A World without Citizenship: On (the Absence of) Politics and Ideology in Country Music Lyrics, 1960–2000

Abstract

This study contains an examination of the lyrics of all of Billboard magazine's No.1 country songs for the period from 1960–2000 (a total of 1,217 songs is all), in an attempt to identify and understand the political and ideological content therein. Every song that reached the number one position in a given year was included in the database. Explicit working definitions of politics and ideology were adopted. Using a simplified content analysis approach, 20 issues or concepts were developed for coding. A surprisingly small total of only 73 songs, or roughly 6%, were found to contain significant observations of a political or ideological nature. It is concluded that, contrary to standard notions, commercial country music does not regularly display religious, populist, patriarchal, or politically conservative views. Rather, the most successful songs have been explicitly apolitical, even anti‐political, in their rejection and apparent unawareness of social and economic conditions outside the lives of the song characters themselves. In sum, it must be asserted that the best‐selling country songs contain significantly less political sentiment than is typically assumed.