FEATURE: Shade of Red, White and Blue: This Country of Ours: Fighting Against the Genre’s Culture Wars

FEATURE:

 

 

Shade of Red, White and Blue

IN THIS PHOTO: Country artist Morgan Wade 

 

This Country of Ours: Fighting Against the Genre’s Culture Wars

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I want to quote quite liberally…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks, has become NashVegas, a strip lined with nightclubs named for Country stars/PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Gilbertson/VII for The New Yorker

from an article in The New Yorker from July. It talks of the culture wars happening in the genre. How Nashville is transforming. The article look at how Tennessee’s government has turned hard red (Republican). It is a shame but, with a new set of outlaw songwriters challenging Music City’s conservative ways and a scene proliferated by dudes, bros, and white men, things look positive for the future. I will get onto the fact Country has been in the spotlight recently due to protest songs and how some male artists have been making headlines due to seemingly far-right and small-town mentality ideas expressed in songs. If there is a new wave of artists challenging the anti-progressionist ways and male-heavy scene, figures from earlier in this year show how stations playing country still seem to be against female artists:

“A new study solidifies the belief that country radio has long been reluctant to play songs from women in general — and almost never plays two women artists back-to-back.

The study, by Jan Diehm of The Pudding and Dr. Jada Watson, is titled They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio: Examining Back-to-Back Plays by Gender, Race and Sexual Orientation. It pulls from the daily logs of 29 country radio stations in large market areas, analyzing 24-hour programming in each month of 2022 to see how often listeners of those stations could expect to hear back-to-back songs by women, artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists. Among the country radio stations included in the study were KKGO (Los Angeles), WUSN (Chicago), KKBQ and KILT (Houston), WKDF (Nashville) and WMZQ (Washington, DC).

The study found that at these stations, songs from women country artists were played back-to-back an average of 0.5% of the time. In data that is consistent with SongData’s findings regarding daypart programming, the majority of these back-to-back plays (46.1%) occurred in overnights (between midnight and 6 a.m.), while 19% were played during evening hours (between 7 p.m. and midnight) — time periods with lower listenership. In the intro to the study, an anecdotal sample is given, noting that if one had tuned into a particular (unnamed) station at 8:35 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2022, it would have taken over nine hours before hearing two consecutive songs from female artists.

“If you listen to this station non-stop from midnight to 11:59 p.m. today, you’d likely only hear three back-to-back songs by women, compared to 245 from men,” the report states.

“We’ve heard for many years that songs by women should not be programmed back-to-back — as we say in the study, it’s been part of industry rhetoric since at least the 1960s and was even written into programming manuals,” Watson tells Billboard via email. “But it’s one of those issues that is spoken about anecdotally and now we have this study to show not just that it’s true, but just how bleak it is for women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists at radio.”

The new report builds upon Watson’s earlier work, including her March 2021 study, Redlining in Country Music: Representation in the Country Music Industry (2000-2020), and an updated version released earlier this year.

“As a listener, it’s pretty easy to pick up on the bias in country radio when you can spend 20 minutes in your car and go without hearing a single song by a woman, let alone back-to-back songs by women,” Diehm tells Billboard via email. “So, I was expecting the worst, but it was so much worse than that. My hometown station is San Antonio (KCYY-FM), the station we used in the intro of the piece — [and] you know it’s bad when you start to think of a station that plays women back-to-back at 0.99% as one of the ‘better’ stations”.

It is no secret that Country music is one of the slowest to diversify and embrace the modern world. In terms of its racial breakdown and attitudes towards Black artists, Country has had a big problem with race and moving forward. In a lot of ways, it is still white and male-dominated. With big artists in its midst popular in spite of allegations of racism against them, things are slowly starting to clean up. Books like Marissa R Moss’s Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be illuminates the journeys of numerous female artists trying to make a break in a genre set up for and focused on men. In spite of small movements forward in recent years, there is still a huge issue with sexism and misogyny. A genre that has had to battle those accusations in years past, that bro mentality was called out back in 2014 here. Have things moved on?! A lot of women in Country have transformed and stepped more into Pop. The likes of Kacey Musgraves and Taylor Swift began in Country and have since become more commercial and mainstream. If there are more Black artists in Country music than there has been, and there is a tiny shift in terms of the sexist and white men-only stricture, there has been a recent uncomfortable look at politicians and right-wing attitudes in Country.

North Carolina artist Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond caused some controversy and storm. Even if there is some empathy to his lyrics and agenda, the song has been mobilised and supported by those on the right. Problematic lyrics about welfare and taxation means that what could have been an inspiring and uplifting song is seen as one with a political agenda. One that has quite an ugly surface. Populist outrage is returning to and dominating the charts. The protest song is very much back. At a time when there is so much gun violence and senseless murder in the U.S., coupled with climate change and people struggling to make ends meet, right-wing music is dominating. A genre that should be tackling vital and important themes instead. If an attack against perceived dangerous wokeism or a reaction to growing dissatisfaction and anger among the working-classes, there is an ugliness coming from white men in Country. Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town, as you might expect from the title, is very smalltown and anti-urban. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote for The Guardian in July, there is this delusional attitude and toxic narrative coming from conservatives and the far-right:

“Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.

That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.

Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.

Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town

“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”

If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost”.

There is a progressiveness. Red blood, a red heart. Blues and blue politics. A white heat against the white dominance and ideologies. The American flag of Country music being repainted and defined. Singer-songwriter Allison Russell organised the Love Rising benefit concert. It was established to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ residents. their Republican government banned drag acts anywhere near children could see them. The supergroup boygenius protested against this at one of their concerts. The benefit gig pulled together legends of Country/Blues music new and older like Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard (Alabama Shakes), Julien Baker (boygenius), Jason Isebell and Amanda Shires.

IMAGE CREDIT: Love Rising

Maybe many of these performers can be seen as Americana. That is a wider term given to any artist outside of Country music - whose lyrics and sound could be seen as Country. To show that sexism is still alive in Country, Amanda Shires’ hit, Cover Me Up, was covered by Morgan Walley. Many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he had written it. This corporate machine that is running Country radio is still very much in favour of white men. Even so, there are shades and flickers of light and colour emerging – against the beer-stained, gun-owning and male-dominated scene that has been dogging Country for decades. I want to get to that piece from The New Yorker. I will not bring it all in. Suffice it to say, there are some passages that make for particularly important reading. It starts with details about that incredible recent benefit concert:

“On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.

The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. residents—including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. Stars had texted famous friends; producers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone—only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town.

IN THIS PHOTO: Brittany Howard/PHOTO CREDIT: Alysse Gafkjen for She Shreds

The doors were about to open. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars—but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it.

Shires, overwhelmed by the crush backstage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she poured each of us a goblet of red wine. A Texas-born fiddle player who is a member of the feminist supergroup the Highwomen, she had forest-green feathers clumped around her eyelids, as if she were a bird—her own form of drag, Shires joked. Surrounded by palettes of makeup, she talked about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, something that her grandmother had refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. Shires’s adopted city was in peril, she told me, and she’d started to think that more defiant methods might be required in the wake of the Tennessee legislature’s recent redistricting, which amounted to voter suppression. “Jason, can I borrow you for a minute?” she called into the anteroom, where Isbell was hanging out with Mercy. “The gerrymandering—how do we get past that?”

“Local elections,” Isbell said.

“You really don’t think the answer is anarchy?” Shires remarked, bobbing one of her strappy heels like a lure.

“Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re gonna win,” Isbell said, mildly, slouching against the doorframe. “You bite somebody’s ear off, you’re probably gonna beat ’em. And if there are no rules—or if the rules keep changing according to whoever won the last fight—you’re fucked. Because all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Hey, this guy’s a really good ear biter. Let’s make it where you can bite ears! ’ ”

That night, the dominant emotion at “Love Rising” wasn’t anarchy but reassurance—a therapeutic vibe, broken up by pleas to register to vote. Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke; stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” showed up via Zoom. The folky Americana singer Joy Oladokun, who had a “keep hope alive” sticker on their guitar, spoke gently about growing up in a small town while being Black and “queer, sort of femme, but not totally in the binary.” Jake Wesley Rogers, whose sequinned suit and big yellow glasses channelled Elton John, sang a spine-tingling version of his queer-positive pop anthem “Pluto”: “Hate on me, hate on me, hate on me! / You might as well hate the sun / for shining just a little too much”.

One of the worst shifts had followed the 2003 Dixie Chicks scandal. At the time, the group was a top act, a beloved trio from Texas who merged fiddle-heavy bluegrass verve with modern storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, just as the Iraq War was gearing up, the lead singer, Natalie Maines, told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. Bush. The backlash was instant: radio dropped the band, fans burned their albums, Toby Keith performed in front of a doctored image showing Maines alongside Saddam Hussein, and death threats poured in. Unnerved by the McCarthyist atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered at an indie movie house for a sub-rosa meeting of a group called the Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It was kind of like an A.A. meeting—‘Oh, y’all are drunks, too? ’ ”

But a meeting wasn’t a movement. For the next two decades, the entire notion of a female country star faded away. There would always be an exception or two—a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the spitfire Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” became a hit—just as there would always be one or two Black stars, usually male. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew lots of talented women his age who had found the gates of Nashville locked. “Some of them sell real estate, some of them write songs,” he said. “Some sing backup. None became stars.”

Knowles felt encouraged by Nashville’s new wave, which had adopted a different strategy. Instead of competing, these artists collaborated. They pushed one another up the ladder rather than sparring to be “the one.” “This younger generation, they all help each other out,” he said. “It feels unfamiliar to me.”

Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.

People I spoke to in Nashville tended to define Americana as “roots” country, as “progressive-liberal” country, or, more recently, as “diverse” country. For some observers, the distinction was about fashion: vintage suits versus plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label had always been a grab bag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel to blues, Southern rock, Western swing, and folk. But the name itself hinted at a provocative notion: that this was the real American music, three chords and the historical truth.

Since 2000, the proportion of women on country radio has sunk from thirty-three to eleven per cent. Black women currently represent just 0.03 per cent. (Ironically, Tracy Chapman recently became the first Black female songwriter to have a No. 1 country hit, when Luke Combs released a cover of her classic “Fast Car.”) Country is popular worldwide, performed by musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of rural people everywhere—but you’d never know it from the radio.

All parties agreed on only one point: you couldn’t ignore country radio even if you wanted to—it drove every decision on Music Row. As Gary Overton, a former C.E.O. of Sony Nashville, had put it in 2015, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Not enough had changed since then, even with the rise of online platforms, like TikTok, that helped indie artists go viral. Streaming wasn’t the solution: like terrestrial radio, it could be gamed. When I made a Spotify playlist called “Country Music,” the service suggested mostly tracks by white male stars.

Another song performed that night had a different feel: “Bonfire at Tina’s,” an ensemble number from Ashley McBryde’s pandemic project, a bold concept album called “Lindeville,” which featured numerous guest artists. The record had received critical praise but little radio play. During “Bonfire at Tina’s,” a chorus of women sang, “Small town women ain’t built to get along / But you burn one, boy, you burn us all.” In its salty solidarity, the song conjured the collectives emerging across Nashville, from “Love Rising” to Black Opry, groups that embodied the Highwomen’s notion of the “crowded table.” You could also see this ideal reflected in “My Kind of Country,” a reality competition show on Apple TV+, produced by Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, that focussed on global country acts and included the gay South African musician Orville Peck as a judge, and in “Shucked,” a new Broadway show with music by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which offered up a sweet vision of a multiracial small town learning to open its doors. Mainstream country radio hadn’t changed, but all around it people were busily imagining what would happen if it did.

McBryde, who grew up in a small town in Arkansas, had spent years working honky-tonks and country fairs, a journey she sang about in the anthemic number “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” She was a distinctive figure in mainstream country, a brunette in a sea of blondes, with arms covered in tattoos. When we met backstage one night at the Grand Ole Opry, she was playing in a memorial concert for the character actor and pint-size Southern sissy Leslie Jordan, who had created a virtual crowded table during the pandemic, through ebullient Instagram videos, then recorded a gospel album with country stars such as Parton”.

If Country music is diversifying – more artists of colour played on radio; fewer traditional blonde women joined by other types of artists, many with tattoos; a slight move towards gender parity, different backgrounds and politics mixing alongside one another -, recent news and songs still show that there is this ugly streak running through. Fortunately, like heroes riding through on horseback, Music City’s hard red and sexist, bro-rules-all sounds are being challenged and combated. Slowly but surely Nashville is changing. If many of Country’s women have moved to other genres, there is still a bright and hugely talented new wave and existing legends – Megan Moroney and Jessie James Decker among them – who are adding diversity and different voices, even recent playlists of new Country songs is largely white men. There are inspiring artists like Maren Morris who, rather than quitting the scene, are calling for change and necessary, overdue progression. MSNBC explained more in a feature from earlier this month:

“What does it mean to quit a music genre? That’s what many of Maren Morris’ fans are asking themselves in the wake of the singer’s announcement in a recent Los Angeles Times interview that she is “getting the hell out” and “leaving” country music. Her explanation, essentially, is that she is fed up with the country industry’s institutional racism, gender discrimination and tolerance for anti-LGBTQ+ voices, along with the blowback she has received for speaking out against these problems. It’s an eye-catching renouncement given Morris’ status, but there’s also a subtlety that may be getting lost. At the heart of this news lay much thornier questions about what country music as a genre even represents in the modern era. Can you quit it like a bad habit or, as Morris sings, more like a bad relationship?

Genres are created by the ever-evolving, nuanced interplay of how fans think about their music and themselves.

In the practical world, a music genre is a complex category defined not by any one set of gatekeepers in the music industry nor by any particular list of awards shows and marketing venues. Rather, genres are created by the ever-evolving, nuanced interplay of how fans think about their music and themselves, how musicians enmesh particular sounds and styles into their sound, and how the industry attempts to differentiate what is, in reality, a messy, interconnected sonic world.

In other words, if fans hear the songwriting roots echoing decades of country artists in Morris’ new EP, along with the poignant twang in her vocals, they are going to hear a country song — regardless of whether Morris shows up at the Country Music Awards or whether any particular DJs pitch the song on country radio. And that’s a good thing, both for Morris and for the whole genre of country music: Headlines blare that she is quitting, but she is also simultaneously doing the vital work of expanding country merely by making the music she makes and calling out the decades-long exclusionary practices of an industry she no longer wants to buy into. After all, her name is in the headlines and her music and message in water-cooler conversations, while Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart this week has only one track by a solo female artist in the top 20, and a mere three that include a female vocalist as “featured”.

Even if, on the surface, it seems like Country music is white, Christian and radically conservative, there are complexities. What does one define as ‘Country music’?! Is a traditional sound of the South? It is a wide-ranging genre that has at least diversified its sound through the years. Whether you think that the far-right are co-opting controversial Country songs for their own agenda, it is clear a lot of artists from smaller towns and southern states are seen as less progressive as many from larger cities. Those who are changing the face of Nashville. There are geographical divides and blurriness around that is seen as Country and how one defines the genre. What is clear from statistics, testimony and time is that there is still gender disparity. Fewer artists of colour being played on Country radio than there should be - even if the needle has slightly moved. Artists leaving Country because it is not progressive. The anti-L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ legislation and hard-red politics that are coming in. It is clear that, the more right the genre becomes, the more that it is heading…

IN the wrong direction.

Sam Liddicott