This week is a relief. An absence of tension as nirvana. It’s speaking to you from the collective consciousness. A dispatch from beyond the algorithm. Utopia.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“A Few Hearts Ago” by Kylie Morgan
Karl Marx’s concept of utopia is a society that resolves existing social tensions. Though Marx was preoccupied with class conflicts, his definition also included dynamic resolution. Utopia exists in active opposition to real-life problems1.
If utopia is the resolution of all personal and societal problems — as opposed to the simple absence of them — then Kylie Morgan’s new single offers the chance to experience a sort of utopia. Morgan has exchanged the “wrong backseats” and “lonely roads” of her past loves for a “wide-eyed and selfless” love so good that it justifies all the pain that came before it. A love that doesn’t cause attachment injuries. A love that heals existing attachment injuries. What’s better than the total absence of heartbreak? The resolution of it. Captured on a sparkling and swelling track that sounds the way a fantasy about that resolution feels.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Trucks, Ducks, Bucks & Beer” by Brian Kelley
The idea of utopia is intrinsic to country music. America is unique in that it was founded — way back in 1776 — as utopia achieved2. Country music reinforces this national self-concept.
Media scholar Richard Dyer’s utopian framework — taken from “Entertainment and Utopia” — outlines a “Social Tension/Inadequency/Absence” along with a corresponding “Utopian Solution3.”
So how do these solutions appear within a text like Brian Kelley’s new single “Trucks, Bucks, Ducks & Beer?” Let’s look.
Abundance: The song centers on how much this rural life has to offer. The refraining “Trucks, ducks, bucks, and beer” emphasizes the ready availability of that which is necessary. While there may not be literal wealth, there is also an absence of explicit poverty. Material needs are met, and these boys “spend [their] checks on camo and ammo / And Redneck 35s4.” Importantly, the natural resources of this world — bass fish, pine trees, and the titular bucks — are limitless.
Energy: There’s the ebullient energy of the music itself, along with a lyrical emphasis on rural leisure: “longneck Friday nights” and “a tailgate dropped with a cold Shiner Bock.” Kelley says he “can’t drive by a field without slowin’ down” — the country-coded version of stopping to smell the roses — because a slow pace is integral to rural life as depicted in country music. Hard work is balanced with hard play.
Intensity: Country music restores drama to everyday life. Perhaps its most endearing quality is the sincere emotional amplitude — the electric aliveness of it.
Transparency: Country music is, first and foremost, sincere. A songwriter like Kelley positions himself as a sort of blue-collar everyman. The lyrics are earnest and the emotions are straightforward.
Community: Kelley uses the pronoun “I” once, in the first verse, and then goes on to use “we” seven times. This shift from an individual narrating consciousness to a collective one that centers community so strongly in the “country boy condition” that this slice of country life can only be accurately rendered in the plural first person.
Part of the draw of country music is the felt relief that it offers with this evocation. Like Morgan’s resolution of relational distress, this country hyperreality is relief from social and economic anxiety. A place where a person can feel like most — or even all — of their Maslow needs met.
Driving around in a truck with the windows down and a Keith Urban song on the radio is fundamentally a fantasy about the resolution of all social, relational, economic, environmental, and political tensions.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Fixer Upper” by Dallas Smith
Another formulaic country song that assumes the existence of American utopia. But what does it mean to live inside of a myth? There’s a great interview between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen here, teasing out an interesting causal relationship between Western mythology and domestic extremists like Cliven Bundy, who express a modernized and euphemistic manifest destiny.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
A little note on why Spotify’s algorithmic New Boots playlist will never touch the astronomical and widely-lauded cultural value of truck songs, from Ezra Klein’s New York Times op-ed, citing Kyle Chayka’s FILTERWOLD:
Thomas More’s Utopia exists without the contrasting context of the real world or its problems. Marx layers a sort of dialectical thinking onto More’s original idea. Nineties girlies will remember Utopia from Ever After (1998), obviously.
Baudrillard, duh.
I borrowed these screenshots and framework from Anne Helen Peterson’s exploration of Taylor Swift as utopia.
Here, 35-inch tires function (“35s”) as more than a practical necessity; they become an in-group status symbol like a lift kit.