360 records from 2000: 36. Johnny Cash: American III: Solitary man

Country: US
Artist: Male solo artist
Career: recording since 1955
Language: English
Genre: Country

Fuck Rick Rubin and the Buddhist monk he ate and whose hair is growing out of his chin. Fuck him when he prided himself on bringing out the punk in hip-hop (what for?) by making it sound like bad heavy metal. Fuck him and the long line of artists who queue up to get no help at all and they thank him for it. I mean, look at this list I got from Wikipedia: Tom Petty, Black Sabbath, Trouble, Slipknot, Slayer, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Mars Volta, Jay-Z, Danzig, Dixie Chicks, Metallica, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Weezer, Linkin Park, The Cult, Neil Diamond, Mick Jagger, System of a Down, Rage Against the Machine, Melanie C, Audioslave, Sheryl Crow, The Avett Brothers. Does that impress anyone? Rubin is very lucky Johnny Cash took pity on him and took him in.

Now let’s get back to this record. I wish I could say I hated it, as it’s so contrived and manipulative (look, it really is) that it offends me. The only way it could be more manipulative is if it contained a cover of the lone (terrible) ballad in Trent Reznor’s oeuvre. But as I can’t hate it, I’m a sucker for a good manipulative pitch (I always well up when Charlie Chaplin buys flowers for the blind girl too), I wish I could love it for its traditional ballads and not for its covers of X-generation cell phone waving in stadium zeitgeist landmarks. No such luck, I’m not coming back to compare Cash’s version of ‘Mary of the wild moor’ with the Stanley Brothers version on their seminal Songs of Satan for our dear departed mother set. I’m into it for ‘I won’t back down’, ‘One’, ‘I see a darkness’ and ‘The mercy seat’ (and ‘That lucky old sun’ – no one does a bad version of that one, possibly the best song ever written). Yeah, I’m a sucker.

At its best: I won’t back down, That lucky old sun, One, I see a darkness, The mercy seat, Wayfaring stranger