Country Canibals
Pop music's insatiable taste for blood
Dear friends, foes, and love interests,
Sabrina Carpenter’s new song is a synth nightmare with country sparkle curb-appeal. The country aesthetic is gorgeous, but would you rather your favourite pin-up popstar change directions because it’s in vogue or because she loves it?
We are seeing major artists who have never expressed interest in country suddenly experiment with the genre. I'm not saying that artists can't challenge themselves or have appreciation for something new, but interestingly, they're all doing it at the exact same time . . .
Pop music has quite the history of taking what doesn't belong to it. Whether it be punk, grunge, or rap, emerging genres tell homegrown stories built from authentic and often painful struggles. These sounds are often geographically specific - ex London (punk), the Bronx (rap) - and eventually spill over their borders and share sounds with the whole world.
Once the genre has earned its stripes enough to be taken seriously, the pop industry will pull it apart for sounds, phrases, and moves. The shadow of the music becomes present in pop stars’ mouths for months until it fizzles out.
When I was in high school, every pop idol had a rap artist on their track, maybe they even deigning to rap themselves. While many radio-played songs were phenomenal in their own right, many of the songs featuring rappers were exactly that - features. The rapper’s presence was to augment the sound, not the story. Instead of artists telling the stories that got the genre recognized in the first place, Ryan Seacrest’s Top 40 showed off songs written by and for dabblers in the genre, not the masters.
Although I come from rural Ontario, I never listened to country until I left my hometown. On one of my visits back, my sister introduced me to some of her favourites, even making a playlist titled, “*HOMETOWN REDACTED* Bangers.”
Up until about a year ago, it was very commonplace for people to say, "I listen to all types of music, except country." Not only was it an appropriate phrase to repeat, but it was almost inappropriate to say that you liked country. Country music was seen as cringeworthy, with the majority of radio stations uninterested in playing it. The music was associated with poorly developed lyrics, misogynist relationships, and alcoholism.
People who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to country music when we entered University together now host graduation parties to blast Morgan Wallen, singing along to his music about being sad, drunk, and throwing chairs off buildings.
However, country music has a rich storytelling history primarily rooted in the American South. Songs came from working communities about folklore, social dynamics in their region (love songs included here), and rebellion music. While the American South is often seen as hyper conservative, the culture is built around working-class people fighting for their rights and communities, regardless of which political party panders to them.
Emerging directly from Southern and Apalachian folk music - which draws on a blend of influences, primarily from African-American, Anglo-Celtic, and Mexican musicians and storytellers - country music is tied both directly and indirectly to the land it was written on.
The issue now is that country music is suffering the same fate as many genres in the past. Punk music was once a rebellion genre coming out of the UK before its commercialization. Rock and rap music turned into sanitized radio party music that erased all the political undertones the music dug into. This tonal shift is a well-worn playbook with patterns that we will likely continue to see.
It's not an issue that pop music is pulling from other genres and that artists are inspired by each other. In his book, Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon explains that there are no new ideas; all art is a reflection of something else, and all art is inspired by something that came before. Good art will make you want to make good art, and that is not something to shy away from. Hence, artists should not shy away from experimenting with new genres and sounds. It is not only their right but a desperate need for artists to continue to create and experiment, and play. However, sanitizing your music and divorcing it from the history of its inspirations is not only wrong but also devalues the art.
We cannot ignore the constant theft of working-class sounds for billionaire mouths. Currently, pop stars like Beyoncé, Post Malone, Tate McRae, Chapell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter are either putting out country music or having country artists feature on their pop songs. When this interest in experimentation not only makes a concerted effort to separate itself from its source materials or inspiration and is part of an overall trend in the industry, it is very easy to question the integrity of whether or not the inspiration comes from their heart or their chequebook.
But this is what it always comes down to: money erodes art. The logical answer isn't that art should be made in a moneyless vacuum, but that the connection between money and art should be studied and interrogated by the artist. To be an artist is to interrogate your connection to things. Why should money be exempt from that integral aspect of creation?
Who Cracked Open The Overton Window?
I want to make all this country stuff about cars, too.
While country music is an inherent rebellion against the status quo and is a pro-worker genre, the type of country music we are being spoon-fed is a Trojan Horse for conservative values. There has been a noticeable shift in the Overton Window - a frameing device that allows us to describe which topics along the poitical spectrum are approprate to talk about and what subjects are up to debate - in recent years, undoing the progressive progress of the 2010s and allowing the cultural discourse to rehash closed wounds such as “do women deserve rights?” and “should a country built for and by imigrants allow immigration?”
This shift is symbolized not only by the desire for corporate country music but by the aestheticization of a lifestyle once deemed trashy. If you make people want the life they once associated with conservatism, they will become more open to shifting their beliefs to the right.
I read news articles about Bible stories seeping into the film and TV industry, and watch how music pacifies itself to placate the religious right. Fashion gurus wear cowboy boots, tell me it’s “modest-girl summer” before a heat wave, and that “Jesus sandals are BACK” while department stores stock up on decor for the farmhouse your for-you page is telling you to buy. But what is the best purchase to engrain you in country culture to get you to physically buy into the conservative life? A truck.
Here's the thing: I grew up around a lot of trucks and then moved to a city where they were impractical and non-existent. Their disappearance was shocking at first, but what do you need an overly large vehicle for in a city where the majority of people have never hauled a single thing?
Trucks now exist as a status symbol, and I can't rely on their behaviour as much as I used to. I used to know that anyone driving a truck, whether or not they were an aggressive driver, was very aware of the size of their vehicle and was at least competent at driving it. These cars were meant to do jobs and tasks, and the people who were driving them were actually doing these jobs and tasks.
Now I drive on the highway in Ottawa, and there are trucks in half of each lane because they don't properly recognize the size of their vehicle and don't have an understanding of how to drive it properly and safely. These vehicles have become more of an ego trip than a tool. That is why they are getting irresponsibly bigger, even though their “modern” designs deplete the utility of the vehicle for work.
Trucks are everywhere in the city, and they are so incredibly irrational. They are too big, they take up too much space, they don't fit in parking spots properly, they're very difficult to parallel park with, and people are not used to driving them. There is too much stop-and-go traffic and not enough things to haul in the city for trucks to be warranted.
Just like pop stars putting on cowboy boots, driving a truck that has never seen mud is another performance.
Open Mouths, No Thoughts of Their Own
Why is a genre of music that has been systematically excluded from the mainstream narrative suddenly come in to be the future of popular music? Have we returned to the roots of country? Or at least the roots of country that White America would like you to think are the true roots? Or has the music industry executive simply gotten tired of exploiting Black communities for ideas and wanted to shift over to a new demographic, the Southern workers? Just kidding, Black musicians were instrumental to the creation of country music - the industry can’t stray too far from its playbook.
The reason that pop music is coming from country is because the honesty that pop music found in rock and punk, then later in rap, has started to expire. Using rap music and inner city aesthetics no longer screams of the simple working person and their breadth of untainted emotions; we now must move on to country music.
Industry executives had taken the political anger of genres punk and sterilized it to cherry-pick the sonic ideas of the genre to use it for pop music. Since it seems that “all” of the stories of struggling rock musicians have been told in as many ways as they can find, and “all” of the stories from struggling rappers have been told, it's time for pop music to steal the stories of struggling country musicians in order to have something fresh and new for us to enjoy. It's no mistake that this cycle has happened at the same time as Christian values are starting to be pushed by industry executives in all fields.
People say rock and roll died because it had nothing left to say. People who are writing rock music still have a struggle; they still have a story, it's just that the rock music that we get shown and that people like to listen to is the music without the story. The evolution of the message that rock music had to share was too much. The reality is that the evolution of all of the stories of all of the genres eventually leads to overthrowing the power groups. Instead of reaching that point and empowering their audiences to do that, music industry executives continue to reinforce the status quo and feed us the same struggle story from the perspective and closet of someone in a geographically different area with the hopes that we are bored of the old story and will empathize with the new one instead of connecting the puzzle pieces that the same people are causing all of these diverse struggles.
These genres gave voices to marginalized communities, now the establishment is taking their power back. These marginalized communities didn't run out of anything to say, but what the machine did was suck up all of the air time and overplay watered down versions of these political messages until people were so bored of it that they convinced themselves that rap had nothing new to say, that Punk had nothing new to say. And now they will convince themselves that country has nothing new to say, while the genre they claim to love is eaten alive by pop music, and the stories that built a legacy for country music are forgotten in favour of festival tunes. This is why it is so important to listen to marginalized voices, because otherwise, the voices you will hear are cruel parodies of the actual needs and perspectives of the communities that you might be interested in hearing from.
What Now?
Enjoy it.
Enjoy your farmhouse summer, your Southern twang, and your suspiciously clean cowboy boots.
Just don’t forget, not all propaganda is ads for the military; it may just be the song of the summer.
Love,
Emma
Brilliantly drawn out. My fave read this week!