2023-09-16: Is It Fast Enough You Can Fly Away?
Contesting a Cultural Country Clash
I’m not big on fighting the culture war, because I think that at least 80% of it is stupid, but I would agree with the proposition that culture is upstream of politics, which means that the culture does mean a great deal to us, not just as culture qua culture (are you for real right now, Adam?) but as something that shapes our politics.
I was going to let this discussion between Justin Charity and Rob Harvilla in The Ringer (A Rational Discussion About Oliver Anthony, Jason Aldean, and the Current State of the Pop-Chart Culture Wars) go, since it’s been a few weeks, but I also was just playing catch-up with On The Media and listened to Micah Loewinger takling with Chris Molanphy and it occurred to me that this is a topic where there are a few issues worth piecing out.
First, I am going to cosign Justin Charity on the distinction that should be made between Aldean and Oliver Anthony:
Here, I’ll begin to disagree with you, as I think the common conflation of Aldean and Anthony is unfair to Anthony. It’s easy in hindsight to read a sort of master plan for hyperpolarized virality via Fox & Friends into “Rich Men North of Richmond,” but really, I don’t think the stuff Anthony is singing about is as straightforwardly pandering as Aldean’s posturing against criminals and activists in big cities. I hear in Anthony what I hear in a lot of opinionated musicians: incoherence. I can’t say I’m surprised that he also sings the praises of diversity. Of course he’ll be full of surprises.
We see that more clearly a little farther in retrospect. Oliver’s politics are clearly…heterodox, arguably incoherent (which Charity also notes)…but he is occupying a different space from Aldean. Aldean is making standard pop-country music with a culturally conservative overlay. He’s from Macon, though, and was based in Nashville for a while, so he is not, in the sense you or I would understand it, from a small town. Many people find that somewhat disingenuous, although he is performing in a genre that extols exurban virtues—and it’s not like he’s hiding that he’s from Macon—so I would argue that some people are making more of that particular point than they ought to. It does sure sound like an anti-BLM song. As a guy who’s pretty much always lived in the city, I find “Small town life is great!” Country much more appealing than “The city is terrible!” Country, which is how I would interpret “Try That in a Small Town,” especially given the (original) video uses the Maury County Courthouse and takes some other editorial liberties.
I don’t think much of “Rich Men North of Richmond” as a song. It is not especially clever musically, it doesn’t have much of a hook to my ear, and the level of musicianship isn’t particularly high. So there’s nothing there really pulling me in. Anthony is a Youtuber at a certain level and one of those “hey, this is a nice effort” comments might not be entirely unwarranted there. As a #1 song, it’s not “Blinding Lights,” “Hey Ya!” or “Penny Lane.” To be clear, though, he is performing “authenticity” (Chris Molanphy makes this point), even if he’s performing into a nice mic with a resonator (although the G9220 isn’t top-of-the-line) and may or may not own 92 acres of land in Prince Edward County.
I have less to say about Morgan Wallen. I will cosign from discussion in The Ringer again, this time from Rob Harvilla:
Now, musically, as mainstream country goes, Wallen is the best-case scenario: He makes serene soft rock disguised as raucous bro-country, with an easy wit and unforced charisma that explain why America has streamed these 60-odd songs approximately 12 billion times apiece. Wallen himself has never quite come out swinging against cancel culture onstage or in song, but it’s hard not to view his outrageous success as a backlash to the backlash. His dominance can’t help but feel political. One thing Morgan Wallen can definitely tell you is that you can’t tell him nothing.
Morgan Wallen is a charismatic guy, does make relatively anodyne music that reflects the center of pop-country as craft, and is absolutely more popular in the culture than he would be without using the N-word but also has tried to make himself relatively apolitical while carrying the cultural cast of country music. You can absolutely make a superstar career on that basis. You and I may not like it and are completely within our right to complain, but it’s not especially new or surprising.
Luke Combs, though?
Look, Black people have been screwed a lot in the history of popular music. Unless the argument is that as a result of that, that white guys shouldn’t cover songs by Black women who may have been in a relationship with Alice Walker back in the day, I don’t really get it. It’s “country” because Luke Combs is singing it, but there is very little that’s changed in the arrangement. He doesn’t even touch the “I work in a market as a checkout girl” lyric. And it’s “Fast Car,” a famous, famous song. The 165th greatest song ever, just ahead of “Lose Yourself,” “Let’s Get It On,” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” He’s not hiding his light under a bushel; he’s literally just taking a classic song and playing it straight for a new audience 35 years (!) later. The song is older than Luke Combs is—I’m just happy that someone that young gets value out of music that I really like (for the record, Allison is an alien and doesn’t like either version of the song).
Charity’s take is pretty similar:
Likewise, I guess, I’m not entirely sure why I’m supposed to be mad about Luke Combs’s cover of “Fast Car” in the first place. I keep encountering the argument that it’s racist for country radio to play a popular country artist’s cover of a noncountry song when country radio wouldn’t have played the noncountry artist’s (again, noncountry) song in its original form; and I keep waiting for someone to point out how weirdly transparently inane this reasoning is, but it never happens. It’s a good cover! I thought Natalie Weiner and Marissa Moss had a very sensible conversation about it over at Don’t Rock the Inbox.
And, since we’re now into Weiner and Moss’s conversation, I will quote a bit from Weiner’s part in that discussion:
I think Luke is catching a fair amount of flack just by association, which is fine to an extent — obviously he's making boatloads of money in the process. But covering a Tracy Chapman song because you earnestly have always loved Tracy Chapman (and yes, probably having your label strategically push it because they saw a window for success) — which is why he did it — and sending millions her way in the process is not anything like politically baiting people all the way to the iTunes store, or capitalizing on Gen Z's short attention spans with TikTok fodder (and the mythology and mystique of "cancellation" as it pertains to your own obvious racism).
She also makes a separate point that I did want to dig into just a little:
Outlining those songs, we have a Nickelbackified MAGA vigilante song (Aldean), a basic R&B-cribbing ballad (Wallen, who was clearly listening to a fair amount of Baby Bash — a perennial TikTok fave — when he was recording), and a cover of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," which charted as rock and adult contemporary 35 years ago. Unsurprisingly, the two songs here that are not explicitly racist draw heavily from (what else) Black music.
Part of why Country music is having a bit of a moment is because it is now essentially pop music. There was a point in the 80s, if you think about a type embodied by Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt, and those sorts of artists, where popular country music was borrowing a great deal from where pop and rock music were in the moment. Garth Brooks went about the production of his records a different way, but he is, famously, a huge Kiss fan. There are other artists in that trajectory, as well—Shania Twain was married to Mutt Lange in the prime of her career, after all. I would argue that in contemporary country music, the distance between the audio vocabulary of the genre as a whole and popular music (which is now largely flavored by hip hop) is as small as it’s ever been. I think there might be more of that convergence than I would like, personally; I tend to like artists that let their freak flag fly a little more. Country music might be demographically somewhat distinct, and it’s definitely marketing itself differently, but it’s not too far away from contemporary hip-hop flavored popular music. Which, as I mentioned in brief a week and a half ago, is struggling with its age a little. There is a real argument that the commercial success of country music is more a function of having coopted other forms of popular music and less the political leanings of some of its most prominent artists.
Changing gears, I am not planting a unique stake in the ground, but I want this to be a place where we can feel safe asking the difficult questions. So: who wore it better? David Guetta and Sia or Pat Benatar?
So long (for now) and thanks for all the fish!