(Photo: Phillip Maisel)
When I traveled to Nashville in 2023, I spent most of my time running in and out of country music-themed gift shops—or really, one gift shop in particular. Sure, I also perused the Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline T-shirts at their conjoined museums. But it was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum store that I haunted, stopping three separate times in five days, fixated on an Elvis Christmas ornament that I had to buy, first for Nick Cave and then return for myself. By the third visit, I was surprised they didn’t have my face printed near the cash register to alert the employees to my suspicious behavior! Christmas Elvis currently swings on my kitchen cabinets, rhinestoned cape thrown open, arms wide as if on the cross. That sacredness is mixed with the profane, his flared jumpsuit legs akimbo, crotch frozen mid-thrust. Elvis was the only souvenir I brought back from Nashville. However, many more are always on my mind, like a Shania Twain shirt I continually kick myself for not buying before it was snatched away on my second visit. It’s okay, though, Elvis is all I need.
Or so I thought, before I saw the best country music merch imaginable: Kitty Wells’s brunette ploof of a wig, covered root to tip with safety pins, as if Kitty abandoned caterwauling to those uncomfortable wooden pews in the hallowed church of country, the Ryman Auditorium, for sneering at posh arseholes in West London with Jordan. It wasn’t God who made honky-tonk angels, but he may have had a hand in creating this collision of prickly punk menace and country camp. Isn’t Kitty a proto-punk anyway with that feminist anthem?
The glorious Kitty Wells Wig from Derek McCormack’s The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide
Kitty isn’t the only Music City, U.S.A. icon given a Seditionaries twist. If Kitty isn’t your thing, a grey and fluffy Minnie Pearl wig dripping with $1.98 sales tags is another option. But there are more tourist-trap tchotchkes on offer. Gaudy Nashville snow globes are whimsically crammed to the brim with jangling safety pins. Those perilous pins also jab out from cheap Nashville coin purses, threatening any quarter thief with a trip to the hospital for a tetanus shot. Souvenir Grand Ole Opry tour tickets hang from a shimmering rhinestone necklace, while crumpled receipts from splurging on one of Nudie Cohn’s famed sparkling suits dangle from another. And speaking of rhinestones, those bedazzlers, appropriately brown, are also slapped onto a bunch of (fake) turds, alongside a smelly selection of dooky alternatives topped with Grand Ole Opry-branded collectible forks and spoons, a micro-crap-lection aptly named “Eat Shit.”
Where am I finding this (literal) shit? Well, these freaky fecal finds are part of a time-traveling 1950s fashion collection by Malcolm McLaren and Vivian Westwood, who opened a store called Hillbilly Heaven in an appropriately anal-like cave underneath the Grand Ole Opry. This doo-doo yee-haw collection was made for the London duo’s inspiration: a bunch of backwoods vampires that haunt the Grand Ole Opry, which they call the Shithole Opry because, instead of sucking blood, they suck shit right out of the asshole of Hank Williams, whose intestinal track also doubles as a runway for Westwood and McLaren. What the fuck am I talking about? Ok, fine, no, I’m not having a psychotic break just yet. These items—artworks, really—as well as their deranged backend backstory derive from writer and artist Derek McCormack’s turdtastic book, The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide, published by San Francisco gallery Cushion Works, which also held an exhibition of these wacko wares that closed earlier this month.
Installation view of Derek McCormack’s The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide at Cushion Works (Photo: Phillip Maisel; Courtesy of the artist and Cushion Works, San Francisco)
Not that it’s McCormack himself who tells this stinky story. Or not exactly. This constipated context comes courtesy of a foreword to this reported bestseller of a collector’s guide by Malcolm McLaren himself, penned in 1953. Never mind that McLaren is, unfortunately, deceased, and was also only seven years old in 1953. But whatever! Suspend your disbelief, for McLaren provides not only the lurid lore about his co-created crap collection, but also pitches provocative points like, “What is shit but baubles worn by bowels?” That dingleberry is an accessory! If you got it, flaunt it!
If a posthumous child-penned foreword about a “so punk, so Podunk” poop-inspired fashion collection featuring plastic logs covered in brown rhinestones isn’t enough of a brain twister, then take a gander at the following fecophilic faux-archival review of the Shithole Opry collection from McCormack channeling country music legend Hank Williams published by a fashion mag more immortal than Anna Wintour, Vampire Vogue. Instead of twanging out “I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry,” McCormack’s pseudo-Hank Williams, the “shitfaced Hillbilly Shakespeare,” acts as an unhinged (Shithole) Opry host by spewing out putrid promotional psycho babble with a felching twist, opening with (brown)eye-poppers like, “These are the stars of your show. This is Stringbean—suck his shithole! This is Grandpa Jones—suck his shithole! This is the Gully Jumpers—suck their shitholes!” More than merely hyping the “Golden age of shit at the Opry,” Williams/McCormack has a floater field day with poo puns like he’s a child stuck in the bathroom phase, in particular taking Debord through a flushing spin with “Shituationism” and “déturdement.” Admittedly, I’ve been delinquent in reading McCormack’s other books, like 2020’s Castle Faggot, which means I have to take fellow writer Nate Lippens at his word when he points out in Artforum that after being diagnosed with abdominal cancer in 2011, McCormack’s writings “have taken on even more experimental approaches with his signature black-humored body horror.” After my own bout with a nasty stomach bug last week, dry heaving and running to the bathroom after watching a shaky Nelson Sullivan video, I, on a very minor level, get it! And McCormack/Williams does refer to cancer overtly, when whipped into a concluding frenzy over a fantasized fatal attempt at gastrointestinal glamour: “I want a rhinestone suit shoved up my shithole, and I want the stones to bruise my bowels. I want a rhinestone shit to puncture my bowel and become an organ in my abdomen. I want some strange cancer.”
Like the above quote, this essay is so gleefully demented and scataologically singleminded that I find it a little frightening! And given I’m almost unshockable, this is a true feat of experimental writing! An award must be given! But how can you not be a bit taken aback when Williams sputters out head-wringers like this that read as if they were smeared on the walls of an asylum for the criminally insane in—what else?—poop!:
“What this shows is that shit’s the start of fashion and fashion’s the start of self—what’s the start of shit? Satan. Satan sticks shit in us—all of us aren’t shit eaters, but all of us shit it out, so how does it get in us but by devilry?”
HUH?!
(Photo: Phillip Maisel)
Look past the queasy imagery of punctured and bedazzled colons and Satanic shit, if you can, and what becomes clear in this Vampire Vogue review is the author’s deep (bow)well of knowledge about country music history (I mean, the Gully Jumpers?!) and its interconnected web of stores, from Hank’s own short-lived Hank and Audrey’s Corral to Ernest Tubb Record Shop. This is further reflected in the true star of The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide: the merch. Organized by genre, whether brooches, bracelets, or simply put, shit, the book lays out a litany of Hillbilly Heaven crap in a manner that is half illustrated exhibition checklist and half desperate collector’s guides for those who still believe they’re going to hit it rich with a Princess Diana Beanie Baby bear. While the collection may begin with a groan-worthy but still quite amusing image of those gum-destroying plastic Halloween vampire teeth ripped through with safety pins, a majority of the items tip their ten-gallon hat to Nashville’s country legacy, whether a Pee Wee King fan club pass transformed into a safety-pinned tie clip; a necklace made from a postcard featuring dour Mother Maybelle Carter; bracelets strung with $2 tickets from the Webb Pierce Hall of Fame; or a jewelry box paying tribute to Roy Acuff’s oddball music venue, the Dunbar Cave, dripping with brown jewel stalactites. Rightfully so, Minnie Pearl comes off as the Queen of the Shithole Opry, celebrated with her own dedicated collection that not only features fake shit affixed with Minnie’s famed price tag but carnations modeled after Pearl’s hat fashioned from crumpled pretty-in-pink toilet paper. If you don’t want to wear a toilet paper hat, Hillbilly Heaven also offers a roll of toilet paper jammed onto a prim pearl necklace. Fancy!
Like toilet paper and pearls, gewgaw gags abound, most concerning either the copious aforementioned fake turds or punky safety pins. While I love a good b.m. joke as much as anyone else who refuses to mature, the safety pins are what really get me: Richard Hell’s low-rent fix-up turned quintessential punk icon turned mall goth hack becomes sartorially and satirically interesting yet again when filling a souvenir teacup to the brim or stuffing a Grand Ole Opry pillow case (OW!). Although some are a bit more bespoke, such as the “Don’t Forget Music City U.S.A.” figurine of an index finger waving in the air, which McCormack dipped in a slick of brown nail polish, my favorite items–and the ones I find the funniest–require very little, if anything, from the artist. Most highlight just how berserk touristy merch really can be. Take the “Bedroom Mood-Meter” with two dials for his and hers, which features options like “If I’m not back in ten minutes—start without ME!” and “NO!” respectively, or the toilet ashtray that reads “I made a hit in Nashville.” I want one! Of course, fashion is theft, so why not take those schmaltzy Jesus-y church fans from the Ryman Auditorium, slap a Hillbilly Heaven label on them, and call it a day? It’s not as if any other intervention would improve upon their kitschy beauty. As McCormack/Williams writes of Minnie Pearl’s hats, “They’re perfect as they are.”
Installation view of Derek McCormack’s The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide at Cushion Works (Photo: Phillip Maisel; Courtesy of the artist and Cushion Works, San Francisco)
Advertised as “100s of pieces of shit priced & pictured,” The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide is a delightfully unbalanced achievement of camp world-making. It reminds me of the 2017 John Waters-inspired exhibition Lost Merchandise of the Dreamlanders held at La MaMa Galleria, in which fellow fanatics produced Divine dolls, born-to-be-cheap Connie and Raymond Marble Halloween costumes, and other childhood toys from their mentally unwell fantasies. The biggest difference, though, is that the artists in the LaMaMa exhibition worked with one foul well of inspiration—John Waters’s output—while McCormack came up with this collision course of Kings Road and Broadway (that’s Nashville’s Broadway) all on his own, with a little help from Nashville’s propensity for baffling branding, of course. Admiration for the atrociously abject aside, two questions do nag at me: Is McCormack, one of our northern Canadian neighbors, taking the piss out of Americans’ endless drive to sell absolute shit related to our most storied cities and their talents? Or is he producing a semi-sincerely reverential, if debased, ode to the holy trinity of country, punk, and filth? Maybe both. Either way, I’m saving up for that Kitty Wells wig.