Subscriber Special: No Holds-Barred DRTI Slack Throwdown!

Howdy, we're taking a week off from our usual playlist and picks to bring you a special juicy slack throwdown for subscribers only. But don't worry, we know it's a huge release week: Margo Price has an amazing new record out, Hard Headed Woman, along with albums from Caroline Spence (so good), Zach Top and more. I'm sure we will get to all those things in the coming weeks. But for now, some things we needed to get off our chests!

Marissa:  Welcome to our special subscriber-only DRTI Country Music Slack Throwdown! We thought it would be fun to get into some of the pressing country stuff on our minds at the moment - Gavin Adcock, I'm sure, the recent wild Defector piece on country music (that someone is based around the "crossover" of Mitski) and other maybe salacious or annoying country music things in a special subscriber-only Slack. I think the idea came from how annoyed we both were with that Defector piece, and just how country music is written about and perceived so often. It's been a long-ass year or two of people declaring country as "cool" again, but not exactly changing their own embedded biases and whatnot (and country radio being same-as-it-ever-was). [and yes, everyone, we're gonna get to Gavin Adcock in a bit].

Natalie: We're pretty uncensored as it is in our usual Slacks (and posts), but figured perhaps for an audience of our paying supporters we could be even less...diplomatic 😄. We are sort of in this cycle of very vague "What does it all mean?" pieces about the popularity of country music, which tend to be pretty laser focused specifically responding to the popularity of Morgan Wallen and Jelly Roll (which is certainly noteworthy). People so badly want to attribute it to reactionary right-wing politics, which I understand and I suppose to its credit the Defector piece didn't really do — but was also so superficial in about a zillion other ways. The tie between conservatism and country in the popular (progressive) imagination is so deep that it's really hard to challenge, even though we're perennially trying to push and pull at it in this newsletter.

Marissa: For sure. It just continually amazes me how in country music, writers are allowed to go forward with an almost unchecked lack of knowledge - not to say they aren't music experts - that does so much harm in erasing artists and movements from the country canon that we work so hard to build...of course usually it's women. How many times can Shania Twain, for example, be completely written out of history? She doesn't exist in this article, nor the huge country boom in the 90s that she helped create, or other historical waves. There's a carelessness that's allowed in country coverage, because, oh, who cares, it's mostly hicks right? (please read in my sarcastic voice).