02-26-2022, 01:09 PM
Too Many Honkies at the Honky Tonk
Jim Goad
1,804 words
Back in the mid-1990s when Tiger Woods took the golf world by storm and the American press was enraptured with the Earth-shifting progress that having a splash of melanin on the putting green signified, I can’t recall hearing a single black person joyously exclaiming, “Lawdy me and Land o’ Goshen, it’s about goddamned time a brother won the Masters!”
I never knew blacks to care much for golfing.
Similarly, I’ve never met a black person who lost sleep worrying that country music — a genre that has been dying a slow death along with the culturally distinct white working class that produced it during a specific historical era — was “too white.” Apparently, though, it’s a big problem. I had no idea it was a problem, and I also had no idea that I was making the problem worse by being so drunk on privilege that I never noticed how big a problem it truly is.
Even more problematic is the fact that the musician who had the biggest-selling album out of all musical genres last year was Morgan Wallen, a white country artist who faced scorn and widespread deplatforming a year ago when some snooping neighbor released a tape showing an apparently drunken Wallen telling his white cohorts, “Hey, take care of this pussy-ass nigga.” As far as I can discern, Wallen was attempting to make sure that his drunken white friend arrived at his destination safely.
I have seen no reports that his friend felt insulted by being categorized as a black person, and I find it interesting that I’m the only one who seems capable of empathizing with his friend here.
Neither do I know whether any black people were furious at being compared to Wallen’s drunken white friend. But the “firestorm” of “outrage” that erupted led Wallen’s booking agent to drop him, for his record label to suspend him indefinitely, and for much of the country-music radio industry to stop playing his music.
Wallen apologized: “I’m embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I want to sincerely apologize for using the word. I promise to do better” — and pledged a half-million dollars to black-led organizations. But at one point last year while he was being boycotted by radio stations, Wallen still had five of the nation’s Top 50 country singles. He racked up his biggest-selling-album-of-the-year numbers after his “pussy-ass nigga” scandal last February. It’s hard to think he achieved this level of success after an N-bomb controversy because of his apology; I’d like to believe his sales catapulted strictly due to the fact that he used the word, hard “R” or not.
But for many others — you know the type, we all know the type, we are sick to fucking death of the type — an innocent N-bomb hurled at a white friend was all the proof they needed that “racism” still runs “rampant” in the country music industry. When one re-reckons the fact that we are now nearly two years into the racial reckoning that kicked off when George Floyd passed a counterfeit bill and then had a Fentanyl conniption, after all the burned buildings and raped women and murder victims, I shake my damn bald head that we still live in a world where a country star feels entitled to refer to his drunken white friend as a “pussy-ass nigga.”
Clearly it is time for a Great Replacement of sorts in country music. It is time for “the white man’s blues” to go black and never come back.
Mickey Guyton is a black female country singer who had languished around Nashville for nearly a decade without much success until she decided to focus her lyrics on her big, bushy black Afro and the fact that most country music fans don’t realize what it’s like to be black like her, after which she became a useful tool for those who were “scurrying to fix the optics of having too many white faces in country music.” She quickly became the first black woman to be nominated for a solo country Grammy, the first black woman to host the Academy of Country Music Awards, and just recently the first black female country singer to belt out the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. She’s hardly the first black woman to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, and this year’s halftime show was basically a chemical spill of aggressive blackness, but Guyton “overcame racism” to become the first black female country singer to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl during Black History Month, and Mickey says this is very important to the famously country-music-loving black community:
It’s Black History Month, and a black country singer gets to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. Wow. This is a huge moment for me. It’s a huge moment for black people. And I want to represent that in the best possible way that I can.
Uplifting stuff. Do your song lyrics address any other topics besides being black? I mean, I think you’ve already covered that.
But whereas one might expect a black person to be silly and overenthusiastic about these things — c’mon, give them a break, they truly don’t have a lot to celebrate — to me, the true Simon Legree characters in these scenarios are the white artists who piously condemn everything that “old” country music represented in an apparent attempt to keep afloat in a climate where the biggest-selling country artist in the world was nearly unpersoned because he referred to a drunken white friend as a “pussy-ass nigga.”
Jason Isbell is one such character, and according to a glowing profile from the literary geniuses over at BuzzFeed, the country singer “Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” Isbell recorded a 2017 song called “White Man’s World” in which he managed to feel guilty about both the black man and the red man:
I’m a white man living on a white man’s street
I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet
The highway runs through their burial grounds
Past the oceans of cotton
I’m a white man looking in a black man’s eyes
Wishing I’d never been one of the guys
Who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke
Oh, the times ain’t forgotten
Nice lyrics, bro. Sharing your guilt is freakin’ brave.
Isbell, who made an ostentatious display of hiring seven separate black country female performers to open his eight-night stand at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, refers to Morgan Wallen as an “idiot” and essentially a failed human being in the aftermath of Pussy-Ass Niggagate, which is why it must sting Isbell in the core of his little jellyfish heart that his all-time most successful song, “Cover Me Up” — which has been streamed 48 million times on Spotify — was covered by the idiot racist Morgan Wallen and got nearly 200 million listens. That’s gotta hurt.
Is it possible that consumers are starving for some breathtakingly unabashed racial animosity in their popular music? And would this be such a horrible trend?
Civilizations, like musical genres and ideological fads, emerge during very specific temporal, demographic, economic, climatic, and geographic circumstances. The country music that I love — the lush, swelling, reverb-drenched, massive-sounding, orchestral, narcotic “Nashville Sound” of the 1960s — conjures for me a total environment where America was on top of the world, conditions for the white working class were better than they’d ever been, and where generations of propagandistic guilt-tripping and carefully curated demographic replacement had yet to corrode and hobble the practitioners of this whitest of musical forms to the point where the most urgent issue facing country music is that it needs more black singers and that everyone is forbidden from calling them niggers.
But that world is gone — forever, never to return –, so country music is now perma-stillborn, an anachronism, forced to be either a pathetic nostalgia act or a postmodern gesture of blasphemy against the original art form, which is I guess what’s happening with all the black singers and all the decidedly non-hillbilly social-justice obsessions.
Gone is the primitively quaint world of the Skillet Lickers, a hillbilly band from Georgia who recorded “Run Nigger Run” in 1927 and “Nigger in the Woodpile” in 1930, and yet still, to this very minute, seem far less tediously offensive to me than some black woman becoming a millionaire by whining that country music neglects black women.
There were some great old black country musicians, too; I’ve never heard anyone play a harmonica better than DeFord Bailey, and Linda Martell could do justice to a song about heartbreak in a way that could make Kitty Wells proud. Charley Pride went from Sledge, Mississippi to smelting plants in Montana to the Grand Ole Opry, and even in the 1970s, country fans were so bigoted that they gave him 30 number one singles. Country fans also snapped up singles by Johnny Cash that lionized racially-abused Native American war vets, and anti-racist children’s songs by Henson Cargill. And for all the flak that country music gets about being misogynist, it boasts a higher quotient of female performers than rap, R&B, and indie rock.
The difference between country music now and that of the 1960s can be summed up in one word: guilt. Back when country music was good, it was related to a healthy culture. There was no white guilt and no wannabe black musicians guilt-tripping their way into a career. Charley Pride was a black man from Mississippi, but I don’t recall him ever singing about being black. He sung about heartbreak and hitchhiking in the rain to get away from a woman he’d never be able to get over. And even though his audience was likely composed of 99% rural crackers at any given moment, I don’t ever remember Charley Pride apologizing for being black or scolding his audience for being white.
But now we inhabit a world where even the biggest-selling country artists have to express contrition to the entire black diaspora because they drunkenly called a white friend a “pussy-ass nigga.” Every white country artist is expected to either show remorse for, or never even mention, the fact that they’re white — only Merle Haggard was able to survive putting out a single called “I’m a White Boy,” and that was 45 years ago — whereas black country artists are encouraged to plumb the depths of their blackness and everyone else is discouraged from even thinking of stopping them.
Does anyone think that will end well? Do any of you pussy-ass niggas even think it was designed to end well?
Country music died a while ago; what’s happening now is simply the ritual abuse of its corpse. Better to leave the old lady alone and gently shut the barn door.
Jim Goad
1,804 words
Back in the mid-1990s when Tiger Woods took the golf world by storm and the American press was enraptured with the Earth-shifting progress that having a splash of melanin on the putting green signified, I can’t recall hearing a single black person joyously exclaiming, “Lawdy me and Land o’ Goshen, it’s about goddamned time a brother won the Masters!”
I never knew blacks to care much for golfing.
Similarly, I’ve never met a black person who lost sleep worrying that country music — a genre that has been dying a slow death along with the culturally distinct white working class that produced it during a specific historical era — was “too white.” Apparently, though, it’s a big problem. I had no idea it was a problem, and I also had no idea that I was making the problem worse by being so drunk on privilege that I never noticed how big a problem it truly is.
Even more problematic is the fact that the musician who had the biggest-selling album out of all musical genres last year was Morgan Wallen, a white country artist who faced scorn and widespread deplatforming a year ago when some snooping neighbor released a tape showing an apparently drunken Wallen telling his white cohorts, “Hey, take care of this pussy-ass nigga.” As far as I can discern, Wallen was attempting to make sure that his drunken white friend arrived at his destination safely.
I have seen no reports that his friend felt insulted by being categorized as a black person, and I find it interesting that I’m the only one who seems capable of empathizing with his friend here.
Neither do I know whether any black people were furious at being compared to Wallen’s drunken white friend. But the “firestorm” of “outrage” that erupted led Wallen’s booking agent to drop him, for his record label to suspend him indefinitely, and for much of the country-music radio industry to stop playing his music.
Wallen apologized: “I’m embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I want to sincerely apologize for using the word. I promise to do better” — and pledged a half-million dollars to black-led organizations. But at one point last year while he was being boycotted by radio stations, Wallen still had five of the nation’s Top 50 country singles. He racked up his biggest-selling-album-of-the-year numbers after his “pussy-ass nigga” scandal last February. It’s hard to think he achieved this level of success after an N-bomb controversy because of his apology; I’d like to believe his sales catapulted strictly due to the fact that he used the word, hard “R” or not.
But for many others — you know the type, we all know the type, we are sick to fucking death of the type — an innocent N-bomb hurled at a white friend was all the proof they needed that “racism” still runs “rampant” in the country music industry. When one re-reckons the fact that we are now nearly two years into the racial reckoning that kicked off when George Floyd passed a counterfeit bill and then had a Fentanyl conniption, after all the burned buildings and raped women and murder victims, I shake my damn bald head that we still live in a world where a country star feels entitled to refer to his drunken white friend as a “pussy-ass nigga.”
Clearly it is time for a Great Replacement of sorts in country music. It is time for “the white man’s blues” to go black and never come back.
Mickey Guyton is a black female country singer who had languished around Nashville for nearly a decade without much success until she decided to focus her lyrics on her big, bushy black Afro and the fact that most country music fans don’t realize what it’s like to be black like her, after which she became a useful tool for those who were “scurrying to fix the optics of having too many white faces in country music.” She quickly became the first black woman to be nominated for a solo country Grammy, the first black woman to host the Academy of Country Music Awards, and just recently the first black female country singer to belt out the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. She’s hardly the first black woman to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, and this year’s halftime show was basically a chemical spill of aggressive blackness, but Guyton “overcame racism” to become the first black female country singer to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl during Black History Month, and Mickey says this is very important to the famously country-music-loving black community:
It’s Black History Month, and a black country singer gets to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl. Wow. This is a huge moment for me. It’s a huge moment for black people. And I want to represent that in the best possible way that I can.
Uplifting stuff. Do your song lyrics address any other topics besides being black? I mean, I think you’ve already covered that.
But whereas one might expect a black person to be silly and overenthusiastic about these things — c’mon, give them a break, they truly don’t have a lot to celebrate — to me, the true Simon Legree characters in these scenarios are the white artists who piously condemn everything that “old” country music represented in an apparent attempt to keep afloat in a climate where the biggest-selling country artist in the world was nearly unpersoned because he referred to a drunken white friend as a “pussy-ass nigga.”
Jason Isbell is one such character, and according to a glowing profile from the literary geniuses over at BuzzFeed, the country singer “Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia.” Isbell recorded a 2017 song called “White Man’s World” in which he managed to feel guilty about both the black man and the red man:
I’m a white man living on a white man’s street
I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet
The highway runs through their burial grounds
Past the oceans of cotton
I’m a white man looking in a black man’s eyes
Wishing I’d never been one of the guys
Who pretended not to hear another white man’s joke
Oh, the times ain’t forgotten
Nice lyrics, bro. Sharing your guilt is freakin’ brave.
Isbell, who made an ostentatious display of hiring seven separate black country female performers to open his eight-night stand at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, refers to Morgan Wallen as an “idiot” and essentially a failed human being in the aftermath of Pussy-Ass Niggagate, which is why it must sting Isbell in the core of his little jellyfish heart that his all-time most successful song, “Cover Me Up” — which has been streamed 48 million times on Spotify — was covered by the idiot racist Morgan Wallen and got nearly 200 million listens. That’s gotta hurt.
Is it possible that consumers are starving for some breathtakingly unabashed racial animosity in their popular music? And would this be such a horrible trend?
Civilizations, like musical genres and ideological fads, emerge during very specific temporal, demographic, economic, climatic, and geographic circumstances. The country music that I love — the lush, swelling, reverb-drenched, massive-sounding, orchestral, narcotic “Nashville Sound” of the 1960s — conjures for me a total environment where America was on top of the world, conditions for the white working class were better than they’d ever been, and where generations of propagandistic guilt-tripping and carefully curated demographic replacement had yet to corrode and hobble the practitioners of this whitest of musical forms to the point where the most urgent issue facing country music is that it needs more black singers and that everyone is forbidden from calling them niggers.
But that world is gone — forever, never to return –, so country music is now perma-stillborn, an anachronism, forced to be either a pathetic nostalgia act or a postmodern gesture of blasphemy against the original art form, which is I guess what’s happening with all the black singers and all the decidedly non-hillbilly social-justice obsessions.
Gone is the primitively quaint world of the Skillet Lickers, a hillbilly band from Georgia who recorded “Run Nigger Run” in 1927 and “Nigger in the Woodpile” in 1930, and yet still, to this very minute, seem far less tediously offensive to me than some black woman becoming a millionaire by whining that country music neglects black women.
There were some great old black country musicians, too; I’ve never heard anyone play a harmonica better than DeFord Bailey, and Linda Martell could do justice to a song about heartbreak in a way that could make Kitty Wells proud. Charley Pride went from Sledge, Mississippi to smelting plants in Montana to the Grand Ole Opry, and even in the 1970s, country fans were so bigoted that they gave him 30 number one singles. Country fans also snapped up singles by Johnny Cash that lionized racially-abused Native American war vets, and anti-racist children’s songs by Henson Cargill. And for all the flak that country music gets about being misogynist, it boasts a higher quotient of female performers than rap, R&B, and indie rock.
The difference between country music now and that of the 1960s can be summed up in one word: guilt. Back when country music was good, it was related to a healthy culture. There was no white guilt and no wannabe black musicians guilt-tripping their way into a career. Charley Pride was a black man from Mississippi, but I don’t recall him ever singing about being black. He sung about heartbreak and hitchhiking in the rain to get away from a woman he’d never be able to get over. And even though his audience was likely composed of 99% rural crackers at any given moment, I don’t ever remember Charley Pride apologizing for being black or scolding his audience for being white.
But now we inhabit a world where even the biggest-selling country artists have to express contrition to the entire black diaspora because they drunkenly called a white friend a “pussy-ass nigga.” Every white country artist is expected to either show remorse for, or never even mention, the fact that they’re white — only Merle Haggard was able to survive putting out a single called “I’m a White Boy,” and that was 45 years ago — whereas black country artists are encouraged to plumb the depths of their blackness and everyone else is discouraged from even thinking of stopping them.
Does anyone think that will end well? Do any of you pussy-ass niggas even think it was designed to end well?
Country music died a while ago; what’s happening now is simply the ritual abuse of its corpse. Better to leave the old lady alone and gently shut the barn door.