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.
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.
posted by Mark at 2:39 PM
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