The Bulwark: “Country music at its best is Russian literature set to song. Heartache from marriages gone awry or anxiety about losing a job keep the music in tune with the very real pains of living in a modern regime. Such themes speak to the souls of Americans who live in rural areas or who work with their hands. The pains of living in rural America and among the working class have never been more real, especially in the last generation. Scholars write of ‘deaths of despair’ from suicide or drug use or alcoholism among white Americans without college degrees. Manufacturing, mining, and other working-class jobs have fled. Marriage rates have plummeted over the last half-century, as has church attendance. The decades-long climb in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, especially among the less well educated, has far-reaching consequences: Many of today’s rural whites don’t know both of their parents, much less their grandparents.”

“It should be a golden age of songwriting, with sad songs dominating the airwaves. Instead, Nashville’s corporate Music Row acts like nothing has happened. Today’s bubble-gum country claptrap depicts easy good times and cheap thrills. Songs about drinking a beer on a tailgate on a dirt road after a Friday football game are in. Songs about divorce, alcoholism, prison, or drugs – once staples of country songs – are almost nonexistent on country radio. Mainstream Nashville just isn’t producing them. Of course, worries about the direction of country music are as old as the country-music industry. Many of the country greats of bygone days who gave voice to authentic concerns were Nashville outsiders (think Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson), and some classic songs bemoan ‘Murder on Music Row’ and how fakes have ‘Gone Country.’ Today’s disconnect goes beyond instruments and outfits. It goes to the connection between country music and its audience, between country music and the destiny of the nation. Nashville betrays its place in our polity when it ignores the deep despondency of the white working class and rural America.”