Meditations on the Rise of Bro-Country, the Death of Rock and Roll

No song better epitomizes current-era country music than Jason Aldean's “She's Country.” The song's in-earnest beginning is an extraordinarily simple riff which is more in the vain of AC/DC than of Conway Twitty. The lyrics are a mix of southern regionalisms (this girl is apparently from 7-8 different states, depending on which “Brunswick” you interpret as the location mentioned in the song) and the new country cliches (jacked-up trucks, mildly sexist tropes about how the titular daddy's girl couldn't afford to add her own pointless accessories to her truck, cowboy boots; you know, store-bought things to convey what kind of person you are). If “She's Country” had been released in 2014 or 2015 rather than in 2008, it would be assumed to be a parody of, say, Luke Bryan's “That's My Kind of Night” or Florida Georgia Line's entire catalog. It is the definitive modern country song. And you know the weirdest part? It's not even a country song.

At least not in the traditional sense it isn't. It's a rock song. This is the sort of thing that annoys rock fans to hear, so let me be perfectly clear—it's not a good rock song. Just like it's not a good country song, in a universe where it's labeled a country song at all (so, this one, I guess). But songs along the line of this have always existed. They just weren't performed by “country” artists. Last year, I heard a bar band perform “She's Country” within a song or two of performing “We're An American Band” by Grand Funk Railroad, from 1973 and categorized by both Wikipedia and everybody I've ever met as a hard rock song, and it felt right that this band was performing the two songs together. A band like Grand Funk Railroad would be the ones doing this song in 1973 if that's when it were written. Or maybe Nazareth. Or, in a moment of weakness, Thin Lizzy or Bad Company. But hard rock bands in this sense do not exist anymore.

When people speak of Nirvana's impact on music, it's often reduced to “it killed hair metal.” But it also killed the notion of a rock star being a desirable thing. Which is a shame, because while Bret Michaels might make being a rock star look boring, Freddie Mercury made it look utterly amazing. Ironically, it's less the actual actions of Kurt Cobain (while he may not have been a dynamic rock star in the mold of Mercury or even Bono, that's just who he was—it's not as though he actively campaigned against specific artists) and more the narrative. It's been 21 ½ years since Kurt Cobain died and there still aren't rock stars in the literal sense (well, not literally rocks, but you know). Liam Gallagher had the stage presence but also had an ambivalence to his fans, though at least it wasn't the contempt of Axl Rose. Billie Joe Armstrong never had the transcendence to go beyond his own guitar to truly reach a screaming crowd. The closest thing to a “rock star” post-Cobain, ironically, is his former bandmate, Dave Grohl. And the Foo Fighters are an rare example of a band that's allowed to just be a hard rock band without being tangibly “alternative”. I suppose they got grandfathered in. But when a hard rock band comes in without having apparently listened to a Talking Heads album in their lives, they're dismissed and mocked. Like Nickelback. Like Creed.

The yesteryear equivalents to Nickelback or Creed were arena rock bands like Journey, Styx, Foreigner, REO Speedwagon, and Bon Jovi (the latter is often miscategorized as “hair metal”, which is arguably even more ridiculous than categorizing Guns N' Roses as such). And all of these bands had and still have their critics. But it wasn't universal. And you know what? Nickelback's the best selling band of the 21^st century other than The Beatles, who broke up in 1970 (if you hadn't heard). But they're the exception. Artists don't want to be stigmatized as much as Nickelback, but Chad Kroeger and company are smart enough to realize that if you can make as much money as they have making extremely average, party-line rock, it's worth it. I give them credit for that.

But perhaps the most staggering difference in rock now and rock before I was born is that rock music used to have solo artists. Even beyond the obvious pre-Beatles rock stars, almost all of whom were solo acts (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, James Brown, etc.), we had Bruce Springsteen. We had John Mellencamp. Hell, we had Bryan Adams. Who's the major rock star post-grunge to be a successful solo artist without having initially been part of a successful band? Keep in mind that Dave Matthews was part of an eponymous band and wasn't actually a solo artist until 2003. Who is it?

So what we have had was two former forces in rock music which barely exist today: simplistic balls-to-the-wall riff rock, and solo artists marketed by dynamic stage presences. Rock doesn't have those. But country has those. Boy, country has those. And the reason that “country music”, however it's defined, has never been bigger. Country music in 2015 is still closer to being country music in 1980 than rock music or hip hop music or top 40 in 2015, so it's not like the people who like old-school country defected. And if they're still hung up on listening to Hank Williams Jr. music constantly, they were probably unlikely to embrace new music no matter what it was. Meanwhile, people who were buying up Sammy Hagar records in the 1980s don't have an equivalent to Sammy Hagar in modern rock. That guy's not welcome. And even though I'm not personally a Hagar fan and I am a fan of alternative rock, I don't necessarily think this is a good thing. True weirdo bands like Talking Heads don't get enough play—the closest thing to that kind of band getting play even on rock radio would be somebody like Queens of the Stone Age or Arctic Monkeys (both of whom I love, for what it's worth), semi-oddball bands who nevertheless remain firmly entrenched in conventional-ish alternative rock. In 1983, rock fans got the silly mainstream rock of Def Leppard's Pyromania, it got the truly alternative Murmur from REM, and it got things like The Police's Synchronicity, which fall somewhere in between. And everybody was happier because if the Stipeheads didn't dig “Rock of Ages”, they could ignore it. But in 2015, it's a somewhat homogeneous group of a fairly small number of bands releasing rock music.

Anyway, while the weirdos can't get play, the dumb rockers (meant mostly with affection) can't either. So they play country. People who have musical tastes in the same vicinity as mine don't understand how Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton are as popular as they are, but I totally get it. The reason Luke Bryan and Blake Shelton are popular isn't because people had an awakening and would've bought Johnny Cash albums in droves back when he was doing concept albums about the plight of Native Americans (Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian). It's because people do have an appetite for simple songs they can sing along to, and as the moody post-grunge bands that had only a peripheral idea of what Nirvana represented with about a hundredth of the musical talent failed to understand, a lot of people also like their musical heroes to smile a little. Ozzy Osbourne on a good day is a mediocre vocalist and his career has been built on two things: his uncanny ability to hitch his wagon to three of the greatest metal guitarists ever, and the fact that people love him because he's always happy and smiling. And this is the so-called Prince of Darkness. And while it's corny as hell (and soooooo corporate) for Luke Bryan to open concerts while standing on a pickup truck, it gets people excited. I guarantee you none of his fans can rationalize it as a great artistic statement, and frankly it doesn't matter.

But perhaps the strangest thing about the modern country revolution isn't that it's essentially big dumb rock—it's when it isn't. As much distaste as I have for the Big Dumb Rock Charismatic Solo Artists, their music isn't stagnant. These artists are doing something that all good artists do—they incorporate new sounds. And this is a good thing. Even if their efforts fall short, which they often do in miserable fashion, they do deserve some credit for trying. Hell, even Blake Shelton's “Boys Round Here”, a tribute to country dudes not listening to the Beatles and not knowing how to dougie and chewing tobacco and spitting, is spoken-word pseudo-rapping. Jason Aldean had freaking Ludacris perform with him on his biggest hit. Florida Georgia Line had their biggest hit remixed by Nelly. Luke Bryan name-dropped T-Pain in a song. I recognize that country artists are stopping well short of working with Run the Jewels or even Kanye West (who would TOTALLY do it, by the way), but they also aren't just trying to sound like Buck Owens and Glen Campbell forever. The genre isn't just stagnating; the people who are at the forefront of what we call country music are listening to other music and trying to work those influences into their product. And this is the thing that annoys the establishment. Not the sexism, not the stupidity of the lyrics, none of that. The fact that, against all logic, the silly men who act as the musical caretakers are actually TRYING is what offends people.

It's entirely possible that modern country is in its hair metal stage. That awful minor stars like Cole Swindell will soon be forgotten; that artists who have half a foot in bro-country and half a foot in less objectionable territory (Sam Hunt, Dierks Bentley) will survive with a few adjustments; that Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan are in for a precipitous decline that will eventually gain some salvage value when a weird sense of retro pride sets in. But hopefully the end result isn't that country, one of the few non “pop” popular genres to have any sense of fun, doesn't lose theirs. It's bad enough that hip-hop is plagued with a self-serious sense of duty to pound and scream about REAL hip-hop and that the parameters for what is allowed in a rock band are so exclusive that nobody is allowed in the club anymore. Music is supposed to be fun and even when it's bad, I don't want that to be lost.