Writer's Block Magazine

Betty Boots on Music Row, by Tim Bagwell

With 2024 fading into the brown-backroad-haze of our collective rearview-mirror, smudged further by the revved up dirt of an already historically tumultuous January, it becomes possible to view the year as a whole and begin to guess at its role in history. The year of war and Taylor Swift. The year the American empire’s decline went from a trod to a gallop. It was also undoubtedly the year of country music. Everybody and their grandmother, as well as Beyoncé, made a country album, because, if I’m allowed to be cynical for a while, it was finally commercially viable again. Many of the year’s biggest hits were country songs. I’m very gladdened with this odd little growth-spurt. I love country music. More so than any other musical genre. But as with anything exposed to a high-noon sun harsher than before, faults are easier to find.

Country is embarrassingly white and male. Non-white people and women have always been integral to country, from its foundational influences to the many artists that have enriched it since. Yet they have been woefully underacknowledged. Women were called the superfluous tomatoes in the salad of country music, spawning 2015’s #TomatoGate scandal, and the first ever country number one hit by a Black woman was Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, except it first had to be sung by straight white man Luke Combs for it to reach the top-spot. There has been some improvement on these fronts; Beyoncé, for instance, gracefully highlighted many Black female artists on her latest record, and if I’m allowed to be uncynical for a moment, she seemed to be righteously hankering to drag country music into the modern age as it lay kicking and screaming. 

I believe country music probably has more to learn than it has to teach, but its redeeming qualities are unlike any other genre. To examine how it may grow as well as inspire, I’ll compare the genre to another; American rap. Despite the general air of disdain between both genres, this comparison is strikingly easy. Both are musical styles initially made by and for poor people. Both present fascinatingly distinct visions of masculinity through their aesthetics and lyrics. There is a unilateral obsession with cars, inebriation, and ass. A harsh divide between “party anthems” and “songs for your female audience”; the “thugs need love too” song and the whole branch of “boyfriend country”. There is a hyper-fixation on puns and lyrical jokes. Infamous rap bars like “Real G’s move in silence like lasagna” have only ever been rivaled by country music lines like “They say I have a drinking problem but I don’t have a problem drinking at all”. Still, differences are just as easy to find. Originally, rap is made by and for poor Black people; and while many of the essential elements of country music have their roots in Black traditions and instruments, it is now generally associated with rural, white poverty. Rap is filled with people living paycheck to paycheck musing about their success and affluence; country is filled with millionaires who haven’t wandered a wheatfield in a decade describing their hands in the dirt, their last dime in the church basket, and both their feet firmly planted on the rusted pedals of a tractor. Despite this, both genres have a profound respect for authenticity, keeping-it-realness, down-to-earthness.

Still, a definite boon of rap that its rootin-tootin-ten-gallon-hatted-alternate misses is its willingness to address societal issues. “Conscious rap” is a prevalent sub-genre entirely devoted to examining racism, police brutality, poverty, system oppression, and every other form of discrimination and strife that Black Americans face. Herein lies also the answer to why rap has this branch and country does not. The land white country singers live in isn’t deliberately designed to exploit and suppress them, they don’t tackle these issues because they don’t have to. They have the privilege of pretending to be ‘apolitical’. Country music is a genre that is deliberately small scale. Big-city-slickers and their big-city issues are ignored in favor of the one-horse-town problems like broken pick-ups and even more broken hearts. This is not to say country music never tackles politics. Some of my favorites include the carefully class-conscious and admirably early Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Ned Sublette-writ and Willie Nelson-performed queer anthem Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other. Still, these are admirable little tumbleweeds in an otherwise barren plain. It is indicative of a wider issue. What country’s missing is respect for its own form. Rap believes it can be, and thus is, an artform. More than that, an artform that is worthy of discussing issues larger than the immediate and close-by. Its overt politicalness is a product of the lives of those who produce it, but also of the genre’s belief in its own merit. Country seems somehow convinced it is not a genre built for anything bigger than heartbreak-benders, dive-bar-divas, and anything that would seem to paint a man as too big for his britches. Common or Kendrick aren’t being told to shut up and just make fun songs. The Dixie Chicks’ career was shot down when they spoke out against Bush.

There is a final, harsh distinction between rap and country that could sully a move to more politically conscious music. Generally, country is conservative, and at times, downright regressive. The two biggest recent overtly political songs in country music were Rich Men North of Richmond by Oliver Anthony, a song that plays into confederate rhetoric and blames working-class poverty on people living on welfare, as well as Try That in a Small Town by Jason Aldean, a shockingly unsubtle pro-lynching song. Neither bodes well for the type of political country that I’d like to see. However, I am not arguing country should simply copy the more progressive-minded-political elements present in rap. It would certainly constitute an improvement, but I do not see it happening anytime soon. Rather, I think country should evolve to take itself more seriously. It is more than a genre regurgitating spur-and-saddle-motifs, it is an artform. It is allowed to be pretentious. Trying to say something with your music doesn’t mean you’re all hat and no cattle, it makes you a musician. 

In recent years there have been artists that share my view of country as a real art. Sturgill Simpson is a perfect example of this. He makes sweeping, strange, delightfully pretentious and unapologetically progressive concept albums. I rewatch his performance of Call to Arms on SNL at least once a month. Buzzcut and buzzing, he sings over country strings and jazz licks about the American government squashing the lives of its soldiers in exchange for heroin-profits. Tyler Childers, a disciple of Simpson in many ways, as well as artists like Jason Isbel, also seems to truly believe that country music could be more than it is perceived to be by many inside and outside the genre, and their music reflects this. Their albums have defined aesthetics and themes that build and examine themselves throughout their tracklists. They attempt to say something more because they believe their genre is worthy of it.

Something country has gotten right since its inception, something equality tied to its small-town-scale, and something rap would benefit from embracing, is male fragility. While country trends like “bro-country” have tarnished this at times, generally speaking, country music is about fuck-ups, losers, and the eternally-flawed. The number of drinking-myself-to-sleep-because-she’s-gone-songs outnumber I’m-rich-and-she-adores-me songs by at least ten to one. Female country musicians more frequently boast of their qualities, which seems to me the correct response to the amount of repression, suppression, and sexism they’ve faced within the genre’s history. But traditional and neo-traditional male country music is almost constantly melancholic and fragile. They are alone, again, and drunk, again, and they really thought it’d be different this time. Simply looking back through country music history proves this. The songs about truly loving someone are about women who left you, died, or live across the border and you can’t get to them while your heart yearns so. Party songs have the eternal undertone that you really should be drinking less and you promised your sweet Mary Beth you’d be home by eight and maybe, just maybe, if you pick some flowers beside the highway for her, she’ll let you in and you won’t have to sleep in the doghouse. Even most songs by happily-married-with-kids-Luke-Combs are about how he’s convinced he doesn’t deserve his amazing wife and how he leaves money in a college fund so his kids still have use of him if he dies soon. Christ. This is perhaps my favorite quality of country music. A lot of it is simply incapable of egotism, self-impressedness, or arrogance. While country music often lacks the almost confessive nature of recent rap records like Staples’ Dark Times, Tyler’s Chromakopia, or Kendrick’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, its embrace of male frailty is far more present than in rap music.

Rap’s presentation of infallible hyper-masculinity is not something to blindly attack. These productions of masculinity can be understood to be “an active attempt to mediate economic, social and political neglect prevalent within the African American urban community” and is much more complicated than being “merely the glorification of wealth, consumption, criminal activity and violence” (Morris 40). Country singers have the privilege of projecting vulnerability whereas many rap artists have not. Still, this performance of masculinity has done real damage, not least of which is to women who are “commonly expressed as commodified sexuality” within this rhetoric (Larsen 82). The focus on personal flaws present in country obviously wouldn’t solve these issues, but it would be a step in the right direction, and looking just at the music for a moment, leads to greater tonal and lyrical variety. It could be a wonderful addition rather than replacement to the bravado frequently associated with rap.

Despite the vast differences between rap and country, both ultimately seek to give voice to the voiceless. The ignored strife of inner-city-poverty and the forgotten stories of rural nowhere-villes. This central goal could be strengthened by growth in both genres. With rap and country replacing pop and rock as the primary music of the United States, their responsibility for evolution increases. I’d also just really like more rap songs about forgetting your partner’s birthday and feeling stupid as you sit rereading the label of your fifth beer or country songs about the systemic suppression of unions in the middle of a three part pretentious concept album that symbolizes the journey to Hinduist Nirvana.

Written by Arthur Mulder

Larsen, Jane Kathrine. Sexism and misogyny in American hip-hop culture. MS thesis. 2006.

Morris, Megan. “Authentic Ideals of Masculinity in Hip-Hop Culture: A Contemporary Extension of the Masculine Rhetoric of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.” Sydney Undergraduate Journal of Musicology 4 (2014).