12/29/2021
This is a long, but well-written article about Jason Isbell and his contentious relationship with country music.
It also highlights a couple black female country singers who opened for Isbell at the Ryman in Nashville. I added their names to my list of musicians to check out.
The article is worth reading, but if you just want the gist, here are some powerful quotes:
"I asked Isbell about an old quote of his — in 2016, he told GQ, “I don't believe all music is okay. ... I believe some music is bad for people to listen to. I think it makes their taste worse, I think it makes their lives worse, I think it makes them worse people.” I was intrigued by the concept. He explained that he was referring to “anything that panders, anything that serves to reinforce a story that you already believe.” So that’s about half of country radio. “I think anything that tries to use nostalgia against you, anything that tries to reinforce your fears, that’s bad for you,” he added." ..
"I pointed out that until recently, he was a member of the Country Music Association. “They sent me the membership. I did not request the membership,” Isbell told me. “It was like: Congratulations, you’re in our club. Well, I never asked to be in your fu***ng club.”..
Isbell paused. “I don’t mean to pick on George Jones. I think he’s the greatest country singer that ever lived,” he clarified. “But he did a lot of really, really terrible, terrible sh*t.” This is the magic trick: to be able to hold both truths in hand at the same time, instead of rushing to the redemption."..
"Nostalgia is a beast of fiction: It’s an act of selective editing, of carving out just the bits you want, in order to tell the story you want to tell. It’s the kind of forgetting rampant in country music. Seeking nostalgia is seeking a mirage, for its beauty, yes, but also for its safety. Isbell is not in the business of safety. His music paints the image of a man who’d sooner shout a thousand uncomfortable truths than take refuge in one lie."..
Isbell complicates this story. He stands as an inconvenient challenge to what he calls a “con,” the trick of using nostalgia and white resentment to keep rural white Americans believing that they are victims, that something has been taken away from them. You know the coded rhetoric. It’s the one that says America has to be made great again. It’s the kind of narrative that explicitly tries to use nostalgia against you, in Isbell’s parlance...
“Excuses have been made over and over to try to craft that same white male narrative. It’s just part of the story. It’s like, ‘Yes, sometimes, as white men who’ve been put upon, we slip and we make mistakes, but we can rise again! And that’s country music, folks,’” Isbell said. “For people who already believe it’s true in their life, it gets reinforced when they hear it on the radio. And they don’t have to question it, they can just enjoy the nostalgia of it.”
I asked Isbell: What do those audiences get out of this nostalgia? What makes it so appealing? “They want to hear how heroes are just like us. But I think we can ask for a little more,” he said. “Let’s look for real heroes. People who devote their whole life to a battle they know they’re not going to win. Those are the real fu***ng heroes.”
“I think it’s possible to acknowledge that you have benefited from a system that’s unequal without feeling shame or even guilt from it.”
