“Everybody’s hard times are different”: country as a political investment in white masculine precarity

ABSTRACT

Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the disparate nature of these texts and their producers, we center our analysis of the politics of contemporary “country” in the accounts of country music listeners. Through this lens, “country” foregrounds a portrait of precarious labor and white rural economies. Precarity is held up as aspirational, facilitated by the relative structural support of whiteness and masculinity that simultaneously leverages economic hardship to obfuscate these privileged positions. “Country” elides experiences of class marginalization, white rurality, and masculinized labor with mythologized narratives that position simplicity and work as “the good life.”

KEYWORDS:

• country music
• precarity
• white masculinity
• happiness
• working class

Notes

1. Wyatt Durrette and Zac Brown, “Chicken Fried,” Home Grown Atlantic, 2008, mp3 single.

2. J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy (New York: Harper, 2016); Richard Fausset, “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland,” New York Times, November 25, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/us/ohio-hovater-white-nationalist.html.

3. ibid.

4. Ludwig Hurtado, “Country Music Is Also Mexican Music,” The Nation, January 3, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/country-mexico-ice-nationalism/.

5. Les Christie, “Home Prices Post Record 18% Drop,” CNN Money, December 30, 2008, https://money.cnn.com/2008/12/30/real_estate/October_Case_Shiller/index.htm?postversion=2008123014.

6. Joli Jensen, The Nashville Sound: Authenticity, Commercialization and Country Music (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998), 7.

7. Aaron A. Fox, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 42.

8. Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Politics in an “Other” America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 125.

9. Diane Pecknold, “Introduction,” in Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 3.

10. Ibid., 3–4.

11. Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 128.

12. Hurtado, “Country Music Is Also Mexican Music.”

13. Geoff Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White? Race and the Voice of Nostalgia,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 31, no. 8 (2008): 91. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870701538893.

14. Nancy S. Love, “Singing Alone is Not Enough: A Response to Reviewers,” New Political Science 39, no. 2 (2017): 296. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2017.1301326.

15. Sieglinde Lemke, Inequality, Poverty and Precarity in Contemporary American Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 14.

16. Kathleen M. Millar, “Toward a Critical Politics of Precarity,” Sociology Compass 11 (2017): 6. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12483.

17. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso Books, 2016), ii.

18. Ibid.

19. Jasbir Puar et al., “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović,” The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 166. doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00221.

20. Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Culture Producers,” Trans. Dagmar Fink and Lisa Rosenblatt, Transversal Texts (January 2006).

21. Paul Elliott Johnson, “The Art of Masculine Victimhood: Donald Trump’s Demagoguery,” Women’s Studies in Communication 40, no. 3 (2017): 229–250.

22. Millar, “Toward a Critical Politics of Precarity,” 7.

23. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 195, emphasis original.

24. Henrik Örnebring, “Journalists Thinking About Precarity: Making Sense of the ‘New Normal,’” #ISOJ Journal 8, no. 1 (2018).

25. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

26. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. These terms are drawn from Ahmed’s analysis of Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Atria, 2002).

27. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Pantelion: Neoliberalism and Media in the Age of Precarization,” in The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas, eds. Constanza Burucúa, Carolina Sitnisky (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 269.

28. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), x.

29. Anthony Kwame Harrison, “Black College-Radio on Predominantly White Campuses: A ‘Hip-Hop Era’ Student-Authored Inclusion Initiative,” Africology, 9, no. 8 (October 2016): 146–147.

30. Amanda Nell Edgar and Keven James Rudrow, “‘I Think of Him as an Ancestor’: Tupac Shakur Fans and the Intimacy of Pop Cultural Heritage,” Communication, Culture & Critique 11, no. 4 (2018): 655. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcy032.

31. Harrison, “Black College-Radio on Predominantly White Campuses,” 147; Berlant, The Female Complaint, viii.

32. Kelly, “It Follows: Precarity, Thanatopolitics, and the Ambient Horror Film,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, no. 3 (2017): 235. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2016.1268699; Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 195.

33. Claudine M. Pied, “Conservative Populist Politics and the Remaking of the ‘White Working Class’ in the USA,” Dialectical Anthropology 42, no. 2 (2018): 197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-018-9501-1

34. Kelly, “The Wounded Man,” 165.

35. Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?” 92.

36. Janice Radway, “Identifying Ideological Seams: Mass Culture, Analytical Method, and Political Practice,” Communication 9 (1986): 93. doi.org/10.4135/9781452218540.n129.

37. Tasha R. Dunn, Talking White Trash: Mediated Representations and Lived Experiences of White Working-Class People (New York: Routledge, 2018).

38. Sara L. McKinnon, Robert Asen, Karma R. Chávez, and Robert Glenn Howard, Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 14.

39. Radway, “Identifying Ideological Seams,” 118.

40. To choose pseudonyms, we searched for popular baby names that matched the gender and approximate year of birth for each participant.

41. Fox, Real Country, 32.

42. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

43. Throughout the essay, quotations without endnotes are the words of our participants.

44. Örnebring, “Journalists Thinking About Precarity,” 111.

45. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991/1998), 188.

46. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10.

47. John Hartigan, Jr., “Who Are These White People?: ‘Rednecks,’ ‘Hillbillies,’ and ‘White Trash’ as Marked Racial Subjects,” in White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, ed. Ashley “Woody” Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (New York: Routledge, 2003), 95.

48. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10.

49. Jensen, The Nashville Sound.

50. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 160.

51. Berlant, Cruel Optimism; Fox, Real Country, 32.

52. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7.

53. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 86.

54. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 7.

55. Jensen, The Nashville Sound.

56. Waymon R. Hinson and Edward Robinson, “‘We Didn’t Get Nothing:’ The Plight of Black Farmers,” Journal of African American Studies 12, no. 3 (2008): 283–302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-008-9046-5.

57. Mann, “Why Does Country Music Sound White?” 92.

58. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.

59. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.

60. Ibid., 42.

61. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2009), 133.

62. Ibid.

63. Jocelyn R. Neal, “Why ‘Ladies Love Country Boys’: Gender, Class, and Economics in Contemporary Country Music,” in Country Boys and Redneck Women: New Essays in Gender and Country Music, ed. Diane Pecknold and Kristine M. McCusker (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016), 4.

64. Ibid.

65. Berlant in Puar et al., “Precarity Talk,” 166.

66. James C. Cobb, “Rednecks, White Socks, and Piña Coladas?: Country Music Ain’t What it Used To Be  …  And It Really Never Was,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 4 (1999): 41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26236770.

67. Berlant in Puar et al., “Precarity Talk,” 166.

68. Fox, Real Country, 32.

69. Watson, “Quelling Anxiety as Intimate Work,” 266.

70. Radway, “Identifying Ideological Seams.”