The One Year Country Music Appreciation Guide

This week, I want to do something of a postmortem. Not on an actually dead artist, although there are plenty of them I can cover in a genre with as long of a lifespan as country. I want to talk about a group that is still alive and kicking, but isn’t making country music anymore: The Band Perry. Why do this? Why talk about them? And why is this band that is ostensibly still around getting a postmortem out of me? The Band Perry hit the Nashville scene like fucking napalm. There was no one who looked like them, no one who sounded like them, no one with lyrics like them. When your first single gets certified platinum six times , there’s some kind of magic there. Something that’s happening, and is worth paying attention to. During their country tenure, they could basically do no wrong, cranking out hit after hit after hit, and building a rabid fanbase. They brought this pop-punk meets country meets Americana sound and aesthetic, very different from the plaid crop tops and butt-huggin...

So last week, we talked about TomatoGate and women in country , and that wasn’t an accident. I did absolutely want to cover a sort of “foundational situation” in the country music industry as it exists today. But I also know myself, and I know that I like a lot of female country artists. Especially if folks are looking for something a bit more mainstream, women are usually the first names off my lips for folks looking for examples of good country. Miranda Lambert, The Chicks, Carrie Underwood, Brandi Motherfucking Carlile. If female country artists are the tomatoes, then let it be known: I love tomatoes. I mean, in country music. I’m gay as a drag queen sniffing poppers at White Party while lip syncing to Cher. But I love female-sung country, so I knew that I wanted to open up the gate rather quickly to me discussing female artists. And at least for me, there’s one who comes to mind before anyone else. Reba McEntire has been a staple of the country music industry since 1980, aft...

  So I wanted to do this article for week two for a few reasons. A: I wanted to make it abundantly clear that not all of these are going to be explorations of singular artists. B: A lot of people who aren’t as into country are often under the (completely understandable) impression that country music is one-note, and that note is not “feminism.” And C: I like a lot of female country artists, and it would be irresponsible and ill-advised for me to start talking about female country artists without also touching on their place in the industry, including fucking TomatoGate . Yeah, country music had a fill-in-the-blank-gate just like everything else in the mid 2010s, and this one was about women in country. To put it very briefly, a country radio consultant said that songs from female artists should never be played back to back on country radio, because women were the tomatoes in the salad, and men were the lettuce. And no, he didn’t mean that male country artists were bitter and bl...