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Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?
Epistemic Status: Elaborate inside joke with myself from spending too long riding in a truck listening to country radio.
I grew up with a certain country music cliche, that every straitlaced city girl wanted to cut loose and ride a dirt road with a country boy. Trace Adkins made it clear that Ladies Love Country Boys; Kenney Chesney’s woman [] Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy and is always staring at him when he’s chugging along; Big and Rich saddled up their horses and rode into the city, where the girls shouted Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy; Joe Diffie found that all you needed was an F150 because women loved a Pickup Man; even mr sunshine on my god damn shoulders John Denver’s the Cowboy and the Lady and country godfather Johny Cash’s If I were a Carpenter play to the same trope.
Today our swaggering country hero has been replaced at the top of the charts with soulful bittersweet songs by small town men who lost their upwardly mobile girls to the city life.
Country megastar Morgan Wallen’s More than My Hometown dominated country radio so hard it even charted on the Billboard 100. The lyrics reflect a man left behind by a woman who loved him, but had ambitions for bigger things than he could give her.
23 by Sam Hunt follows the same storyline a few years down the road (as does Wallen’s own Seven Summers
Looking at the lyrics, there’s a common trope of an ambitious young woman leaving her country fried boyfriend behind. He was fun while he lasted, but she wanted more from life and he didn’t, she left town he stayed, she wanted bright lights and office views and drinking wine with grown up friends while he wanted gas station coffee with the same buddies he had from high school. Note that neither singer really denies the objective superiority of the city life, or puts in much effort to defending small town worldview, they simply agree to disagree with their lost loves.
The swaggering songs I grew up with reflected a world where the working class country white man was dominant, resurgent culturally. Country music’s crossover popularity reflected it: singers like Alan Jackson and Toby Keith and Shania Twain hit it big, country dominated charts in a way it hadn’t before and wouldn’t since. The cities were hollowed out, the downtowns emptied, the exurbs were being built. The exurbs culturally identified themselves with rural, more than urban, values. Cultural creation is about distinguishing oneself from others, after White Flight they wished to distinguish themselves from the city they left, and with the rural areas they colonized. The suburban dad, the kind who buys a John Deere baseball cap to go with his lawn mower and hoped his wife thought it was sexy, that was the core country music consumer. That was the man who listened to Big and Rich and could imagine himself as “the only John Wayne left in this town;” and who wouldn’t trade his "Silverado for [the city’s] Escalade or your freak parade.” The kind of guy who bought an F-150 crew cab with a sparkling clean bed and fancied himself a “pickup man.” The music reflected a confidence, a swagger, the country man was sexually potent, a real man not like the effeminates and freaks from the city.
The dynamics of the 2020s’ give us these Sad Working Class Boy country songs. The SWCB is Nashville’s interpretation of the zeitgeist, which reflects material reality: women now hold 3% more degrees, and represent 56% of the current tertiary student population. A 56-44 gender gap of degrees means a huge percentage of men without degrees see women they should be dating, women they may have dated in their carefree teens and twenties, they see these women become upwardly mobile while they do not. This is reflected in populations. In NYC, LA, and Chicago there are 10 adult women for every 9 adult men. Those women came from somewhere, and they left men behind, they left the SWCBs behind, in their rural and exurban hometowns.
The SWCB song taps into a deep vein of truth for millions of Americans who lived that story. Women who dated men they knew in high school or still too young to worry about marriage, “in between real love and real life.” Couples that enjoyed spending time together, but ultimately were unable to bridge the gap between their competing ambitions and lifestyles. The country singer, and audience he embodies, has drifted from being the irresistible object of attraction, to being good enough to bed but not good enough to wed. The swaggering blare of Big and Rich handing out hundred dollar bills has been replaced by the lament of a himbo grisette in a cowboy hat for young female yuppies. Inevitably left behind when his novelty fades, left with memories but no ring in his small hometown.
The traditional character of the Grisette, a young working class girl that the Parisian artist or bourgeois student would have an affair with in his youth before abandoning her for a proper marriage to a woman of his class, provides the clearest parallel to the SWCB. Fontine in Les Miserables is probably the character most likely to ring a bell for the audience here. Where in 18th-19th century Paris, when men had sexual freedom and women were repressed, working class women were used for pleasure and then thrown away; today when women have sexual freedom working class boys are used and then thrown away. Good enough for now, not good enough for forever.
Maybe the transition song is Kenny Chesney’s All the Pretty Girls:
The questions ask themselves: the pretty girls are “home for the summer” from college while Kenny just stayed in his hometown. They still want to hang out, but eventually they won’t, the story goes from In Love with the Boy to All the Pretty Girls to 23. Kenny should have hit the books, then maybe they would have stayed together.
Reminds me of the ‘higher education is for women’ trope- the only acceptable future that can be pushed for women coming out of high school is going to university and seeking a professional class job. Young men, of course, you can tell them to think seriously of joining the military or learning a trade, but don’t you dare advocate anything for women other than university to PMC. Now to some extent this is because parents don’t like to think about their daughters doing dangerous things(getting shot at, working on an Alaskan crab boat) and the trades are not a very friendly workplace for women, other than the butchest lesbians, but see below.
Heck, even the ‘Emily’ ad recruiting for the US army- lots of people missed this for the woke crap about lesbian parents and fighting for equality, but what I noticed was she went to college and then joined the army. Motteizeans who were in the military, sound off- how many enlisted showed up with education beyond high school, let alone a degree? I am not under the impression it was many at all, although I meet plenty of veterans who enlisted and then got a degree.
There is simply a cultural value in the USA where all women must go to college, otherwise they’re going to become either trailer-trash loser single mother fast food workers whose kids don’t share a dad, or horribly oppressed homemakers beaten by their hypocrite alcoholic husbands. I don’t think this is the IRL norm for working class women, although yes they’re more likely to be beaten or be single mothers than degree holding women, but the cultural prejudice is real.
Yeah. My parents figured that both me and my sister would go to college. They cautioned me against joining the military because of leftist disagreements with US foreign policy; they cautioned my sister extra hard. They were fine with her trying to become an ironworker or something if she wanted, though. IDK how an athletic average size woman pulls off working on an Alaskan crab boat, but if she did, more power to her, she's a badass.
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I am about as far from the target audience of the messaging as possible, but my impression is that (apart from the specific appeal to the Violent Class discussed by JTarrou, which only the USMC really features in its messaging) the "join the military" message is a combination of:
So I don't think the military (apart from USMC grunt) is sold as an alternative pathway to getting a degree, more as a better route to a degree for less-bookish more-masculine men compared to going to a 4-year college straight out of HS.
There certainly was a message of enlist in the military to figure your shit out, get benefits for life, and learn a trade that you don’t necessarily need college for, at least when I was in middle and high school. There was also a travel the world for cheap angle and an appeal to patriotism angle.
VA loans featured in recruitment ads as much as the GI bill did when I was young.
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I think it’s this. Culture is saying the quiet parts out loud and the blue collar lifestyle is now seen as undesirable. Either the people themselves are unacceptable (racist, stupid, poor, and so on), or the life itself is seen by the cultural elites as much less than modern exurbs have to offer (mostly fake-authentic foods, night clubs, wine stores, and the option of more culturally acceptable jobs). I don’t think it’s a jobs thing entirely as the vast majority of women I know with college degrees end up in education or other casually full time jobs that allow regular time off and don’t interfere too much with domestic duties.
Although I will say that another part of this is that country singers lost their mojo because they now accept their cultural inferiority— even country artists see the country as old-fashioned places that used to be good where you used to be able to get the good life. Compare that to hip hop and even people rapping about the inner city are talking about fast cars, drugs and alcohol, good times and loose women. They still see their culture as good, something worth embracing.
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