A couple of months ago, we delivered the obituary for rock music — a genre that was never going to survive the post-Obama cultural shifts in America, which punish experimentation and risk-taking, as well as anything important to white people, while rewarding manufactured solo acts that are easier to market on social media and much easier to manage and control.
There’s no doubt that the death of rock is a very bad sign — you might even call it a “leading indicator” of cultural decay in this country. Of course, some people — some conservatives, especially — might argue that rock music itself was a driver of cultural decay. And in some cases they might be right.
But generally speaking, rock was — still is, where you can find it — a truly great art form, in my view. And more than that, it is an American art form. Rock was both a product of American culture and a producer of American culture.
Each decade going back to the 50s saw a new stage in the evolution of the genre, reflecting changes and shifts in the culture at large — whether it was the prog rock, heavy metal, and arena rock of the 70s, or the new wave and hair metal of the 80s, or the alt rock and grunge of the 90s, and so on.
You can go back and listen to the rock music of a particular decade, and come away with a better understanding of the cultural mood of that time. Our current decade is arguably the first in 70 years without its own unique rock sound. That is not a good thing, I would quite emphatically argue.
It’s yet another symptom of an exhausted, decadent culture with no new ideas and nothing left to say.
That said, there are some subgenres of rock that, while not often producing huge mainstream hits, still churn out great music nonetheless.
Folk rock is one of those subgenres. I say that really just as a way to wedge in a mention of Glen Hansard, one of the great folk rock and singer-songwriter musicians of our time, who just sadly died in a motorcycle accident on Wednesday.
He starred in a movie called “Once” back in 2007 that, if you consider it a musical (and I do), is one of the only musicals I ever personally enjoyed. He was a great artist. If you aren’t familiar with him, you should go look him up.
In any case, while rock has fallen on hard times — along with a number of other once-thriving musical genres — it’s not all bad news.
There is another traditional American genre that’s somehow thriving right now. And it’s worth thinking about how it has managed to succeed in an environment that has all but destroyed so many other genres.
This is the counterbalancing narrative to the decline of rock. And it is, dare I say, a cause for some optimism: As rock has faded, country music is dominating the charts. This is a resurgence that’s been building for several years now. You can make the case that country music is now the strongest it’s ever been — certainly in terms of its popularity relative to other genres.
Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has now spent 15 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. That’s a record for a female solo act, excluding holiday releases. The previous recordholders were “We Belong Together” by Mariah Carey and “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston — although the latter was actually written by Dolly Parton, whose original version is superior in my opinion.
Each song spent 14 weeks at the top spot. Ella Langley’s surprising triumph has been a cause of consternation for some people on social media, who are clearly not thrilled to see a down-home country girl from Alabama take this particular crown. And it’s caused heartburn for some critics who fashion themselves country music purists and have decided that Langley is not authentic enough or something.
But in fact, she’s quite authentic, and the song, whether you happen to enjoy it or not, is, in many ways, a classic old-school country song. We’ll discuss more about the particular song in a moment and why it’s successful, but suffice it to say, it’s not an outlier. As Billboard reports:
Country hits claim the top four for a second time in the Hot 100’s history, two weeks after the genre first achieved the feat. … Below “Choosin’ Texas,” Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” is No. 2 for a fifth consecutive week, after it spent its first two weeks on the Hot 100 at No. 1 in June; Stella Lefty’s first top 10, “Boston,” surges 6-3 for a new high; and Langley and Morgan Wallen’s “I Can’t Love You Anymore” rebounds three spots to its No. 4 best. Two weeks earlier, “Choosin’ Texas,” “I Knew It, I Knew You” and “I Can’t Love You Anymore” were in the same spots, joined by Langley’s “Be Her” at No. 3. In eight other weeks — all in the past three years — country titles took the top three, starting on the Aug. 5, 2023-dated Hot 100, via Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” Wallen’s “Last Night” and Luke Combs’ “Fast Car.” Of the nine weeks all-time with country songs at either Nos. 1-3 or Nos. 1-4 on the Hot 100, this week marks the fifth in a row dating to the first week in July.
There are other metrics we could talk about, including the fact that country has been the fastest-growing U.S. genre in on-demand streaming since 2023. The longest-running No. 1 songs in the last three years on streaming services have all been country songs.
I do have to acknowledge that a lot of modern country music is also terrible. I’m not going to pretend that every country music song is worthwhile, while all Latin, hip-hop, and R&B is a waste of time. That wouldn’t be true on either score. There are plenty of cliché, boilerplate country songs that sound like they were made primarily to serve as the soundtrack for an Applebee’s commercial.
There are plenty of country songs that have infused so many pop and even hip-hop elements that they barely qualify as country songs at all. But, even so, many of the popular country songs in recent years have been faithful in tone, theme, and sound to traditional country music — including Ella Langley, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, Lainey Wilson, and others.
This is not just a story of country music achieving widespread success by stripping itself of every defining feature and becoming a soulless, corporate product indistinguishable from AI slop. There is some of that happening, certainly. But we’re also witnessing a genuine resurgence of the genre at its core.
This is significant in part because, historically, country has been dominated by rural Americans, especially in the South and West, where it originated. What we’re seeing now is a major victory for Southern culture, which, as we all know, has been vilified and beaten down in mainstream discourse for some time now — certainly, since Obama’s presidency.
Country music in the South grew out of the folk ballads from Scottish, Irish, and English immigrants. They were Celtic ballads that transformed into something distinctively American, which gave voice to the unique American experience. One of the first country songs that could be called a mainstream hit — maybe the first ever — was called the “Wreck of the Old 97,” released in 1924, about a train derailment in Virginia.
So this was a genre that was, in many respects, invented to tell the American story, especially its tragic elements. And in the West, country music had its origins in the lifestyles of ranchers and cattle drivers on the frontier. The songs had relevance to specific parts of the country in ways a lot of music executives didn’t realize at first.
But in the 1990s, when the music industry turned on the SoundScan system, they immediately realized how popular country music was in these particular areas of the country. Rural radio was the stronghold for country music, even though there were several artists with wide crossover appeal, including Shania Twain and Garth Brooks.
As of 1997, there were more than 2,400 radio stations devoted solely to country music broadcasting throughout the United States, accounting for more than a quarter of all commercial radio stations in the country.
Around the same time, country music accounted for roughly 20% of all record sales. Meanwhile, in February 1996 — as country music was surging in small towns across America — New York City’s biggest country music station — WYNY 103.5 FM — stopped playing country music full-time. They moved over to dance music. In the biggest radio market in the United States, there was no full-time country music station on FM radio. So country was, indeed, a phenomenon in the South and West in particular. And now it’s coming back.
The song “Choosin’ Texas,” in particular, is a solid vehicle to spearhead, or at least participate in, this comeback. I’m not going to pretend that it’s some historic, extraordinary achievement in songwriting or anything like that. It isn’t an artistic masterpiece necessarily. But it is a genuine country song, and a good one, that is now objectively one of the biggest hits of this century.
It’s also not some insufferable girlboss anthem. If anything, it’s an anti-girlboss anthem. And it’s not a braindead pop song pretending to be country, wearing the style of country music like a skinsuit. In case you’ve somehow never heard this song, here it is:
Watch:
It’s about a woman who’s pining for a man who’s choosing someone else. It’s a song that feels less like a lot of modern pop country and more like a spiritual successor to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” Which, given that “Jolene” is one of the greatest songs of all time, is not bad company to be in.
A song like “Jolene” resonates across generations because it’s about feelings and troubles that people connect with. It’s about someone who is pleading, desperate, and heartbroken. That’s a human experience.
A lot of modern pop and hip hop music — and plenty of the worst and most fraudulent country music — by comparison, consists of the artist bragging about themselves. It’s false and fake and doesn’t speak to anything deeper in the human soul, which may be one of the reasons why the public is tiring of those genres.
When I praised the Ella Langley song on X, a few people responded that her song is also degenerate nonsense because it’s about a woman drinking away her sorrows. And sure, that’s part of it. I’m not trying to make the case that this song should be some kind of Bible for how to live your life.
But, first of all, like it or not, drinking away your troubles has been a regular theme of country music for 70 years at least. And second, again, pining for something, and feeling heartbroken because you can’t have it, is human. It’s real. And those are the aspects of the human condition that music is supposed to illuminate and give voice to. In short, it’s a song about yearning, about longing.
All that to say, if the concept of “yearning,” or longing, is making a small, limited, isolated comeback, by way of country music — that would be good news. It would suggest that people are becoming more aspirational, as opposed to being demanding and insufferable.
People want to live in a part of the country that has a viable future. Living around death and decay and incompetence is extremely demoralizing. And it contradicts a natural human impulse, which is to strive for something better than you currently have.
Call it “yearning” or “desire” or whatever you want, but there’s an unmistakable drive in most people to improve their circumstances for themselves and future generations. If you live in a state like California or Illinois, then in all likelihood, you don’t see how things can get any better, because every year they’re getting worse.
People who are optimistic and forward-thinking, on the other hand, are getting out of town. And unsurprisingly, in other aspects of their life, they’re seeking out content that isn’t intended to demoralize them or glorify murder and depravity.
That explains why the most conservative and most traditionally American regions of the country are dominating the rest of it. And it explains why there’s a newfound demand for wholesome, original, upbeat content, rather than the degenerate drivel we’ve been subjected to for decades.
Is it the most important victory that conservatives could possibly win? No. Are there many other things we need to fight for, instead of conducting hearings where nothing is ever accomplished? Absolutely.
But all the same, it’s a very important start. It’s a very welcome sign. And for once, as tempting as it may be to indulge in gloom and doomerism, we should celebrate that.
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