truck songs of the week #22: the coastalization of country
plus: some thoughts on Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter
This week is all those little details. It’s Kool-Aid. It’s reality television. It’s a reality more real than reality. It’s hyperreality.
Drive safe.
Get the full 2024 playlist here.
“Austin” by Dasha
Dasha doesn’t really feel like a country artist. She’s got a real monogenre sound. But this particular song — with its stomp/clap percussion, spaghetti western guitar, and hyperactive fiddle — has a country quality that landed it on the truck songs playlist. My favorite thing about it? This chorus-ending kiss-off: “In forty years you'll still be here / Drunk washed up in Austin.” There’s a whole lot of mythology about this central Texas city, and Austin mostly drinks its own Kool-Aid. But, if we’re being for real for real, it’s the kind of town where people do wind up drunk and washed up forty years later. God bless a country song willing to call this city on its bullshit.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Next Best Thing” by Tenille Arts
Tenille Arts has appeared at least twice as a guest star on ABC’s The Bachelor, which is its own weird kind of Nashville cred. I always thought those artists were totally made up, but she seems to have crafted a genuine career from it, and this is a love-gone-up-in-flames track that hits just right.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
“Damn Good Day To Leave” by Riley Green
This rollicking Riley Green track is the kind of happy breakup song that country music specializes in. “You picked a damn good day to leave… me / Sittin’ here, cooler full of Keystone,” he sings, spinning that country hook into a cheerful and well-branded cheap beer moment. This song feels like the spiritual successor to Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee.” That’s the kind of monumental pleasure it takes in drinking beer by the river.
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube
COWBOY CARTER
I won’t wade too far into the Beyoncé discourse because I don’t pretend to have the Beyoncé-expertise that would require. I was captivated by Taylor Crumpton’s deep dive review for The Daily Beast.
An excerpt here, reflecting on the album’s opening track “Ameriican Requiem”:
I hopped into a moderated Zoom call with Crumpton yesterday, during which she spoke about feeling pushed to “coastalize” her music writing. Since media is so disproportionately located along the coasts, music criticism is often disconnected from the places that country music is about. There’s a lot of pressure to write within prevailing narratives that alternately fetishize or pathologize “country.” Anytime top-down narratives get forced onto reality, genuine experiences get lost. Part of the brilliance of Cowboy Carter is that it is grounded in observed reality. That is, after all, how you arrive at saying anything original.
This is what Chuck Klosterman meant when he said that the brilliance of Nashville country — or what he called “Wal-Mart country” — is the way “the organic themes in Wal-Mart country filter up from its audience.”
This is why I keep harping on the importance of material objects in country music. When John Morgan sings about “Waylon turned up on the JBL,” he’s not trying to come up with some new idea that’s never been sung before. The Nashville powers that be don’t place that kind of premium on saying something new. Instead, we get a song more present with the material details of real life. It adjusts reflexively to fit its specific zeitgeist. Listening to “Friends Like That,” you get the sense that Morgan just looked around, saw that JBL-branded speaker pumping out Waylon Jennings tunes over BlueTooth, and threw it in his lyrics. The result is at once familiar and different from anything else on the radio, and this, to me, is a distinguishing feature of contemporary popular country music.
Klosterman, again: “While rock and hip-hop constantly try to break through to future consciousness — and while alt country tries to replicate a lost consciousness from the 1930s — modern country artists validate the experience of living right here, right now.”
On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé does this — and she does it well.
Great W Magazine article on Tanner Adell who deserves her moment in the mainstream spotlight, whether it comes via Beyoncé or not.
This Vogue China cover featuring Rihanna in Pharrell’s cowboy-core FW24 collection for Louis Vuitton because it absolutely fucks.
A little bit of personal news: Had a bit of a hiatus over the last couple of weeks as I submitted and defended my graduate thesis. I’ve also got a couple of writing projects coming out in the next few weeks that I’ll be sure to share here.
In the meantime, I’m headed to Nashville this upcoming weekend. If you send your address to rosemcmackin@gmail.com, I will send you a handwritten country music postcard.
Dig the hair!