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Vice Blog

NEW YORK - COUNTRY SAMPLER INFOMERCIAL

Jim Blanchard's "Kooky Country" changed my life, and it might change yours. It's not quite the Harry Smith Anthology for 60s and 70s country, but it's close enough, and will totally school you. Besides being an awesome party album capable of getting a bunch of adroit New York types jumping around like those mental patients in the Cramps video, the album put Roger Miller's "My Uncle Used to Love Me but She Died" in context with his crazed hillbilly contemporaries. Mind-blowing. That guy's probably the best pop lyricist of our last century.

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Along with Miller, on

Kooky Country

you get Psychedelic country about "The Enchanted Forest" by Mohawk and the Rednecks, really funny anti-hippie songs by bitter old coots, space country by

Speedy West

, a hugely hilarious anti-Garth Brooks rant by

Hank (Bocephus) Williams Jr.

, and a really great anti-Bocephus tune called "A Pinhead Will Survive" by

Rev. Billy C. Wirtz

(a parody of Williams'

"A Country Boy Can Survive,"

which itself is an awesome anti-NYC song to torture your metropolitan friends with.) Another nice thing is there's nothing viciously evil about

Kooky Country

, (unlike a lot of Blanchard's compilations) so there's no psychic shock afterwards.

But on other Blanchard compilations, particularly Creepy Country Volumes 1 and 2 and The Devil Was Laughing at Me, you get your worst Deliverance-style suspicions about country music fulfilled on six or seven tracks--there really are a lot of racist, misogynist, misanthropic creeps in the backwoods of the USA (surprise), and their music is fairly horrifying. One of the catchiest, "Blow 'Em All Away," has the anonymous singer declare that he likes to kill gays, Arabs, and commies "to help keep America clean, gimmie a shotgun and an M-16!" But if you're going to make an honest compilation of the biggest weirdos in country music, you've gotta put the weirdo scumbags in too. If you don't have the stomach for it, just get Kooky Country, the hilarious Freedom Wins Again, and "Eat My Angel Dust"--required listening for anyone on planet Earth, and completely hate-free.