Country music is going exciting places in
2018. On Friday Kacey Musgraves releases her new album Golden Hour to so far glowing reviews and I thought I would write a
new blog entry to reflect on what this means for country music and why I listen
to her.
Kacey Musgraves is a singer-songwriter and
her albums are of a neo-traditional country sound focusing on issues of class,
working class life, poverty, equality and tolerance. Her first album Same Trailer Different Park was released
in 2013 to critical acclaim and her sophomore album Pageant Material followed this
in 2015. Musgraves has continued to build her fanbase across both the US
and UK and performed at this year’s Country2Country Festival in March.
Kacey Musgrave’s music has slowly but
surely crept up on me for the past five years. When I first heard her major
label debut: Same Trailer, Different Park
(2013) I couldn’t get into it. Until one day on a bus ride when I was one year
out of uni (the first time I graduated), unemployed, but kind of relaxed in my
social life and relationship, and I started to listen to the album on my iPod
and I was drawn into her lyrics, her social commentary, and her compassion for
people wherever they’ve come from and whatever point they’ve got to in their
lives.
Her songs about same-sex relationships
‘Follow your Arrow’ and drugs ‘Merry-go-round’ are not typical country-fare,
however the style is traditional country and these themes are situated within a
community rather than as exceptions to the rule. In many ways her songs sit in
a country tradition of Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn calling for an acceptance
of difference and a general equality based on common humanity and dignity. Like
Loretta Lynn, Musgraves dislikes people who act as if they are better than
anyone else and like Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman” she rejects middle-class
fashion and status markers, declaring she is still a “dime store cowgirl.” Same-sex
relationships in ‘Follow your arrow’ are presented not as liberation from a
small-minded, small-town country community, but as a choice that everyone is
entitled to, and a choice that does not cost your family or your community.
Kacey Musgraves followed this in 2015 with Pageant Material, which although did not
meet the acclaim or generate the sales of her debut, I was hooked from first
listen, having been fully converted to her kind of country by this point. The sound is warmer
and more romantic, with some reviewers comparing it to Prom music. Yet amongst
sweeping romantic ballads like ‘Late for the Party,’ there was the same
Musgrave trademarks of critiquing judging hypocrites in the song ‘Biscuits:’
‘mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy,’ and a compassionate embrace of
family and community that acknowledges that this might not be the easiest thing
to do to keep people together as Musgraves sings in ‘Family is Family.’
‘Family is family, in church or in prison
…
you might look just like ‘em, that might
not mean you like ‘em
But you love ‘em’
In these lines there is a balance and
tension between a romanticised view of family and community that takes for
granted the work and emotional labour involved in forming these, and a more
realistic one expressed in ‘that might not mean you like ‘em.’ There is an
acceptance of human relationships, human nature and human frailty that makes
many of Musgrave’s songs compelling, and it is this that the best country music
really excels at. Love, family and community are something you have to do, work
for and unpick challenging relationships; community is not something you get by
just living there and turning up.
This brings us to 2018 and Kacey Musgraves’
latest album: Golden Hour. This album is very different to her previous
albums, with a smoother more pop sound, although still very country. The songs
also reflect a more contented Musgraves and suggest an arrival into a place of
stability and happiness. Some people may
argue that Musgraves has ‘sold out’ or become mainstream; however her music is
still very acoustic country. That being said the sound and style is perhaps
more accessible to a wider audience, however Musgraves is as Guardian reviewer
Alexis Petridis has said imagining ‘a world where its author is the mainstream, rather than an
influential outlier[1].’ In this way Musgraves is not ‘selling out’ to
the mainstream, but instead cementing herself as the mainstream as a set of
values and sounds that should be recognised by everybody.
Applying this to her vocal support for
LGBT+ rights, the closing track to the album ‘Rainbow’ is dedicated to LGBT+
youth. In this song, Musgraves sings about a state of having arrived and
survived ‘the same old storm again.’ There is a hope for a new kind of life; a
new kind of mainstream where LGBT+ people are accepted and this view is
mainstream both inside and outside of country. It also is a world where country is not associated with bigotry and used by others to displace their own guilt by bashing country as if it were uniquely homophobic and that LGBT+ people within these communities (physical, virtual or sonic) have to abandon certain aspects of their lives of themselves to live happily with their LGBT+ identity.
