Just as the family-friendly, tradition-oriented culture championed by old country (think Alan Jackson’s “Small Town Southern Man”) has undergone a sharp decline over the past couple of decades, so has country music. Traditional country has been largely replaced on the Top 40 charts by what has been dubbed “bro-country” or “stadium country,” which Wikipedia helpfully describes as “a form of country pop originating in the 2010s…influenced by 21^st-century hip hop, hard rock and electronica…with lyrics about attractive young girls, the consumption of alcohol, partying, and pickup trucks.”

And he bowed
His head to Jesus
And he stood
For Uncle Sam
And he only loved
One woman
He was always proud
Of what he had

Alan Jackson, “Small Town Southern Man”

 

Musical genres don’t have ideologies, but it is true that different genres were created to convey different values. Rock ‘n roll, for example, was a slang phrase for sex—and the entire genre served as the soundtrack for the Sexual Revolution and a coda to cultural rebellion. Country music, on the other hand—which evolved as a fusion of blues, spirituals, and Celtic music—was the music of the rural American (or those who shared their values). As Psychology Today put it: “If all I told you about someone is that she has an abiding love for country and western, how much money would you bet that she’s also a Republican?” Quite a bit, I’d wager.

That is precisely why music has become such a focal point in the culture wars. One of the most interesting essays I’ve come across on country music was written by Will Wilkinson in 2012, when our culture wars were less all-encompassing. Despite country music’s steep decline (more on that later), Wilkinson noted that country has a built-in appeal for a specific sort of American:

Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has a position on life, taken as a whole. Small towns. Dirt roads. Love at first sight. Hot-blooded kids havin’ a good ol’ time. Gettin’ hitched. America! Raisin’ up ruddy-cheeked scamps who you will surely one day worry are having too good a hot-blooded time. Showing up for Church. Venturing confused into the big wide world only to come back to Alabama forever since there ain’t a…single thing out there in the Orient or Paris, France what compares to that spot by the river under the trembling willows where first you kissed the girl you’ve known in your heart since second grade is the only girl you would ever truly love. Fishin’! How grandpa, who fought in two wars, worked three jobs, raised four kids, and never once complained…

And on it goes. That description now primarily applies to older, traditional country music—most of the newer artists, with a few notable exceptions, are pumping out a pop-lite party product focused on booze and hookups, with the songs and the artists becoming largely interchangeable. But Wilkinson notes that the key reason traditional country music sounds instinctively conservative is because conservatives are, psychologically speaking, less open to new experiences and more oriented towards rootedness and tradition:

More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life’s stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I’m a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. I was once a teenage boy threatened by a girl’s gun-loving father, now I’m a gun-loving father threatening my girl’s teenage boy. Etc. And country is full of assurances that the pleasures of simple, rooted, small-town, lives of faith are deeper and more abiding than the alternatives…

Country music is a bulwark against cultural change, a reminder that “what you see is what you get,” a means of keeping the charge of enchantment in “the little things” that make up the texture of the every day, and a way of literally broadcasting the emotional and cultural centrality of the conventional big-ticket experiences that make a life a life. A lot of country music these days is culture war, but it’s more bomb shelter than bomb.

Country music was once about embracing a certain type of culture—one that, it bears pointing out, is rapidly dying in many of the very places where country music first originated. And just as the family-friendly, tradition-oriented culture championed by old country (think Alan Jackson’s “Small Town Southern Man”) has undergone a sharp decline over the past couple of decades, so has country music. Traditional country has been largely replaced on the Top 40 charts by what has been dubbed “bro-country” or “stadium country,” which Wikipedia helpfully describes as “a form of country pop originating in the 2010s…influenced by 21^st-century hip hop, hard rock and electronica…with lyrics about attractive young girls, the consumption of alcohol, partying, and pickup trucks.”

The advent of bro-country—championed by artists such as Luke Bryan, Chase Rice, and Florida Georgia Line, among others—created what critics, and musicians referred to as a “civil war” within the genre. One bro-country artist stated that he didn’t care about the “old farts” who didn’t like his songs because the kids “don’t want to buy the music you were selling.” Which is probably true, as far as it goes. Once the values promoted by a genre begin to lose their relevance to a new generation, bro-country is a welcome replacement for those who like the sound but prefer less preaching.

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