The New Weird America of Amanda Petrusich's It Still Moves  Don
your hyphens, hipsters!  Justin Tubb, son of famed country star
Ernest Tubb, once described Americana as "the music of the
working man, the farmer, the trucker, the factory worker."
Today, you'd have to add "the hipster" to that list. With It
Still Moves, Amanda Petrusich shows us what the current indie-
folk scene and its record-collecting twenty- and
thirtysomethings—which she labels "the new, weird, hyphenated
America"—have to do with classic American folk: what bands like
Iron and Wine and Califone have inherited from that tradition
and what they've thrown away. To do all this, the 28-year-old
Pitchfork scribe and Paste editor hit the road, heading south in
her beat-up Honda Civic to Memphis, Nashville, and Appalachia to
find the seeds of folk and the birthplace of rock 'n' roll.
Heady stuff, to be sure. Fortunately, Petrusich's evocative
language is loaded with none of the cynicism and snarkiness so
favored by many of her rock-crit peers. Sh