What's Behind Our Return To Country Music?

In Western North Carolina in the late 90s, you were just as likely to hear Tim McGraw’s anti-cancer ballad “Don’t Take the Girl” as you were Martina McBride’s fiery “Independence Day,” a narrative ode to burning down an abuser’s house. Let me state the obvious: times were different. The political climate was probably less fraught, but then again, I was seven years old, riding either in an angle-less sedan straight out of the X-Files or a bouncy white Ford Ranger. What mattered was not moral righteousness or political correctness but extracting maximum pathos from any given piece of art — turn the vibes up to eleven and swoon.

If my taste in art has changed dramatically, the embarrassing truth is that my litmus test really hasn’t. I want to be swept off my feet, momentarily humbled and unable to intellectualize. At 12, “Red Rag Top” revealed the saddest epiphanies life had to offer; at 34, I am more apt to cry to Gillian Welch’s “Revelator” or, on an especially sentimental day, The Louvin Brothers’ “What is Home Without Love.” This is to say: trends change, and so do we. Life shapes us like a river carves up a canyon.

In 2024, country music is the latest bend in that cultural flow. Beyoncé released “Texas Hold ’Em,” a banjo-inflected take on the Lumineers’ hey-ho schtick. Lana del Rey announced this September’s Lasso, recorded in Nashville, Muscle Shoals, and Mississippi. And crossover queen Kacey Musgraves played “Deeper Well,” from the forthcoming Starcrossed, on SNL. Jason Aldean and Luke Combs have infiltrated Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100, and it is not uncommon for my TikTok algorithm to feed me Sierra Ferrell immediately bookended by Mitski’s pedal steel-inflected “My Love All Mine.”

I’m interested less in who owns country music than in the genre’s porousness, and what it signifies to suddenly don a cowboy hat. Genres are loose containers, inclined to spill — you could house Alice Coltrane and Chet Baker in the same pen (“jazz”), when the experience of listening to their songs couldn’t feel more polarized. Mannequin Pussy and Sufjan Stevens and Caroline Polachek are all, in the broadest terms, “indie rock.”

I looked up the definition of country because I wanted a clearer sense of what it meant, beyond fiddles and nudie suits (a fun aside: I saw Margo Price chat with Craig Finn last summer at New York Public Radio’s The Greene Space, where she told a joke. “What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle?” “When you’re selling one, it’s violin — when you’re buying one, it’s a fiddle”). The first Google result care of Oxford Languages calls it “a form of popular music originating in the rural southern US. It is traditionally a mixture of ballads and dance tunes played characteristically on fiddle, guitar, steel guitar, drums, and keyboard.”

That’s a far cry from what it really means. Country connotes authenticity; underdogs; defiance; downtroddenness; the working class. It’s a flashy new F-150 or a beat-up guitar emblazoned with “This Machine Kills Fascists.” It’s a category that contains more contradictions than a moniker like garage rock or bubblegum pop or prog, a genre whose purpose can be reifying American abstraction (Toby Keith’s promise to “put a boot in your ass”) or burning straight through the mythology (Tyler Childers’s “Long Violent History”).

It’s bewildering to think about everything that fits under country’s umbrella, and even more puzzling to consider what it means to “go country” in 2024. It feels like straddling a schism in the earth as it continues to widen. It was already splitting decades ago, in the Ford Ranger, in a small-town America that had yet to weather the Bush v. Gore election, the War in Iraq, the Trump presidency, the #MeToo movement, and the invasion of Gaza.

In this way, maybe, it’s the most American music there is — polyphonic, cross-cultural, riddled with both brilliance and problems. It’s hard to imagine precisely where Lana or Beyoncé will fit into this tradition. Beyoncé has taken a baseball bat to a cheater’s car, the same way Carrie Underwood knocked out the headlights in “Before He Cheats.” Lana has been a winking apologist for problematic lovers the same way Tammy Wynette implored us to “Stand By Your Man.” I can only hope, in the great tradition of our nation, that these artists use the medium to muddy the waters, to stir up the discourse and provoke more than just the algorithm. Tell us something about the world we live in, something true and urgent, even if you cover it in rhinestones.