When Americana doesn't mean American

vonn In the late 1980s, U.S. audiences met an odd musical group from Finland: the Leningrad Cowboys, stars of a deadpan-comic, not-quite-documentary, road-trip film called Leningrad Cowboys Go America. Once you got past the name, two other things made the Cowboys stand out–most immediately, their look. They sported black suits, white shirts, ties, and dark shades… but they were no Russo-Scandinavian Blues Brothers. Rather, their hair was pompadoured forward, to stiff points protruding about a foot from their foreheads, and on their feet they wore ridiculously elongated “winklepicker” shoes, curled at the toes. (A poster for the film shows members of the band lying on their backs side-by-side on a beach, sans pants and jackets; in those hairdos and shoes they resemble a series of empty parenthetical expressions–not a bad metaphor for the film’s plot, actually.) The second and more genuinely odd thing about them: their music. Back in their native Finland, their preferred genre had bee ... Read full article.