started thinking about why I’m a city boy who also loves Westerns, which minimally involve horses, a very country kind of thing.
