Of all musical styles under the sun, country music is perhaps the most misunderstood. What you hear on the radio and think of as country is further from country’s origins than the young punks snarling in their parents’ garages. The country what you hear on the radio is rather pathetic. The Nashville recording industry is not so much evil as terrible. Listen to new-traditionalist country on the radio and you hear one song after another with the same slick production and wholesome normative leanings. No one really ruffles feathers in Nashville and no one really goes out of style either, which makes Nashville the most stagnant, tightly controlled and profitable in the music industry. The most remarkable aspect of Nashville is how it’s able to create pop culture to that other half of America, the culture urbanites and most suburbanites don’t often see outside of an interstate rest stop, but they’re everywhere.

America is, geographically, a rural country. Drive 100 miles off the East Coast and you’re there—you’re in Nashville. You might actually be in western Massachusetts, central Pennsylvania or upstate New York but you’re suddenly reminded that your pop culture might possibly be the aberrant, immoral stuff of MTV, Maxim and Cosmo. This is Nashville music. Music for your grandmother.

On the other hand, my grandmother likes Liberace.

Nashville might be country music, but country music is not Nashville. Country runs along the lines of Woody Guthrie and social unrest, as well as the roots of Hank Williams’ lonesomeness and debauchery. In essence, country at its finest is aberrant, immoral and most of all socially conscious and progressive. George W. Bush might listen to Nashville on his Crawford, Texas ranch but he sure isn’t listening to The Waco Brothers.

The songs of Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens nearly define what it means to be punk long before there was ever a “rock” added to the end. Guthrie’s timeless Dust Bowl Ballads chronicles the plight of Oklahoma farmers moving to California to pick fruit during the Great Depression, as well as his Ballads of Sacco and Vanzetti, which immortalized America’s most famous failure of its justice system. Hank Williams added emotionally-charged songs with an air of misery and debauchery. Since then it’s led to rock ’n’ roll, punk rock and finally alt-country if you will.

Traditionally described as the bastard child of Johnny Cash and The Clash, alt-country is as brooding as it is loud and drunk on Old Crow. Originally showing its roots in bands like The Mekons and Camper Van Beethoven, Uncle Tupelo gave alt-country its first real shot in the arm with its literate reverence and charging guitars spawning two of the most respected and innovative songsmiths of today: Son Volt’s Jay Farrar and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Other hallmark groups like Mekons fronter Jon Langford’s The Waco Brothers, Robbie Fulks, erstwhile Whiskytown singer/songwriter Ryan Adams and the Old 97’s highlighted the alt-country movement in the early ’90s, not out of the sake of canonization or hybridization, but out of the exhumation of the American persona so perfectly reflected in the works of Guthrie, Williams, Haggard and Cash.

However, the American persona doesn’t seem to be as fervent as it was during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War. Alt-country rose out of the Reagan and Bush years only to sputter and lay victim to the rap-rock and teeny-bob of Clinton’s second term. But, as The Waco Brothers sing, “Bad times are coming around again,” it feels as if alt-country seems poised for another reincarnation as the W. Bush years seem to check in for another term.

Now free from the corporate grip of its demise (and always existing outside of Nashville) a new crop of whiskey-breathed rockers are ready to tear through live sets at hell-bent speed just to scream that misery loves company and all the new friends she got. New albums due from the Old 97’s and Wilco this summer are slated to take a turn back to the more organic and rootsy musical musings of their past. Still, alt-country is all but a genre responsible for its own death and in that process, its own rebirth. From the tomb to the womb, I can’t wait to listen to actual country music again.