COLUMBIA — For an album that started as a spontaneous living room jam/recording session, “Cowboys and Cocaine” turned into a pointed and witfully constructed carousel of songs that provoke both laughter and contemplation.
The collaborative album sprung from a friendship between the Columbia band Cocaine Fairies (Henry Luther, Ben Martin and Preston Kornharens) and Athens, Ga., songster-provocateur and “queer anarcho cowpunk,” Cowboy Kerouac. “Cowboys and Cocaine” offers nine tracks, which embody classic country and folk twang paired with lyrics that offer a critical eye to the classic tropes of Southern judgment and religious values.
“Everyone’s a Little Gay” jokingly points out how queerness moves through many spaces and challenges expectations for masculinity and expression, quippingly pointing out the internalized homophobia men often bury deep down and crack jokes about.
“Young Autistic Deadbeat Daddy Blues” is a ballad led by Cowboy Kerouac that pushes back on the traditional narrative country song with its tumbling journey to gay/neurodivergent lived experiences in a satirized and grandiose manner.
“Valley of the Vanishing Man” and “The Ashes of a Dyin’ Man (Burn it Down)” bring a more solemn tone to the album, conjuring impressions of decline of culture and erasure of things once held sacred. The resounding conclusion is one of both activism and authenticity.
Imbuing music with humor offers an “in” to creating a counter narrative for country music with the “Cowboys and Cocaine” collaborators.
Like other South Carolina native country/folk artists like She Returns From War and Yes Ma’am, Cocaine Fairies attempt to carve out a corner of the genre by placing their work in opposition to the stereotypes about country and folk music, making space for alternative ways of expression through a deeply nostalgic and quintessentially American genre.
{span class=”TextRun SCXW51009698 BCX0” lang=”EN” xml:lang=”EN” data-contrast=”auto”}Cowboy Kerouac is an Athens, Ga., “queer anarcho cowpunk” songwriter and performer who works to promote underrepresented communities in country and folk music. {/span}{span class=”TextRun SCXW51009698 BCX0” lang=”EN” xml:lang=”EN” data-contrast=”auto”} {/span}
“For me as an artist, I feel like if I’m going to create any kind of art it needs to be true to what I believe and think,” said Henry Luther, frontman and songwriter for the Cocaine Fairies. “For me, the songs I wrote for the album are just things I spend time thinking about, and it comes from an honest place.”
For Luther, Cowboy Kerouac and their bandmates, music is a useful tool for starting conversations and questioning the status quo of the culture they were born into.
Even though most of the tracks on “Cowboys and Cocaine” are boisterously lyrical and laced with catchy sing-along choruses, the album as a whole tends to err on the side of cultural criticism in a way that pokes fun at the moral hang-ups in traditional American culture and politics.
