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So last week a friend unleashed a blizzard of hell on those of you who read these geoMp3 posts. Yes, both of you. It was the annual dust-up of my love for The Statler Brothers, and the first track was a pathetic little tale of some ethically questionable bloke who absconded to New York City to fulfill his dreams and left his lady back in Clay, Kentucky. Presumably to just rot there. Well, some night he gets a little whistful and calls her up with a bunch of weepy business and that’s the song. But I hinted then of things to come when I drew attention to the odd appearance of Jesus in this tale, and — guess what — Jesus is back muthafuckaz. He’s back in this week’s Statler Brothers track, “New York City,” an even more sordid little threnody, of sorts, that tries to portray New York City as a lair of amorality and evil. Okay, that happens a lot, right? But this song actually has the stones to blame the city while making it very, very clear that the protagonist himself (and very possibly his lady friend) is the blazing dirtbag.

You’ll quickly see how this week’s track is the inverse of last week’s. It starts with an unwelcome visit to the protagonist from his former lady friend around Christmas time:

She came to me shortly after Christmas,
Said she hated spoiling New Year’s Eve.
But the truth doesn’t wait to come in season
And what we had feared was now believed
She said she’d leave come Monday morning,
Catch a plane if I’d split the fair.
She had friends who lived in New York City.
She’d look them up and have the baby there.

Of course the girl feels apologetic (for spoiling the New Year’s fun of her short-lived friend). I mean, it’s her fault, right? But, okay, so they’re a couple of kids and they weren’t careful. It happens to the least careful and responsible of us. But what the fuck did New York City do? Nothing so far except house some friends and have good hospitals. That’s it so far, but nonetheless here comes the chorus:

And now she’s alone in New York City (New York City),
Living like … Lord, I wonder how.
An angel in hell in New York City (New York City),
But I can’t think about that now.

The implication is that somehow New York City’s, what, bigness is contributing to this girl’s hell? Why else mention it? And repeat it? New York can be pretty seedy, but what gall to suggest that the girl you knocked up and then didn’t help or bother to help support is having a rough go of it because she’s living with friends in New York City. Rather than, say, Clay, Kentucky or Old Timey Values County, Virginia.

But I’ll get off the New York City thing, because I quite frankly don’t care to defend it. There are other great cities in this country, and any one of them will have many fewer roving, ferile hipsters taking ironicartistic (it’s one word to them, see) pictures of each other puking at night clubs. NYC isn’t that great, is my point, and anyway there’s way more interesting stuff going on in this song.

Such as the last stanza:

Honey, will you tell him Bible stories
And give him all the love I never could?
And never tell him too much ’bout his daddy
‘Cause there’s not too much to say that’s good.
He’ll have to learn it all from his mother:
How to count and say his A-B-Cs.
But when you teach him prayers to say at bedtime,
Leave off “God bless Daddy,” won’t you please?

This is why The Statlers are so interesting to me. The first reaction here — especially from someone like me — is to rail about the hypocrity of even thinking The Bible should be pushed on this poor bastard when it was clearly not helping the adults in its life keep their shit together. Deadbeat dad is clearly a fuck up, mother a clearly subservient (“if I’d split the fair”? “If“?!) and passive slob who will be taken by countless father figures to come. In other words, The Bible ain’t nowhere to be found in these lives except in their evidently meaningless night-time prayers and this is a very, very common complaint among those who don’t just think religion is an amusingly pointless and fussy hobby but is actually bad for us.

But The Statlers — for all of their constant Jesus this and Jesus that — clearly expect the human condition to be only occasionally triumphant and transcendent. The rest of the time, they seem to argue, it’s nothing but struggle and regret and the gruelling process of reconciling the moral standard you shoot for and the one you actually attain. They clearly see a continuum from bad (Satan, big city values) to good (anything rural and old?), but their catalog is very full of people all along that spectrum. I should research and see how they treat true atheists (or are those “New Yorkers”?), but otherwise they seem to be fully aware and accepting of the fact that adults are weak, troubled, and sad. No matter how much they pray, no matter how many of those little foam wafers they choke down, and no matter how many gay marriages they disallow, adults are weak, troubled, and sad. And obviously I’m okay with that, because I feel the exact same way.

“New York City,” from 1970′s Bed of Rose’s.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.