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If you are a music fan who brags the span of your tastes by saying you listen to "everything except country"—then you only know the genre’s fast food, not its home-cooked meals. Along with hip-hop and jazz, country is one of the genres that is distinctly American in its origins, and presently makes up too big a swath of American music and pop culture to justify exclusion from any music lover’s listening. Hell, it’s not like you can avoid it.
Mainstream Nashville country as of late is a dreadfully samey parade of cliches: beer-drinkin’, truck-drivin’, let me get into your jean-cutoffs. Country certainly deserves cultural representation more nuanced than the greeting-card/bumper-sticker country of Carrie Underwood or hug-it-out-bro sentimentality of Jason Aldean that currently dominates.
Since the era of Garth Brooks' crossover (approx. 20 years ago), Nashville has been more inclined to filter out a lot of complicated truths out of what Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers once termed "duality of the Southern Thing". For all its lip service toward tradition and authenticity, Nashville seems doggedly the same yet nothing like it used to be—like a photocopy of a photocopy of itself.
"If you listen to Willie Nelson, Loretta Lynn, Glenn Campbell, they were all ahead of their time," Kacey Musgraves told the Wall Street Journal last year. "And I don’t know for sure, but it doesn’t feel like they based their careers on templates or models of how country stars should be. So I try to stay open-minded and let an array of things that influence me rather than picking from a small box of what is usually popular here [in Nashville]."
Musgraves’ Pageant Material, which was released this week, and former Drive-By Trucker Jason Isbell’s Something More Than Free (due out next month) form something of a one-two-punch reckoning for Music City. They’re just two of a handful of outsider country artists on major and indie labels (see also: Sturgill Simpson, Eric Church, Chris Stapleton, Lydia Loveless, Angaleena Presley, and others) re-expanding Nashville’s post-Taylor Swift artistic palette from outside of its existing musical paradigm. Musgraves, Isbell, a few of those artists and more will converge on Nelson’s annual 4th of July Picnic in Austin next month, a weekend-long Island of Misfit Toys for country, away from Nashville’s conformist gaze.
Isbell charged to the front of that pack at the Americana Awards last year—held at Nashville’s iconic Ryman Auditorium—when he won its three major categories (Artist, Song and Album of the Year) on the laurels of his 2013 triumph Southeastern and its lead single "Cover Me Up". Isbell’s struggles with addiction and rehab—on and off the wagon, helped by his equally talented singer-songwriter wife, Amanda Shires, and friend Ryan Adams—have been largely channeled into his lyrics since 2007, when his issues got him booted from his stint in the Drive-By Truckers and he released his solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch. Clean and sober, Southeastern marked an artistic and personal vindication for Isbell and the awards sweep his first major industry affirmation.
"I’m lucky to have a second chance at all this," he told the New York Times Magazine in 2013. "I don’t remember a lot of the good times from my days with the Truckers. This time I want to remember it all."
What he recalls in his music most, even more than his checkered past, is his raising: that of a well-read kid from an Alabama state-line town, where "Freebird!" isn’t a punchline or heckle, it’s a passionate cri de coeur. If Isbell had called his record Something More Than Freebird, it wouldn’t fundamentally change its meaning: acknowledging yet stepping past Southern orthodoxy—the duality of the Southern Thing.
Isbell’s lyrics are that of a removed storyteller of the South and fundamentally informed by that interior landscape, which he recalls vividly on "Alabama Pines" off 2011’s Here We Rest. It’s narrated by a lonely hard-drinkin’ musician on tour who beckons, "Somebody take me home," cautioning, "You can't drive through Talladega on a weekend in October," referencing the South’s Other Religion: college football. "Head up north to Jacksonville/ Cut around and over/ Watch your speed in Boiling Springs/ They ain't got a thing to do, they'll get you every time." It’s a "Speed Trap Town", off Something More Than Free, Isbell’s most maudlin image capture of the South to date—a high-school football game, an Indian mound, sleeping in a pickup truck—all with the lyrical grit, grace, and heartbreak of Bruce Springsteen. And like some of Springsteen’s best work, "Speed Trap Town" is a song about getting the hell out.
Yet, it’s clear Isbell doesn’t hate the South. More duality unfolds with news like Charleston’s recent church shooting, events that make Something More Than Free’s "Palmetto Rose"—where Isbell sings the beauty of South Carolina’s Atlantic coast—seem still more conflicted.
"It breaks my heart," Isbell said, speaking by phone late last week. "It coulda happened in Birmingham, Atlanta, Memphis or anywhere else. It coulda happened in Michigan or in Northern California. It could happen anywhere."
On the state’s post-shooting Confederate flag controversy, Isbell recalled the stars and bars sewn onto his Dixie Youth Baseball jersey as kid.
"I’ve seen it thousands of times, especially growing up in Alabama," he said. “I know it means to those folks, I know what they think it means… But you can’t assign meaning to a symbol on [just] a personal level. I don’t think anybody gets enough out of flying that flag to make it worth the pain that it causes."
He sighed, "We haven't progressed very much at all in the last 100 years."
There’s a lot of sighing inherent in Isbell’s music, confronting a lot of awful—and sometimes beautiful—truths about Southern life and history. Truths that Nashville country—de facto ambassador of the South, of Southern-ness—would rather gloss over. Still, Isbell seems like kind of a buzzkill next to Musgraves.
If Isbell’s digging his own rebel tunnel from the independent side of Nashville, Musgraves—on a major, Mercury Records—might end up meeting him halfway from hers. Musgraves’ first foray into Nashville glitz was on season five of "Nashville Star" in 2007, placing seventh. Her star rose in 2012 with "Follow Your Arrow", which dovetailed nicely with a groundswell from the post-Prop 8 same-sex marriage movement. It grabbed the attention of megastar Katy Perry, who took Musgraves on tour as an opener, giving her arena-sized audiences to convert to fans. Musgraves must have grabbed more than a few.
Now Musgraves plays country-music avatar to pop’s campier side: the likes of Perry and the Tennessee-born Miley Cyrus. And while Cyrus is kin to Dolly Parton, Musgraves is more plainly in Parton’s artistic lineage: country music that’s kitschy, funny, heartfelt, and frank. And then there’s Musgraves’ politics: the libertarian "Follow Your Arrow" plus pro-gay statements like her release party for Pageant Material, featuring Nashville-area drag queens lip syncing the new LP’s songs. Yet as much of an agent provocateur as she’s known to be toward her country audience, her music is clever enough to stand on its own. In a pop-country landscape full of formulaic and self-serious country stars, lyrical winks and punchlines like Musgraves’ are refreshing and in too-short supply.
"I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and I don’t really want to be," Musgraves said last year. "I think if you’re everyone’s cup of tea, that probably means you’re a little bit boring, or you’re not pushing yourself… It’s not supposed to be something absolutely everyone enjoys. Frankly, I’d love to see even more diversity in country music. Art is not supposed to be McDonalds."
"There’s not really anything creative being said over there," Isbell said of Nashville’s mainstream. "They’re just looking at dollar signs and looking at math problems and figuring out what’s going to get them the most money… They’re just making McDonalds cheeseburgers."
Indeed, Nashville’s recent expectations are that music should be like fast food. In 2006, Alan Jackson told Billboard he got blindsided with them by Vince Gill at a Country Music Association Awards ceremony.
"I don't know if the script writer wrote it, but [Gill] said, ‘You always know what you're going to get from Alan Jackson. It's like driving through McDonalds,’" Jackson said. "I think he meant it as a compliment, but it kind of made me feel like, ‘Dang, McDonalds, man! I don't want to be like 'every time somebody buys an album, they are getting just another quarter-pounder with cheese.’"
When a genre torchbearer like Alan Jackson is uncomfortable with Nashville’s fast-food mentality, something’s changed. Musgraves’ and Isbell’s careers crest and finding substantial critical acclaim—are two recent instances of intra-Nashville pushback.
It’s a pretty strange time for Nashville—hell, American culture—when its most dynamic and profitable star in a generation eschews Music City for New York, guitar for synthesizer, and removes any trace of country from her sound. It must make Nashville artists like Musgraves and Isbell restless for change at home when shows emanating from Hollywood in the last few years ("Justified"’s tongue-in-cheek moralizing, "Rectify"’s somber and rueful atmosphere) have depicted the South with more nuance than Nashville (or for that matter, ABC’s "Nashville") has.
For all the rancor surrounding the culture of the South right now, it’s worth considering the homespun and finespun points of view of Southerners themselves, country artists or otherwise. Whatever you do, just don’t stop at the McNuggets.