"Everybody's Hard Times are Different": Country as a Political Investment in White Masculine Precarity (original) (raw)
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"Boys 'Round Here": Masculine Life-Course Narratives in Contemporary Country Music
Social Sciences, 2019
Country music remains one of the most popular genres in U.S. American society but is historically under-researched compared to rock, rap and other styles. This article extends the social science literature on the genre by examining themes of masculine identity in popular country hits of the current century. A content analysis of 35 top country hits from the last 15 years of the Billboard charts reveals three key masculine archetypes: the lover, the family man and particularly the country boy, which is the dominant masculine image within the last few years of the genre. Together, the three create a life-course narrative where the rambunctious country boy will eventually settle into monogamous heterosexual romance, with marriage and fatherhood presented as the ultimate achievement of successful manhood. A fourth, lesser, archetype, the roughneck, presents an "arrested development" version of the country boy, fully-grown but rejecting the social and familial responsibilities of the other archetypes. These narratives simultaneously challenge some aspects of hegemonic masculinity (urbanity, white-collar labor) while reinforcing others (whiteness, heterosexuality).
Review: Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2007
Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture. Aaron A. Fox. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. xv. 364 pp. Putting. Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. David W. Samuels. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. x. 325 pp.
Country Boys and the Mythopoetics of White Public Culture
Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as "country boys." In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric-in this case, that something or someone "is not racist"-even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith's success, particularly since he is best known for his "redneck" alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 2015
Researchers have found that within the unfolding trends in pop culture, both pop music and the artists who perform pop songs vary predictably according to socioeconomic conditions. Popular songs are longer, slower, more lyrically meaningful, and in more somber sounding keys during difficult social and economic times. Furthermore, male and more mature-looking pop music performers are more successful during difficult economic times. In the current study, we assess the musical and lyrical properties along with the sex and age of the artists who recorded the 63 songs to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Annual Country Charts between 1946 and 2008. In contrast to findings on pop songs, country songs of the year are lyrically more positive, musically upbeat, and use more happy-sounding major chords during difficult socioeconomic times. While older country musicians are more popular in difficult socioeconomic times, unlike pop performers, the country artists of the year are more likely to be females when the social and economic environment is threatening. We hypothesize these differences exist because unlike the middle-class audiences who consume sadder popular songs because they match their affective mood in times of recession and social threat, the more marginalized working-class listeners of country music use happier sounding songs from comforting female figures, like the wives and mothers portrayed in country songs, as a catharsis in difficult socioeconomic times.
Hope and repair within the Western Skyline? Americana Music's rural heterotopia
Journal of Rural Studies, 2018
Set against a representation of much of rural America as an impoverished and socioeconomically abandoned space, reaching out in desperation to the populism of Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential elections, this paper seeks to probe more critically and carefully the everyday geographies (represented, practiced, lived) of this space. It does this through engaging its artistic expression within a branch of Country Music known as Americana and, more specifically, through the American West articulated in the songs of musician and author Willy Vlautin, expressed by his bands Richmond Fontaine and the Delines. The paper shows both Americana in general and Vlautin's songs in particular to predominantly present a bleak and brutal picture of what is termed 'abandoned rural America', depicting rural to small-city lives destroyed by both 'internal' and 'external' forces. Moreover, this grim condition seems little assuaged through the kinds of residential migration and more everyday mobilities that may be associated with the West's Frontier myth of salvation or today's supposed era of mobilities. However, through a Gibson-Graham inspired reading for difference and sensitised by Neil Campbell's idea of an affective critical regionality, an alternative story of a more positive if fragile rural geography can be identified. Vlautin's songs well express this geography of hope as rooted in recuperative liminal but often deeply emplaced 'pauses' within a gruelling everyday life-course. Indeed, the abandoned rural West can be seen to present heterotopic existential life-rafts to its 'drowning' people, a position rural spaces today can be seen to adopt more generally, expressing, in sum, an affective critical rurality.
Good Ol' Boys and Beer: A Moral Framework for Understanding Republican Values in Country Music
International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2024
The narrative discourse of country music from 2016 to 2021 constructs a worldview clinging onto a nostalgic sense of community and moral values despite a world torn asunder by Covid 19, politics, race, gender, and religion. Country music during these tumultuous times offers listeners a moral community and a sense of unchanging place and shared meaning. In this article. I examine the construction of moral communities in contemporary country music by unpacking the structure of small-town values and sensibilities, including the vestigial Puritan religious attachments to the Judeo-Christian bible and loyal attachments to a poetic sense of place and community. I argue that a close narrative analysis of Top Billboard Country Music's lyrics reveals how these hometown values are framed to construct a world of collective effervescence.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, 2019
This collection makes an important intervention in analysis of country music's cultural politics by detailing the presence of progressive thought within the genre from the emergence of commercial country music in the 1920s through the present. While country music has long been stereotyped as a conservative genre, recent academic studies have found a complex range of political affiliations across the history of the genre, including progressive content. Scholars such as Nadine Hubbs, whose work is featured here, have identified progressive alliances supported by some white, working-class audiences involving working-class advocacy, LGBTQ+ rights, and cross-racial class alliances. This collection offers a vital contribution to this crucial academic interrogation of those stereotypes and country music's more complex historical practice. Some of the strengths of the collection include the balanced focus on different historical periods, the variety of different kinds of progressive expression it establishes, and the rich range of methodological approaches, including musicological analysis, cultural history, and discussions of cultural theory.