Love it or hate it, there is no denying that the country has gone country.
Beyoncé is touring on her Grammy-winning country album, “Cowboy Carter.” All races and ages are line-dancing to country-themed viral hits like “Boots on the Ground” and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” from the unlikely sources 803Fresh and Shaboozey. Lana Del Rey has long been more manic pixie pop star than country crooner. But there she was at Stagecoach last month singing country hits and debuting new, country-ish songs. If you made a Likert scale of pop music gangsta credibility, you could defensibly put Snoop Dogg on one end and Ed Sheeran on the other. Yet, last month they both signaled their country music intentions.
Occam’s razor would chalk their genre-switching up to politics: American pop culture typically goes country when the White House goes Republican. But there’s a wrinkle this time around — a veritable renaissance has come for country music over the last decade, as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and queer artists have staked a legitimate claim to the genre. In fact, they’re still collectively pushing to be included in a genre that wants their rhythm but not their blues. And that has left country music with an identity crisis. There are now two prominent ideas of what counts as country: Nashville’s manufactured, tightly controlled country bops and the last decade’s diversification of its sound.
Outsiders to the genre who want to take advantage of country music’s captive market and cultural power can’t stay neutral. Every interloper from outside the Nashville machine who flocks to the genre has to choose which version of country music they will embody: reactionary whiteness or reparative multiracialism. What they choose can tell us a lot about the artists and the political concerns of the culture they inhabit.
To understand the tension at the heart of country music, it helps to look at a holy trinity of artists widely lauded for country music’s resurgence with mainstream audiences: Jelly Roll, Morgan Wallen and Zach Top. These good ol’ boys — and they are all boys — aren’t outlaw country. They are “8 Mile” country, white acts making country inflected with contemporary Black music for mass audiences. Where Jelly Roll and Wallen’s country is hip-hop inflected, Top is channeling 1980s big-hat, traditional male country singers. Their success, though, is cut from the same cloth. These aren’t country music outsiders storming the gates. They are anointed by the industry as the genre’s white, male saviors.
They’re saving country music from the musical summer I am having. I attended the inaugural music festival Biscuits and Banjos in Durham, N.C., last month. It was about three days of country-ish music performed by artists that Nashville would not consider country because they aren’t white. But they are playing the banjo and the steel guitar, while singing traditional music. This summer and fall, Allison Russell, Shaboozey, Joy Oladokun and Chapel Hart are all Black, all country, all touring. Their ascendance is the direct result of the way the Black Lives Matter movement sharpened their demands for full inclusion, and an audience was waiting to receive them.
Years on, exhausted by nearly eight years of brutal reactionarism to the nominal idea that Black lives might matter, a lot of Black audiences are tired of being depressed. They want to dance and fall in love, maybe both at the same time. A generation of Black country artists that has been making music in the trenches is more than ready to serve it up to them. A neo-traditionalist like Rhiannon Giddens, the husband-and-wife duo The War and Treaty, wild child Adia Victoria and party princess Tanner Adell cultivated diverse Black audiences. Their music is high and low. It is traditional and pop. It is blues and it is soul. It is all country.
However, the line between white people’s country and Black people’s soul has always been about as strong as the braided ropes that once segregated audiences in Jim Crow dance halls. One can go back to the deep country inflections in Black funk groups like the Commodores. Or, one can listen to country performances by Little Richard, Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin for the absolute best that the art form could ever hope to produce, then or now. The music has always been multiracial. It’s the genre — and the money — that has been packaged as white. The packaging is the politics. Singing country music is not enough for Nashville to market you as real country. You have to look country.
Nothing does more to silently define and brutally enforce the racial code of country music than does the Nashville aesthetic. It is a cross between rural cosplay and high school prom court. That’s why an Australian like Keith Urban can be coded as authentically country, complete with his Aussie accent and rock guitar, while Black Texans singing over a fiddle cannot. Even when nonwhite artists make music so sonically country that the twang makes your bicuspids itch, the industry uses aesthetic authenticity to push them into niche markets, like folk and Americana.
One notable outsider, Beyoncé, has explicitly chosen to align herself with the vision of country music Nashville doesn’t want to see. Black audiences across the nation will pay for country music that reflects our cultural sensibilities; the success of “Cowboy Carter” proves that much. Unfortunately for us, country music cannot acknowledge Black women, Black love or Black family and get country music industry support. That’s not hyperbole. Braden Leap, a sociologist, analyzed four decades of country music lyrics and found that country music has increasingly swapped out lyrics about the working class for references to blonde hair and blue eyes, a not-so-subtle code for whiteness.
You cannot squeeze Beyoncé into that aesthetic box, even if she goes platinum blonde. That’s why despite capturing an enthusiastic market with money to spend and coolness to trade, Nashville did not anoint her a savior of the genre. Her art, like that of other Black country artists, is a response to living in a white identitarian pop culture landscape, but it is not itself reactionary. So it is not welcome.
Instead of widely embracing the winds of multiracial change, Nashville has directly counterprogrammed these Black country artists with music embodying white reactionarism, whether crafted by country music insiders or outsiders.
Wallen, for example, arguably owes his entire career to country music embracing its cultural role as rhythm-keeper for white reactionarism. His success is a case of how the Nashville vanguard is bringing millions of new listeners into the country music fold. The vanguard is separating Black art from Black artists and repackaging it as white authenticity to white audiences. His music may be a sincere ode to the futility of genres (Is he making country music or watered-down trap?), but Wallen’s role as lead horseman of the white country reclamation is about white America’s power to police those genre boundaries.
The genre’s enforcers are both top-down (the music industry) and bottom-up (grass-roots fandom). Like the Trumpian brand of politics, country music’s cultural politics are decidedly white and decidedly masculine. (In 2022, female artists represented just 11 percent of all songs played on country music radio.) Country fans and executives historically haven’t taken kindly to art that seeks to change that.
Now, a small but visible group of celebrities is choosing to go country. Maybe that’s just because they want the old-school star treatment. Unfortunately for them, they are working in the twilight of the American pop empire and coming to a genre that is entirely at war with itself.
There is no longer a penalty for going country, thanks in part to the way streaming has unlocked country music from country radio. If Dr. Dre had made a country record in the 1990s he would be dead to the culture. Today, T-Pain is a legit industry insider who came up through hip-hop and R&B. He recently came out of the closet as it were, admitting that he has secretly written country songs. The rapper and reality TV star T.I. has said he is putting out a country EP. Snoop was once part of America’s most feared musical cliques. Last month he put out a country music duet with country singer Ernest.
Country music has a tighter lock on music distribution than other genres. Country radio still breaks new artists in an age where every other genre has lost that power to TikTok. Inside Walmart, country music stock and displays are prominent. From A&R to point-of-purchase, country music has an enviable relationship with fans who don’t mind spending money on their favorite artists. Given how horrible the music industry has become for artists, the question isn’t why are so many pop, rap and rock artists going country. It is: Why hasn’t everyone gone country?
The answer is that country music won’t let everyone go country. This is where the merely popular becomes intensely political, and those politics have a limit. To reap the genre’s rewards, an artist has to look a certain way, act a certain way and embody a certain politics.
Lana Del Rey is the latest artist to test country music’s appetite for outsiders. Her long-anticipated country music debut has found its stride in the form of a handful of new songs, most notably “57.5,” in which she name-checks Morgan Wallen. This could make her too spicy for the tiny slice of airplay reserved for women in Nashville’s male protectionism racket. But in 2024, Del Rey did the most country thing that a girl singer can do. She got married — and then she spun that marriage into song.
Every woman in country music has had to sell a story about why she belongs. That story always has to include a man. Del Rey did it big. She did not just marry a “normie.” She married a Louisiana swamp tour guide who promised to provide what she has described as a “very rich home life” beyond fame. That was enough for National Review to cite the singer of “Venice Bitch” as a paragon of traditional values. With these kinds of self-evident bona fides, it would be harder for Del Rey to refuse the trad wife country turn than for her to go with the tide.
Our nation’s politics have not merely gone conservative. They have gone white nationalist. That makes country music, and Nashville, a good fit for the moment. The music is a cover. The real goal is to have a home for political pop culture. That’s why Trumpist power brokers want to turn Nashville into the right wing’s Hollywood. They want Nashville for the same reason they want universities and the Kennedy Center. Their ideas have followers but few cultural institutions. Leeching onto Nashville’s powerful celebrity machine is a shortcut to manufacturing the illusion of cultural power, and there’s never been a better time for them to succeed. Artists like John Rich and Jason Aldean are already letting their fascist freak flags fly.
Capturing celebrities with national audiences could give the right real cultural power, not simply the illusion of it, propped up by a handful of genre-constrained stars. That is why country music’s boundaries are so politically insistent. Whoever controls country, it seems, will control the culture.
The contradiction of today’s country music popularity proves that money and creative innovation are there to be had. All the genre has to do is complicate its white national mythmaking. As luck would have it, the blues knows just how to do this. The cultural repertoire of the blues, the art form that has the authenticity that country music pretends to have, holds country music to account for the dispossession, extraction and enslavement that is this nation’s true origin story. It isn’t a coincidence that blues is also having a moment — from Ryan Coogler’s ode to Black cultural production in “Sinners” to a young crop of soul musicians. When politics become reactionary, Black people make the blues. And country music makes a choice.
It doesn’t matter if country music is cool with pop stars or if the new vanguard has some rap friends. Ignore what country music is singing. That’s mostly garbage anyway. Listen to how it is selling our cultural rot as a country music bop.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2022. She is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science, the author of “Thick: And Other Essays” and a 2020 MacArthur fellow. @tressiemcphd
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