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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.
I always wonder what that difference is for say 22 to 34 year olds.
Tbh I suspect that stat to be bullshit for different reasons; huge percentages of the urban underclass are imprisoned, the stereotype is that ghettoes are emptied out of prime age men. If I moved to NYC, the availability of a vast quantity of women in the worse parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx doesn't really matter to me one way or the other, what would matter is the gender balance in my social circle.
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