Sep 23, 2020
By
now, it's largely taken for granted that country music is a
racialized signifier, interchangeable with right-wing politics. And
it’s not such an unreasonable generalization: the political
currents of twanged and drawled patriotic paeans like Lee
Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red,
White, and Blue (The Angry American)," and Brooks & Dunn's "Only In
America" leave little to the imagination.
But
how, exactly, did this come to be? After all, country music, a
descendant of the blues, folk, Tejano, and other genres, with
connections to labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of
the World and social-justice movements, has historically attracted
musicians spanning the political spectrum, and didn’t necessarily
emerge from such a staunchly right-wing political
tradition.
Rather, popular conceptions of country music have long
been deliberately shaped by a series of broader ideological
projects. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries,
conservative politicians and other right-wing forces have exploited
the genre to promote illiberalism, racism, revanchist politics, and
runaway anti-intellectualism where not giving a shit about the
world beyond one’s own cold beer, pickup truck, old lady is not
only acceptable, but actively encouraged and
flaunted.
On
this episode, we examine how the genre of country music has been
wielded as a tool of reactionary politicking in the US, from the
machinations of Henry Ford in the 1920s to the Nixon
administration’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s and ‘70s to the
heady Shock and
Y’all days of the Bush
years, and how a once working-class tradition became a cultural cul
de sac of worn-out tropes and middle-class, white grievance
politics.
Our
guest is writer, editor and artist Alexander
Billet.