No music genre is as beholden to corporate radio as country music, and no form of music media is as conservative, aesthetically and politically, as corporate radio. Put two and two together, and it makes sense that no genre is more conservative than country music made for the radio—an assembly-line product stuffed with references to patriotism and pickups, built by a massive industry centered in Nashville. That conventional wisdom accounts for the wide swaths of people whose response to seeing video of rising country star Morgan Wallen using the n-word last month was: “Is anyone surprised?”
The country industry’s answer to that question was both yes and no. As stars like Mickey Guyton and Maren Morris quickly pointed out, there’s at least a century’s worth of evidence that the genre was built by overt racism and discrimination—to paraphrase them, Wallen’s racism