This week is a deep dive on the “girls with guns” trope.
She’s a damsel in fight or flight. Your combat stiletto queen. Jeanne d’Archetype.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“Too Easy” by Tanner Adell
Our favorite Buckle Bunny is back, freshly credentialed by an appearance on Cowboy Carter, with a stompy party track written for the forthcoming Twisters soundtrack. The music video features the PBR Nashville Buckle Bunnies doing a little heel click heel click knee slap turn, lending further support to my theory that LINE DANCING IS BACK, BABY.
Let us not forget that Adell is a banjo-wielding Black Mormon woman from Malibu, California who traffics in the cross-genre imagery of handguns, lifted pickups, snakeskin boots, and dirt roads. It does not get more American than that.
On her early releases, though, those diverse cultural signals felt confused. Take the cover art for her debut single, “Honky Tonk Heartbreak.” The lawn flamingos, the corgi, the camo wrap gun, the bachelorette party hat, the Backwoods Barbie font, the plastic boots???
Her second single, “Country Girl Commandments,” feels confused in similar ways. I was captivated by the mishmash of references that appear in the second verse. The linking of Glock and Louis Vuitton as aspirational brands. Bonnie and Clyde is hip-hop canon. Or even the specificity of this highly concealable handgun (illegal, incidentally, in Adell’s home state of California). A lot is going on here.
But her recent series of releases feel progressively more cohesive as she settles into a persona that marries hip-hop swagger with the tough country girl trope. Club-ready country tracks that could give Beyoncé a run for her money.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“MUD” by CeCe
X-Factor reality-cum-pop star CeCe1 is making a play for country audiences with this hick-hop track. The Los Angeles-based singer’s aesthetic right now is very country-Halsey-cosplay, the sort of kitschy white trash fetishization2 that is popular right now.
What struck me about this song was this line: “I always keep my daddy’s 45 in the truck / And if them boys get rowdy, Imma show ‘em what’s up”3. The line is clearly designed to telegraph “tomboy,” or maybe even “badass.” CeCe can keep up with the boys. She’s got daddy’s gun. It’s chambered in 9mm.
OK, fine, whatever.
But, over and over, the song’s production features the sound of a racking shotgun.
On the simplest level, pop culture’s obsession with shotguns — particularly with racking them for effect — is funny. This goofy clip does a lot, in just 19 seconds, to unpack the meaning of that noise, which only sounds like bravado to people who are unfamiliar with guns, since someone racking their shotgun is necessarily walking around with an unchambered firearm — or ejecting an unfired shell.
But even funnier to me is that, while .45 ACP is a standard handgun caliber, there is not, to my knowledge, a .45 shotgun. It’s all a bit nonsensical.
The song isn’t terribly interested in the technical aspects of guns; instead, it treats them as symbols for toughness. Cece seems likely to muzzle sweep you immediately. The emphasis on the symbolic, rather than practical, use of guns, strikes me as increasingly imported from hip-hop, along with trap beats and drum machines.
In general, country music has relied on different symbols to signify hypermasculinity — like pickup trucks or long cut. When guns do appear, they are usually directly connected to depictions of violence and treated as a tool of last resort. Guns appear in both genres but mean something different in country music because guns are used differently in rural settings. In hip-hop, you might say that firearms predominantly function to manage interpersonal relations. Intimidation is the point. But, in a rural world where everyone has a gun — even children have guns — they no longer function well as a metaphorical stand-in for testicles.
It’s music for (and by) people who took Gun Safety at the local NRA chapter when they were 12 and deeply internalized the “Don’t pull a gun you aren’t prepared to shoot” maxim.
But I digress…
I am prepared to argue that women in country music are allowed to brandish guns more… theatrically; the genre has its own fixation with the sexualization of “badass” women. Miranda Lambert, in particular, has made a whole brand out of being “the girl who played with guns,” including an Oklahoma hotel named after Smith & Wesson’s LadySmith double-action revolver.
But we’ll have to forgive CeCe for her limited gun knowledge since being hot is, in itself, a very time-consuming hobby and it doesn’t always leave bandwidth for knowing much else.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Dirt On Us” by Alli Walker
Alli Walker is talking dirty trucks
More backwoods camp. Why is Walker’s look giving countryfied-McBling?4
But why the perennial appeal of the country tough girl? Is she hot to men or is she hot, mostly, to women? To a certain kind of woman who identifies with her?
Something about these songs makes me feel like the main character, like I can really feel the full breadth of my manual-transmission-driving, power-tool-operating, fiendishly-high-pain-tolerance toughness.
It’s the country version of the Action Girl trope. She has broad appeal, considering the commercial success of IP like Tomb Raider or Furiosa. But, while Action Girl is ostensibly genre-agnostic, she appears in country music more than, say, pop music — perhaps because musical genres themselves contain implicit ideas about what is sexy.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
Tyler Childers is writing modern country standards and you will never convince me otherwise.
In interviews, Frey brags about going after Whitney Houston’s high notes without ever having voice training, which leaves me scared for her, y’all. My vocal chords hurt just reading that.
Evidence: I’m writing this while wearing a mini dress made out of an old Carhartt t-shirt.
What does this even mean though??? Is she shooting these boys for getting too rowdy?????
I officially predict we’re less than 12 months out from a reboot of The Simple Life.