“The Imagined World of Country Music”

This is part two of my analysis of Maxine Grossman’s “Jesus, Mama and the Constraints on Salvific Love in Contemporary Country Music. Read part one here. Check back soon for the next installment of the series, in which I’ll feature a new article.

“All I can say about ‘We Shall be Free’ is that I will stand by every line of this song as long as I live. I am very proud of it…. I hope you enjoy it and see it for what it was meant to be. “ – Garth Brooks, liner notes, The Hits

From the perspective of someone who wasn’t paying much attention to Garth Brooks during his prime, it’s difficult to understand why something as seemingly innocuous as “We Shall Be Free” should cause Garth Brooks to make such an emphatic yet tactfully ambiguous statement. What teenager tuning into the “Live Earth” concerts last week saw Garth Brooks’ performance and thought “controversy?” A similarly puzzling fate befalls another Brooks tune, “When the Thunder Rolls.” While I wasn’t listening to country music when the song was released, years later I saw the music video and heard of the song’s deleted verse, but I still don’t quite understand what all the fuss was about.

The explanation for the controversies generated by these and similar songs may lie in country music’s unique form of censorship, where the acceptability of a lyric is determined less by what one says than by what that thing is said about.

This is in stark contrast to the way that censorship works in the rest of society. Television networks and basic cable channels are distinguished from HBO not by what they portray but by how they portray it; you’re not likely to see the SUV roll over Phil Leotardo’s head when The Sopranos is rerun on cable, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t get whacked. Country songs, however, seem to exist in some kind of selective reality. You’d be surprised at what you can get away with within the boundaries of themes like religion, love and family, but stray from those approved subjects and even the most innocuous commentary is met with fierce opposition.

I think that this is ultimately the problem with a song like Tim McGraw’s “Red Ragtop.” While I’ve been listening to this song for years, I’ve yet to figure out exactly what Tim is saying about abortion (or even if he’s saying anything at all). I certainly couldn’t get my head around it well enough to contribute to the controversy that quickly developed after its release, other than to insist that its message was too muddy to be considered contrary to country music’s values. In the end, though, I don’t think it matters what Tim says about abortion (although some of the genre’s fans would perhaps appreciate an unabashedly pro-life anthem). The fact that he discusses it at all is sufficient grounds for many to deem the song unacceptable.

Maxine Grossman elegantly elucidates these observations. When a sizable portion of the genre’s fans and artists are deeply religious, one would think that tongue in cheek songs like “800 Pound Jesus” (Sawyer Brown) or “It’s All in Your Head” (Diamond Rio) would be more likely to be shunned than the gospel-influenced “We Shall be Free.” The difference, of course, it that religion is a common and approved theme for the country music song. Songs like the Diamond Rio release that express very un-Christian sentiments may raise some eyebrows, but they are ultimately more acceptable than those songs that broach subjects that, in most country lyrics, are simply nonexistent.

Grossman says it best:

In fact, there are a number of social issues that country song lyrics cannot, will not, or do not address. But songwriters eliminate the need to address many of those issues by creating a world in which they do not exist. The imagined world of country music, for example, contains no racial, ethnic, or interreligious conflict because it contains no races, ethnicities, or religions (other than the one that has been the subject of this article)…. Ethnic diversity is exhausted with the appearance of the occasional Native American, and religious diversity is limited to those who are and those who are not. The discursive world of country lyrics, in other words, is remarkably stylized when compared with the worlds outside the music, occupied by the people who produce and distribute it and the people who listen to it as well.

Grossman uses “the imagined world of country music” as a framework for an extensive discussion of one of the most taboo themes of country music: homosexuality, which, like the other realities that Grossman cites, is simply nonexistent in the world of the country lyric, saving artists and fans from having to grapple with possible homosexual interpretations of love songs that are often gender-neutral.

This argument that country music, often regarded as authentically American, is willfully ignoring enormous portions of the everyday experience ought to be very controversial. However, as I think about Grossman’s framework, I only come up with more examples of controversial country lyrics that are only objectionable because of the subject material itself, while other songs that deal with more familiar topics in a manner that really ought to be controversial are accepted by most fans with little hesitation.

What’s your take?

Adapted from: Grossman, Maxine L. “Jesus, Mama, and the Constraints on Salvific Love in Contemporary Country Music.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 70(1): 83-115.