Country singers like to talk about how they provide fans with a form of escape, but that just can’t be right. How are songs about everyday life supposed to help us escape from our everyday lives?
Country music isn’t a way out of reality. It’s a way to get deeper inside of it.But then I heard Brad Paisley — mainstream country’s most progressive utopian — sing an ode to small towns called “Heaven South” during Wednesday’s Country Music Association Awards in Nashville and everything felt upside down. “Turn on the news, you’d think the world ain’t got a prayer,” the song went. “But if you turn it off and look around, it’s just another day in Heaven South.”
So all of our planet’s problems will go away if we stop paying attention to them? I guess that’s one way to escape reality, but it was still disheartening to see Paisley, the CMA telecast’s co-host for the 10th consecutive year, acquiescing to Nashville’s disengagement reflex and encouraging listeners to “turn it off.” Especially at this year’s CMAs, where not one artist found the courage to say a single word about gun control after 58 fans were shot dead at a country music festival in Las Vegas last month.
And sure, nobody expected the CMAs to transform into a three-hour town hall discussion about the Second Amendment. But did anyone expect such monolithic quiet after such a catastrophic event? Apparently, the ghost of the Dixie Chicks’ career still haunts this town in terrifying ways.
(In case you forgot, the colossally popular country trio spoke out against President George W. Bush at a concert in 2003 and were instantly boycotted by radio stations across the country, sending the entirety of mainstream country into a state of political paralysis that has lasted 14 years and counting.)Now, a style of music that used to proudly address the real-life struggles of real-life Americans won’t go near the issue that everyone in our harried republic is struggling with. After last month’s massacre in Las Vegas, 26 more people were killed in a shooting inside a church in Texas — the setting of countless country songs. Yet, instead of singing about life in America, today’s country stars are singing…
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