There is a paradox at the heart of American pop culture. The United States, in recent years, has never had a higher share of foreign-born residents, and it has never been more racially and ethnically diverse. Yet forms of entertainment that are associated with an older, whiter, more rural America — notably, country music and TV westerns — are thriving, even dominating.
Ella Langley’s song “Choosin’ Texas” has spent 21 weeks atop the Billboard charts, outpacing songs such as Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” In the first week of August, for the first time ever, the top five songs on the Hot 100 were country singles. Even Taylor Swift’s latest release, a generically poppy tune tied to the movie “Toy Story 5,” has been marketed as a country song — an apparent acknowledgment that there are advantages to identifying with the genre she left behind in 2014.
According to Nielsen’s multi-platform ratings, four of the top 10 TV shows this season are westerns or neo-westerns such as “Landman” and “Dutton Ranch.” And Gen Z, though more diverse than any previous generation, has been conspicuously participating in this rural revival, embracing line dancing, Shania Twain and Coors beer.
These apparently opposed trends may in fact be related. When America was overwhelmingly white and more closely tied to its rural past, country and western motifs could be seen as conventional and confining. But today, with much of the population concentrated in cities and on the coasts, and as white non-Hispanic Americans inch closer to becoming a minority, the mores and manners of the country’s rural working-class increasingly offer a source of authenticity.
How things have changed. In 1971, television executives canceled several popular but unfashionable country-fried TV shows, including “Green Acres,” “Hee Haw” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” in what came to be known as the rural purge. Though the purge had a commercial justification in the desire of television programmers to appeal to younger, more affluent and urban viewers, it also reflected a cultural judgment: Rural entertainment was déclassé, as were the people who liked it. (Fred Silverman, the CBS executive who spearheaded the programming change, denounced “mindless rural pap” in a speech to broadcasters.)
Decades after the rural purge, we are seeing the opposite — a rural surge. Down-home genres have gained new salience even outside red-state redoubts, sometimes as they are flipped and remixed by artists of all stripes. Beyoncé participated in this shift by donning long blond hair and putting out a country album, “Cowboy Carter,” in 2024. And witness the success of “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Shaboozey’s hip-hop inflected country single, or of “The Giver,” Chappell Roan’s queer take on Shania-style country pop.
Country music and other forms of rural culture were long associated with a kind of white conventionality (a reputation that developed even though these genres were shaped in significant ways by Black artists). By contrast, the modes and manners of a Black art form like hip-hop — or, in an earlier era, bebop — could offer consumers a nonconformist thrill. Social marginalization gave Black-coded cultural forms a coveted distance from mainstream society.
But today social marginalization means something different. After trading for decades on its countercultural identity, hip-hop, for example, has become thoroughly conventional. It reached a peak market share of nearly 30 percent in 2020 — a year in which one in five Fortune 500 companies pledged to support racial justice in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Today, it’s country music that — for all its commercial success — represents the underdog. As diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives accord advantages to everyone except straight white men; as globalization and an urban, knowledge-based economy have impoverished and emptied out rural communities; and as trust in institutions including higher education and the federal government declines, the culture of rural working-class whites can symbolize an unconstrained way of life that stands apart from the stifling, all-encompassing H.R. bureaucracy that everyone else lives in.
Donald Trump, of course, tapped into this anti-establishment energy to power his unlikely political rise. But in subsequent years, you could also see this dynamic in the vogue for candidates such as Tim Walz (a native Nebraskan who drives an IH Scout, a classic farm vehicle), the politically doomed oyster farmer Graham Platner and Dan Osborn, the plains progressive who sports pearl-snap shirts. You can also see it in demographic shifts: The South and Mountain West might once have been seen as economic and cultural backwaters, but those regions now lead the nation in working-age population growth, and southern colleges are increasingly attracting students from outside the region.
Much discussion of the so-called vibe shift of 2024 centered around Mr. Trump. Today, his sagging poll numbers — dragged down by headlines about Jeffrey Epstein, Iran and the economy — may be read as a sign that the vibe has shifted back. Politically speaking, that appears to be true. But the rural surge suggests that in broad cultural terms, the country continues to trend right. In the cultural contest between blue and red America, lots of people are choosing Texas.
Matthew Schmitz is the editor of the magazine Compact and a host of the politics and culture podcast “Counterculture.”
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