In a review of Wednesday night’s CMA Awards show, Washington Post music critic Chris Richards echoed a popular critique of the country music industry, lamenting the event’s lack of overt political advocacy.
“Surely, today’s country stars have more to say about this nation, its leaders and its laws, and the fate of the people they’re singing to,” he wrote. “But if those words aren’t coming out now, when will they ever?”
This came after Richards acknowledged Carrie Underwood’s stunning performance of the hymn “Softly and Tenderly,” which honored the lives lost during the shooting in Las Vegas at a country concert last month. Richards also noted that both Maren Morris and Eric Church penned songs in the aftermath of that tragedy, but questioned why neither number was performed at the awards show on Wednesday.
The article’s headline seemed to capture its thesis, contending, “Country music is becoming the soundtrack of a nonexistent, apolitical no-place.”
The industry’s historical entanglement with politics is long, fascinating, and instructive, and I’ll be the first to complain about the burst of bland ballads about pickup trucks that dominated over the past decade, or the exorcism of the Dixie Chicks. But it doesn’t seem as though critics really want country musicians to get political so much as they want them to get liberal.
Take, for instance, Richards, who in his review of the CMAs complained of how “…not one artist found the courage to say a single word about gun control after 58 fans were shot dead at a country music festival in Las Vegas last month.” The operative phrase there is “gun control.” Were one of the artists to have declared their appreciation for the Second Amendment on Wednesday, I suspect they wouldn’t be receiving applause from reviewers for injecting politics back into the genre.
Underwood and co-host Brad Paisley deftly walked a fine line during the show, cracking jokes at the expense of President Trump that were lighthearted enough to elicit begrudging laughs even from his supporters, but still had a bit of bite. They had done the same for President Obama.
Country music today isn’t “apolitical” so much as it is nonpartisan. Many of its popular songs, however, are fiercely defensive of cultural values that are relevant in political contexts, from the dignity of blue-collar work, to religion, to family. Artists receive no credit for “getting political” with those statements because their messages aren’t liberal. When someone like Kacey Musgraves, one of the industry’s greatest treasures, pushes contemporary country’s more conservative boundaries leftward, she is applauded for getting political.
I may personally agree with Richards that artists whose muses take them in political directions should be comfortable sharing their music with fans, but I’m not so convinced they’re even suppressing those impulses to begin with. More country stars lean Left than people realize, but perhaps even Nashville’s Democrats are less inspired by politics than by faith, family, friends, and, yes, cold beer. I know I am.
At the awards on Wednesday night, the message embraced from the stage was one of unity, which can sound naive and simple here in Washington. Oddly, though, Richards identifies the “no-place” represented by the show as “nonexistent.” In fact, it would seem in the aftermath of division and tragedy, many Americans are firmly located in such a place where exasperation with both sides is widespread. I would venture a guess that place is populated more densely than the place for people who enjoy millionaires lecturing them about football.
