Song of the Day 9/19: Maren Morris, “Get the Hell Out of Here”
Country music’s instincts have always been reactionary. Back in 1969, when people were realizing Richard Nixon’s promise to end the war in Viet Nam was bullshit, Merle Haggard wrote “Okie From Muskogee” because he thought the protesters were wrong.
“America was at its peak, and what the hell did these kids have to complain about?” he said at the time. “These soldiers were giving up their freedom and lives to make sure others could stay free. I wrote the song to support those soldiers.”
Today’s reactionaries don’t have war protesters to demonize, but they sure are responding poorly to the country’s changing mores, as evidenced by the kerfuffle over Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.”
But as country music has diversified, so have attitudes among its practitioners. I don’t recall anybody calling out Haggard over “Okie,” but Aldean has gotten a bit of pushback from some quarters. One of the most outspoken has been Maren Morris, who’s so pissed off about it she announced the other day that she’s leaving country music behind.
She told the Los Angeles Times,
After the Trump years, people’s biases were on full display. It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music. I call it butt rock.
People are streaming these songs [like “Try That in a Small Town”] out of spite. It’s not out of true joy or love of the music. It’s to own the libs. And that’s so not what music is intended for. Music is supposed to be the voice of the oppressed — the actual oppressed. And now it’s being used as this really toxic weapon in culture wars.
Women like Shania Twain and Taylor Swift successfully transitioned from country to pop, but they didn’t leave the Nashville marketing machine with a kiss-off like Morris’ new EP “The Bridge.”
Funny thing about reactionary movements, though – they don’t last. Just a few years after Haggard made fun of hippies, young Southerners were smoking pot, growing their hair long and listening as much to rock music as country. Haggard himself, in a 2010 interview with American Songwriter, acknowledged as much.
“Okie From Muskogee,” he said, “was the photograph that I took of the way things looked through the eyes of a fool… and most of America was under the same assumptions I was. As it’s stayed around now for 40 years, I sing the song now with a different attitude onstage… I’ve become educated… It’s a different song now. I’m different now.”
That’s something worth remembering. As Morris said of Aldean’s song, “I think it’s a last bastion.”
You don’t have to go pop to get away from the cowboy-hat bigots. Country Top 40 is an offshoot from actual country music, which never stopped and is now called “Americana” and is mostly rejected by Nashville.
A lot of commenters have mentioned that she could go Americana, so we’ll see. But I would argue that Americana grew out of the ’90s alt-country movement, because it’s anything but Top 40. It doesn’t sell all that well.
Interesting. If you watch the video of Boebert acting up during the performance of Beetlejuice, she actually ramps up her assholery after the woman asks her to stop vaping. I could not articulate it, but there is no joy in Boebert’s performance, only unctuous spite.
The whole wingnut/MAGAT experience is shot through with very damaged people projecting their un-confronted misery onto everything like it is their job.
And in many cases, from the Fux News slimeballs to Joe Rogan wannabes to witless Witzke clones, it is.