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Akon: Taking the "honky" out of honky tonk

6:39 p.m. · April 3, 2008 · by Jim Allen

Always good for a surprise or two, Akon has informed the world at large that he's about to make inroads into a new market by going country. He told the BBC "I'm about to break into a genre that no black artist, producer, or writer ever broke into, ever." Um...we certainly don't want to be the first to call hogwash on the Ake, but...

1) For anybody with a good pop-cultural memory: Charley Pride? Ray Charles? 

2) For those with fair-to-middling memories: Cowboy Troy? Solomon Burke's Nashville album from about a year-and-a-half ago?  

3) Even for those with the attention span of a fly: Snoop Dogg's "My Medicine," from about a week ago? Just sayin'....

Meanwhile, perhaps most interesting of all is the fearless boundary-smasher's implication that the deed has already been covertly accomplished: "I'm Goin' in with an alias, and I already got my first hit record." The mind of the casual country-chart observer reels with the possibilities. Does Shooter Jennings have a secret life? Is there something Carrie Underwood hasn't been telling us? If Akon had made this announcement a couple of years ago, it would have gone a long way toward substantiating certain theories we've long held about Trace Adkins' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk."