Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 86

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The Popular Culture Review

Prostitution is a frequent theme in ZZTop's music, but there is
little room for sexuality of any kind in the flat, desert-like world of
McDonald's poetry. Perhaps one reason is that sexuality implies
relationship and relationship means vulnerability, a luxury which is
unaffordable out on the hardscrabble. An exception is McDonald's
"His Side of It" which bears comparison with ZZTop's "She's a
Heartbreaker." Both works are about strong-willed, persevering
women who like living unconventionally, even dangerously.
McDonald's heroine is always "risking her neck along the edge,"
while ZZTop's heroine is "a lover 'n fighter, she’s a wild bull rider."
Sentimental love has no place in either of these works; one must be
fist-hard in order to survive the Texas landscape. As a consequence,
both women are driven by the pursuit of this hardness. McDonald's
heroine is intent on collecting "lava, / petrified stumps, anything
hard"; she symbolically gathers hardness about her, steeling herself
for survival in a world where she must make love "on a bed of flint
chips / ignoring snakes and indifferent trucks / somewhere beyond a
blur of thistles, / her skin hammered with sand like gold leaf."
McDonald's heroine, by making love on flint, metallizes herself
emotionally as well as physically, acquires an armor as protection
against the threat of vulnerability. The woman in "She's a
Heartbreaker" has an extraordinary ability to avoid involvement, to
keep her relationships shallow; she can break a heart and take all
the love she needs. She is "tuff as a boot and thin as a rail and she
could step to the cotton eyed joe." Being "tuff as a boot" or having skin
"like gold leaf' exemplifies the hardness which both McDonald and
ZZTop take delight in; such hardness is an attribute of beauty in a
world where remaining invulnerable is a necessary virtue.
For characters less heroic, less "tuff," than these two women or
Jesus or McDonald's lone rider, the pioneer impulse to move beyond
boundaries remains strong. There is still the need to exhibit a certain
self-reliance no matter how caught one is in the complex network of
human relations. However, existence outside these normal boundaries
is often restricted to a sort of temporary recreation, though it still
presents danger. In "Avalon Hideaway”, for example, the narrator
goes to what he calls "these backwoods lone star dregs" to gamble and
"hideout where I am my own best friend." The place provides a
haven against the monotonous legitimacy of closely regulated society,
and supplies a hint of exoticism and danger.