The problem with country radio isn’t complicated, a worker on Nashville’s Music Row said: the old generation still runs everything and will never change its mind.
When Leslie Fram first moved to Nashville, a decade ago, to run Country Music Television—the genre’s equivalent of MTV—she studied Music Row like a new language. “I understand why people who aren’t in it don’t get it,” she told me, over a fancy omelette in the Gulch.
Hill did love one hip-hop-inflected new artist, he told me: Jelly Roll, a heavily tattooed white singer from Nashville who had a moving life story about getting out of prison, kicking hard drugs, and finding God. He was country’s “most authentic” new artist, in Hill’s estimation, with an outlaw story to rival Merle Haggard’s. Could women be outlaws? “You know, in central casting? I have my doubts,” Hill said. He blamed one woman after another for blowing her chance at success.
Since 2000, the proportion of women on country radio has sunk from thirty-three to eleven per cent. Black women currently represent just 0.03 per cent. Country is popular worldwide, performed by musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of rural people everywhere—but you’d never know it from the radio.
At the bar, I also met two low-level Music Row employees, who worked in radio and helped companies handle V.I.P.s. They happily dished, off the record, about clashes on the Row, but added that there was no point bringing their own politics into their jobs. It was like working for Walmart—you had to stay neutral. The problem with country radio wasn’t complicated, one of them said: the old generation still ran everything and would never change its mind.
The bar at the center of Jason Aldean’s was built around a big green tractor. The bathroom doors said “.” The night I went, the crowd was sedate—no bachelorettes, just middle-aged couples. The singer onstage was handsome and fun, excited to get a request for the Chicks’ “Travelin’ Soldier.
There had always been queer people in country music. In 1973, a band called Lavender Country put out an album with lyrics like “My belly turns to jelly / like some nelly ingenue.” But there were many more ugly stories of singers forced into the closet—and even now, after many top talents, including songwriters such as Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, had come out, old taboos lingered.
The A.C.M. Awards’ final number was the live première of Parton’s new single, “World on Fire,” from an upcoming rock album. When the lights came up, Parton was wearing an enormous, rippling parachute skirt printed with a black-and-white map of the globe—and then, when it tore away, she was in a black leather suit, chanting angrily as backup dancers strutted in Janet Jackson-esque formation.
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