And you’re looking at the most liberal motherfucker you know. “Let’s address the ‘voice of the heartland’ thing,” he told Paul Rees, whose satisfying biography, “Mellencamp,” came out last year. The image of such “real,” non-coastal Americans has become a useful cudgel for conservatives looking to depict their opponents as élitist buffoons Mellencamp finds this grotesque.
JOHN MELLENCAMP WINDOWS
Yet Mellencamp has also bristled at this characterization, which is largely rooted in fantasy: men gazing wistfully out the windows of vintage pickup trucks, watching dust blow by, listening to some parched and distant radio station. The musician, who comes from Indiana and began releasing records in the late nineteen-seventies, is known as a populist soothsayer, an irascible and unpretentious spokesman for hardworking, rural-born folks.
"My manager went in and was talking to the record company, and the president of the record company - who I won't mention his name, but you could probably figure it out - said, 'I don't know why Mellencamp insists on having these singing with him," Mellencamp said on The Howard Stern Show in 2017 (via Ultimate Classic Rock).In 2012, the singer and songwriter John Mellencamp was given the John Steinbeck Award, presented annually to an artist, thinker, activist, or writer whose work exemplifies, among other virtues, Steinbeck’s “belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes.” The grace of the marginalized is a long-standing theme of Mellencamp’s writing. What do those Mellencamp collaborators have in common? They're African-American, and a Columbia Records executive had a problem with that. Seven years earlier, the singer had one of the biggest hits of his career with "Wild Night," a duet with Meshell Ndegeocello. That song appeared on his Columbia Records album Cuttin' Heads, of which the title track found Mellencamp performing with Public Enemy rapper Chuck D. In 2001, Mellencamp released the single "Peaceful World," a duet recorded with India.Arie. And after building up a long career and selling millions of albums, he has enough clout in the music industry to call it out when sees that kind of behavior go down. With his work on Farm Aid and songs about the working class, it tracks that John Mellencamp doesn't care much for injustice or intolerance. The role instead went to some guy named Brad Pitt. According to a 2017 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Mellencamp says he turned down the role of hunky J.D. (Despite the parallels to his real-life, the film is not biographical.) Mellencamp's first film could have come earlier, and might have made him into a star.
JOHN MELLENCAMP MOVIE
Written by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and actually directed by Mellencamp himself, this 1992 movie is about a country music star whose life is a mess to heads back to his Indiana hometown to get his head on straight. His biggest acting work to date (among about four movies) is his film debut: Falling from Grace. While those musical stars successfully branched out into this other form of entertainment, Mellencamp resisted the lure of pursuing silver-screen stardom. As a photogenic guy with millions of fans, Hollywood came calling for John Mellencamp the way it has for so many other well-known musicians, from Elvis Presley to Dolly Parton to LL Cool J.
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