BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones - i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note - all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a'ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country - how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state - especially from johnny cash and merle haggard - now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems - attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem - “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn - sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” - has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so - understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands - the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon - almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
I mean. This is all pretty solid. Just because it’s a “hot take” doesn’t make it wrong.
I don’t think it was just 9/11. Generally speaking, after 9/11 the vast majority of the country was on board with the mission of “find bin Laden, and prevent Afghanistan from being used as a terrorist safe zone again.” Nobody was expected to make performative gestures in Support of the Troops; support for them was a given. Most of that was about “Police, Firefighters and EMTs” since a lot of them died on 9/11.
Then March of 2003 rolled around and Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. A much more controversial move from the start, this presented some problems for the country music audience. Riding the jingoistic high of Courtesy of the Red White & Blue hadn’t really gone away yet, but a lot of people had doubts about whether invading Iraq was justified, and those doubts only got worse as the Coalition failed to produce any evidence of bio-labs or anything but the long-broken shell of a WMD program.
Now, country shifting towards the pro-war with contempt for “treasonous liberals” or whatever is nothing new. Merle Haggard wrote “Okie from Muskogee” as a counter to Vietnam protests, after all. But the political narratives were a bit different this time around: Don’t be like those Vietnam protestors, spitting and beating returning soldiers! Support the war and support our troops! You can’t support the troops and not support the war! Don’t be a traitor!” There was no room left in the industry for a different take. So, when the Dixie Chicks say something relatively mild like “we’re ashamed Bush is from Texas,” in the eyes of the right wing they might as well have curb-stomped and pissed on a returning wounded war hero.
All of this coincided with the last pages of a way of life in America that doesn’t effectively exist anymore. Throw in that less that 2% of the US is actually involved in agriculture, and those in manufacturing and mining are also a tiny minority with the vast majority of the working class being in the service industry, you’re left with people who can’t possibly have much of a connection to what we might call Real Country. Even if they live in Texas or Alabama or New Mexico, they’re every bit as urban in lifestyle as someone from New York or California. They know that the countryside’s pretty and they might like camping or whatever, but not a damn one of them has worked outside from sunup to sundown, loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal, or whatever. They might be working very hard, they might be trapped under the thumb of The Man, but the imagery specific to their way of life isn’t found in country music.
That’s ultimately why so many songs are about driving a truck out in the middle of nowhere to have a party and fuck on a tailgate. Even the sad music’s about drinking and fucking. For the working class, it’s all that’s really left of the country anyway: something slow and twangy to listen to while drowning your sorrows, or something fast and twangy to slam drinks to at a bar or party. It’s all about the Aesthetic now: big trucks, cowboy hats, girl in cutoff jeans and a ballcap, partying out in the middle of nowhere. Listening to pop/bro country, you can lose yourself in the idea of being a Real American with old-school values, even if you drive a truck or stock freight at Costco for a living. About the only jobs left in any significant number that are “country” to any stretch of the imagination are, well, troops, cops, firefighters, etc.
Which brings me back to the politics. You’ll see the right wing capitalize on this fantasy a lot. Warrgarbl about Coastal Elites, “flyover pride,” “Rebel nation,” “Makers vs Takers,” and so on. Criticize the politics of a red state and you’ll hear about how you’re being mean to the people that feed you. The last people the US can be Proud Of, the Real Americans, the big white boys in cowboy hats with a five o’clock shadow, out there holding this country together with their bare hands. But it’s been awhile since The Troops were involved in anything The People gave a shit about, the shine has worn off the badge for much of America after 9/11, and to be blunt, it’s been awhile since a lot of firefighters have died at once to get national attention back on them again.
The hell of it is, I think the cracks in this are starting to show. Mo Pitney’s “Country” is about how country is more about values than anything else. Brad Paisley’s “Country Nation” is along similar lines, starting off with the “factories and fields” workers but expands to other jobs including, of all things, FedEx deliverymen. And I think that’s because the mid-2000s, early teens image of the Real American is dissipating like the illusion it always was.
Country’s not dead, it’s just comatose.