MUSIC; It's Off the Map, but It's His Country, Right or Wrong

ROBBIE FULKS doesn't sound entirely convincing when he allows, with Clintonesque caveats, that ''country is my first love, probably, at this point.''

This is a man whose first CD, ''Country Love Songs,'' features on the cover a black and white photograph of a greasy yokel, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, taking an ax to the love of his life as she cowers on the porch of some dismal shotgun shack. The most memorable song on his second album, ''South Mouth,'' is a hilariously obscene screed against Nashville. His fourth (there's a third, but it's too long a story to go into), has upbeat pop-flavored odes to the movie actress Jean Arthur and the pop star Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles and a memorable country antilove song entitled ''Love Ain't Nothing.'' It's a safe bet that Mr. Fulks is the only vaguely country performer to use the phrase ''the canon of amour exotique'' in his liner notes.

In truth, his first reaction to country was to make fun of it -- a tendency he hasn't completely lost. But in his own cranky, accomplished way, Mr. Fulks has become one of the most compelling voices out there in what he dismisses as ''the roots-cracker-fringe-roadhouse-Western-Beat firmament'' of indie-label, off-the-radio country. And his eccentric, only mildly remunerative career thus far offers clues to two lines of inquiry: What's the role of humor in country music? And is it good or bad that a guy who claims to be reading Jacques Barzun pledges fealty to the canon of Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens?

Mr. Fulks, 37, grew up in Virginia and North Carolina, enrolled at Columbia University in 1980, quit after two years to become a full-time musician and has lived in Chicago since 1983. (He lives with his wife, Donna, an actress, and two sons, 1 and 3, and has a 17-year-old son by an earlier relationship.) His first CD came out in 1996 to terrific reviews within the outside-the-lines world of off-brand country.

But even in the slapdash assemblage loosely called alternative country, his oeuvre is the subject of some dispute. Is he twang's Moliere or just an obnoxious wise guy with more brains than heart? Along the way, he has gathered a modest cult while creating a body of work that traverses the line between where country is the real deal and where country is a parody of itself.

In his blue jeans and blue sneakers, with a pack of Marlboro Lights in the pocket of his knit shirt and a modified buzz cut, Mr. Fulks doesn't affect either the aw-shucks earnestness of mainstream Nashville or the hip, ragged antistyle style of the alt-country world. Tall (6-feet-5), thin and diffident, he comes across as somewhere between a perpetual grad student who's never going to finish his dissertation or an aging ball player -- he looks a little like David Cone -- trying to hang on.

Mr. Fulks said he grew up on the folk music that his father, a teacher, listened to and then in New York gravitated to the smart, eclectic rock of artists like Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and Dave Edmunds. But in retrospect, he said, they were all deeply influenced by country music. After he joined the Chicago bluegrass band Special Consensus, the road led to Nashville, where he spent a fitful year or so trying to make it as a songwriter.

Mr. Fulks is more than a songwriter. He's a gifted guitarist who has taught for years at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago, he's a soulful singer with an expressive honky-tonk tenor, and he's a natural performer. It rings true when he says he's only truly comfortable when he's onstage or when he's totally alone. But what really sets him apart is his songwriting, which is one part artful country, one part artful sendup of country and one part a little of everything else.

In a genre wedded to the gospel of nice -- high school sweethearts, neighborly front porches, good dads, wise grampas -- Mr. Fulks takes a somewhat bleaker tack. It's sort of country meets David Lynch. There's ''Love Ain't Nothin,' '' which proclaims, ''They say love's for the stupid and the poor/ Well I'm here to tell you that's for doggone sure.'' Songs like ''She Took a Lot of Pills (And Died)'' and ''Papa Was a Steel-Headed Man'' (''He used to tell us stories from the Bible/ His homespun wisdom I still recall/ It was only as a man I came to find out/ That he didn't know much about anything at all'') are highly unlikely to make it to country radio. He plumbs the lower rungs of the food chain in ''The Scrapple Song'' and then sinks a bit lower with ''White Man's Burbon,'' a venture into bad taste and borderline racism that even he seems to acknowledge wasn't a great idea. To lighten things up, there are his old-time murder ballads.

But he's not much kinder to his brothers in alternative country. He mercilessly lampoons his own fans in ''Roots Rock Weirdos'' on his most recent album, ''The Very Best of Robbie Fulks.'' (It's actually unreleased material he ascribes to fictional albums like ''I Loathe My Fans,'' ''Adultery for Beginners'' or ''Hit the Hay Vol. 3.'') And the literate, droll journal he keeps on his Web site (www.robbiefulks.com) seems as bothered by the pretensions of the of the alt-country crowd as by mainstream Nashville.

It's definitely not all fun and games in Fulks-land. Songs like ''I Push Right Over'' and ''Goodbye, Good Lookin' '' on ''South Mouth'' or ''Tears Only Run One Way'' and ''The Buck Starts Here'' on ''Country Love Songs'' are marvelous blends of contemporary smarts and traditional country sounds.

Indeed, if country was hardly his first love (when he was 13, he was writing parodies of trucker songs, he has since learned to channel the good stuff with a particular bent toward the Bakersfield sound of Buck Owens. You can both do hard-core country and poke fun at it, but it's a delicate balance, and Mr. Fulks seems horrified at being seen as the guy who writes clever sendups of country music.

''I'm trying to get away from that,'' he said recently before a show at the Bottom Line in New York, adding that he plans to play it straight on his next CD. ''I don't want to become the Weird Al Yankovic of country.''

It's understandable that Mr. Fulks is wary of being seen as just a purveyer of satire or novelty songs -- particularly since his work does veer from wry humor to hard-core country to first-rate pop rock. But country music has always had a sense of humor, from the the sly wordplay of Hank Williams (think ''Jambalaya'') or the songcraft of Harlan Howard or Buck Owens, to the vaudevillian quality of the Grand Ol' Opry. It's easy to relegate much of it to the cornpone world of ''Hee-Haw'' or novelty acts like Minnie Pearl and Grandpa Jones. But, to cite just one example, there are few songwriters in any genre who used wit and humor as effectively as Roger Miller and the routine wordplay of country -- ''Next Time I Fall in Love (I Won't''), ''She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft)'' -- has always had an unpretentious sense of humor.

The question that's interesting about Mr. Fulks is whether his humor fits in the traditions of country or whether it's something different -- a hipster tossing brickbats from outside the tent rather than an antic insider like Mr. Miller. You can argue it round or flat. Country humor has usually been self-mocking but polite. (For an up-to-the-minute example, look for ''Meat and Potato Man'' on Alan Jackson's new album ''When Somebody Loves You.'') It hasn't been a game for snide wise guys. And even Mr. Fulks acknowledges that some people ascribe a chilly, superior tone to his work.

''I guess there's certain intellectual coldness some people see, but most of it's pretty good-spirited,'' he said of his music. ''It's polemical in good fun. I like being a provocateur. If something needs to be mocked, I'm glad to mock it.''

On the other hand, he's not the only country artist whose humor does not fit in any conventional box. And from Kinky Friedman or John Prine to Todd Snider, another contemporary singer with a smart-aleck edge, Mr. Fulks represents a contemporary vein of literate, satirical country that reflects how varied country has become. The last thing it needs is to become the province of sardonic, Columbia dropouts. But one reason alt-country/Americana is so interesting is because there's room for someone like Mr. Fulks.

Whether he even makes it semi-big (we're not talking 'N Sync here) is anyone's guess. Given his major-label break with Geffen in 1998 (the mystery third album) he came up with, ''Let's Kill Saturday Night,'' a brave but self-destructive venture into rock that probably set his career back several years. He's perfectly happy to turn out CD's too diverse to fit neatly into any marketing niche. And he's not much of a cheerleader for his most obvious commercial niche.

''Is it just that I'm naturally hypersensitive to twang currents in the air,'' he wrote on his Web site a while back, ''or is every writer in America daily grinding out articles about the coming alternative country revolution as though a sufficient tonnage of pulp makes the prospect less patently ludicrous?''

He votes for Buddy Miller as the king of contemporary country. But he's as likely to take shots at his peers than to celebrate them, casually knocking the most successful alt.country artist, Steve Earle: ''I think what he does is fine, but as far as self-absorption, he's the guy.'' But then if he's not too impressed with the bulk of the music he hears, what else is new?

''When you come down to it, 90 percent of anything is junk,'' Mr. Fulks said.