The Three Biggest Problems With Contemporary Country Music

As the end of the current decade approaches, I realized in the past few months that I'd soon be doing my decennial list of favorite country music singles the decade produced.  In the past, the struggle has been to limit the list to 20 or 25 titles over the course of a 10-year span.  In the 2010s, the struggle is to come up with 20 or 25 songs worthy of high praise.  Having recently watched Ken Burns' comprehensive 16-hour documentary on "Country Music" on PBS last month, it's really striking how bleak this past decade's country music has been compared to the historical standard.  I get that that's the persistent grumble from people of a certain age (I'm there now!) about the music the kids are listening to these days, but it's not as if I'm on an island judging today's country music as being in a sad state of affairs compared to pretty much any other time in the genre's history.  The sentiment is pretty close to universal.

I could probably do a list of 20 reasons why the country music of today is inferior to pretty much any time in the genre's past, but three reasons pretty much spell out its biggest problems....

#1.  It's too immature and emotionless.

Obviously you can go back to the Hank Williams era and every era since and always find plenty of country music that has been silly and lyrically nonsubstantive.  I don't have a problem with that so long as there's a balance, mixing the trifles in with songs that carry some weight.  This decade's country music has been weighted much more heavily in the direction of the trifles, and rarely with vocal performances that lift the material above the way its frivolous lyrics read on paper.  It doesn't help that the genre's sound has evolved into a hip-hop hybrid set to beatbox and/or generic snap tracks that saps all the identity out of the instrumentation.  It would be a struggle for me to get into music set to such a pretentious and unappealing sound no matter how good the lyrics are, but when that sound is coupled with an assembly line of lyrical cliches written by the same dozen or so Nashville scribes and performed by middle-aged guys who are 15 years too old to believably sell those lyrical cliches, there's precious little to hang my hat on.

In the 80s and 90s, I took for granted the story songs and tear-in-my-beer ballads that were a mainstay in the commercially available selection of country music.  Those started to become endangered into the 2000s but really got scarce in the 2010s, and often held to the lower reaches of the charts when they are released as singles.  The best I can say is that songs that fit this profile that do become hits nowadays stand out as throwback beacons amidst a radio landscape overwhelmed with empty ditties devoid of personality.  One of the biggest problems, I suspect, is that the record companies' sales have plunged so much that they have far fewer songwriters on staff....meaning the vastly shrunken litany of songwriters who are on staff have to write everything.  The result is a product that breeds repetition and uninspired soullessness to the point that the songs just become background noise.

#2.  Not enough women.

I've always had a bias toward women country singers as their vocals seem more emotive and better at interpreting the lyrics than their male counterparts.  Suffice it to say that in the 2010s, my bias has been the diametric opposite of country radio programmers' bias.  At no point in my lifetime, or probably my parents' lifetime for that matter, has there been as few women on the country charts.  On any given week from the last several years, there's been no more than a handful of women artists in the top-30.  The average is more like two or three, and there have been a few weeks where there's been zero.  So what gives?  According to radio programmers, the heavily female country music fan base wants to hear the boys....and nothing else.  I'm sure they have market research to back this up, but that certainly wasn't the case in the 1990s when women country singers were regularly outselling the guys.

It kind of feels like a self-fulfilling prophesy is underway that began once popular women with strong sales like Shania Twain and Faith Hill passed their peak commercial years.  In the aftermath, there was a brief dearth of women singers selling well and it started a death spiral in the minds of cautious radio programmers, never giving the next generation of women the chance to prove their mettle.  Now they point to a lukewarm reception among the women singers that do get played as an excuse to play fewer and fewer women moving forward.  Country music has been acutely aware of this issue for several years now but there continues to be no sign at all that it's being remedied.  All it would take is a few women artists creating as much buzz as their predecessors a generation ago and I could imagine the tide turning the other way, but it's too late to save this decade, as I'm reminded of whenever I turn on the radio and listen to seven soundalike bros before a female voice emerges to break up the monotony.

#3.  There's far too little of it.

Arguably, the biggest problem of all in country music today is that there's a fraction as many songs on the commercial rotation as there was a generation ago.  Songs are released to radio and stay on the charts for up to nine or ten months at a time, crowding out chart space and creating an environment where you can listen to radio for a full day in July and hear mostly the same songs that were popular in January.  Comparatively, back in the 80s and 90s, the average chart run for a single was between three and four months.  At year end, chart countdown shows would do a top-100 countdown for the year and every song included would have made the top-10.  Nowadays, they do a top-50 or top-60 show and some of the entries miss the top-20.

This is the phenomenon I understand least about radio culture.  Ratings are down pretty dramatically on radio, and the lack of turnover of their song selection makes it very easy to see why.  So why don't they fix it?  They're clearly tuned into the ratings, which is the reason they claim to box out so many women singers who don't deliver the same audience response as the male singers.  So wouldn't the obvious response to sagging ratings be to expand the amount of music they play?  There's certainly no shortage of music available out there, so why isn't radio letting us hear most of it?  This is a problem that's been getting worse since I was a teenager so I don't see it correcting itself with faster song turnover in the decade ahead, but it's impossible to understand the logic of why radio would choose to deny itself more hits.

With all of this in mind, should country music fans be hopeful of what the decade ahead holds?  Probably not too hopeful as there are endemic problems not going away, particularly the cratering of album sales which ensures the record companies will be conservative in who they sign and will be limited in the number of songwriters they keep on staff, likely assuring the same pens will continue to be responsible for nearly everything we hear played commercially for the foreseeable future.  Nonetheless, I will say there seems to be an effort to correct for the insipid excesses of the "bro-country" era that peaked in the middle of the last decade, a cavalcade of empty-headed and chauvinistic songs with increasingly interchangeable arrangements that country music was forcing down our throats.  At least there are more artists actually playing their own instruments in the recording studio these days rather than being drowned out by artificial snap-tracks added in post-production....a few more anyway.

It's usually the third year in a given decade where the decade's new sound gets defined.  This is true in country music and pop culture generally, for better or for worse.  This was the case with rock music transitioning to the Seattle-based grunge sound in the 90s, a transformation that pushed me out of rock music and kept me out of it even though it most definitely did define its decade starting around 1992.  Likewise, country music's giant sales boom began in 1992 with an exciting new sound and new wave of artists that changed the genre's trajectory forever.  It was 2002 when wartime politics shifted country music's focus that decade and defined it with the jingoistic, flag-waving flavor of the 9/11 era.  And it was 2012-2013 when "bro country" was born and defined the current lackluster decade of country music.  If history is any indication, it'll be 2022 or 2023 before we will know with any confidence if commercial country is poised to climb out of its funk in the decade to come.

Is Elizabeth Warren as Big of a Con Artist as Donald Trump?

I've come to the unfortunate conclusion after viewing much of last Tuesday night's Democratic primary that I really don't care for Elizabeth Warren that much, at least as a Presidential candidate.  As the Democratic primary electorate has come to like her more, I've come to like her less.  That's a tough admission to make because I still like her work in the U.S. Senate, an erudite left-populist champion speaking truth to power with a working policy agenda geared toward reining in Wall Street excess.  What more could a liberal want?  Well, intellectual integrity in a Presidential campaign would be a good start.

We're not yet at the stage in the Democratic Presidential primaries where the candidates are fully speaking to voters yet.  They're still mostly auditioning for campaign donations needed to keep the lights on in their campaign through the Iowa caucuses in February, which requires them to take delusional positions that go over well among the faculty on college campuses and rank-and-file tech industry workers but are electoral poison on Main Street.  But it's October now and some candidates seem to be pivoting to a campaign pitch that is at least nominally saleable in the real world.  Not Elizabeth Warren.  She's doubling down on a maximally progressive agenda while holding firm in refusing to tell us where the revenue's gonna come from to pay for what will amount to a more than doubling of the federal budget.  And what irked me most was when other candidates on the stage asked her how she was gonna pay for it and she fired back with the ad hominem strawman that "everybody else on the stage thinks it's more important to protect billionaires than it is to invest in an entire generation of Americans".   Where to begin in unraveling how unserious this is....

First of all, this year's lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants is more liberal--by orders of magnitude--than any lineup of Democratic Presidential aspirants that preceded them.  Even those in the field labeled "moderates" are running well to the left of Barack Obama in 2008.  Warren's accusation against other candidates in the race is not salient or believable in any way.  And as a possible frontrunner, she has a responsibility to the party and the country to give us a credible path toward enactment for the expansion pack policy agenda she's proposing if elected...or else she doesn't deserve to be a frontrunner.

I'm amenable to a single-payer health care plan, and I suspect nearly all of the other candidates in the race are too, but Warren would have us believe if she's elected in 2020 we would successfully slay the insurance industry leviathan by 2021.  It isn't gonna work like that and Warren knows it.  A path to single-payer will come in baby steps, likely beginning with adding a public option to Obamacare, which was proposed but shot down back in 2009.  If that public option provides good care at lower costs than people's insurance policies, more people will join and eventually the insurance industry will either rein in its excesses or cease to exist.  Single-payer will rise if the insurance industry fails.  When other candidates talk about "Medicare for All Who Want It", this is what they're talking about, fully expecting the government plans would eventually choke out the insurance industry model for all but supplemental coverage.  The only other approach would be a huge tax increase to pay for an abrupt switch to single-payer as Bernie Sanders is proposing.  Warren is pretending she can have the hugely expensive new policy with no stated way to pay for it.  This was irresponsible last year at this time when she was at 3% in the polls and is even more irresponsible now when she's leading the field.

I'm also sympathetic to Warren's proposed wealth tax that taxes not just income, but accumulated wealth, thus hitting the trust fund babies who currently pay lower tax rates than janitors making $20,000 per year.  But other candidates on the stage were pointing out that such taxes were implemented and rolled back in several countries, including Scandinavian countries whose governments most closely resemble the democratic socialism Warren embodies, because they failed upon implementation.  Again, Warren responded defensively, putting the motives of her challengers in question rather giving a serious rejoinder to push back against the notion of why her wealth tax might not work in practice.  At this point, shouldn't voters expect her to have a credible answer?

Thankfully, Warren's ascent is happening relatively early, meaning there's time before Democrats actually vote to put her frontrunner status to the test.  Given Biden's demographic strength among African Americans and older, blue-collar whites who live in states with significant delegate hauls, I think it's far too early to write Biden's obituary, but let's take current polls at face value showing that if primary voters all went to the polls today that Elizabeth Warren would become the nominee.  The heat will be on for the next three months to test her ability to revise policy statements in a way that shows she could actually govern, but the rigidity of her platform leaves little room to maneuver if attempting to shoehorn her proposals to fit a real-world template.  She's sold herself as an alchemist and if she starts putting conditions on it now that are in keeping with political reality, she could lose current supporters she won over by convincing them of her alchemy skills.

It's all more than a little depressing.  It's depressing that someone with as much to offer as Warren is playing such a high-stakes con on voters in the Presidential campaign.  I've always questioned her political judgment ("my DNA test shows I am a Native American"!) and her communication skills (preachily professorial), and those early question marks now seem more prescient in terms of a broader portrait of character.  It's also depressing that the media is giving her a pass without scrutinizing her program or her past statements that in some cases directly contradict her biggest applause lines at rallies.  And it's also depressing that Democratic voters appear to have radicalized down a rabbit hole of unseriousness as Republican voters did four years ago in that, thus far, they're buying Warren's third-rate hustle.  Ultimately, Warren's health care promise that "Costs will go up for the wealthy, for corporations, but for middle-class families, it will go down." is no less P.T. Barnum-esque than "We're gonna build a wall on the border and Mexico's gonna pay for it."