The World According to Country Radio: It’s Pretty Basic, Baby

“There’s things that matter / and things that don’t” – Craig Morgan, “This Ain’t Nothin’”

When you’re listening to your local country radio station and the announcer says, “Here’s the new single from…”, that word “new” could mean several different things. Most artists seem to follow a formula designed to maximize the impact of singles and at the same time prolong the shelf life of albums. A big country star will release a single before the album, building up expectation. Once the album is released, singles will keep coming out for as long as they keep being successful, up to two years even.

The hope is that you will stay prominently tuned in to the radio, waiting for those new songs, until it’s time for the next album, or at least close enough to it to start this whole process all over, again. As a country musician, you want the audience to always remember who you are, and you’re hoping that will increase the likelihood that they’ll buy the album at some point during its cycle. If the first single off Darius Rucker’s album didn’t grab you, for example, maybe by the fourth one you got hooked.

That’s one way that country is a genre with its own sense of time. It’s also common to reissue an album on a broader scale that did well on a smaller one; to re-release an album with some new bonus material, calling it the “deluxe” or “ultimate” version; or to throw new songs on with hits, to make a CD sound both fresh and yet familiar. These are common music-industry tricks in general, but especially so with country, a singles genre trying to hold up album sales.

For these reasons, it’s hard to think of a country-radio listening session as taking the pulse of American culture today. With some exceptions, the songs themselves tend to pursue the state of seeming “timeless” more than “of the moment”. The current Billboard top 20 country songs (for the week of 26 June 2010) contain few lyrical references to the circumstances of our particular time. The lyrics reference little that’s contemporary per se, from #1, Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me” on through #20, Josh Turner’s “All Over Me”.

Hardly any of these top 20 songs paint specific pictures of places or people. The places are city versus country, small town versus big. The lovers and devilish ex-lovers are figures whom you know very well, through their years of telling through the music — yet you can never really visualize. The songs on the whole try less to capture a point in time than they do to depict the essentials of human life. They proclaim, “This is life. This is how things are. This is how men act, this is how women act. This is how the world is”.

By the time a song hits the radio, many people have touched it in some way, from the songwriters to the artist to the record label. Not unlike greeting cards or television commercials, country radio songs seem like works of consensus and design that try to appeal to the basic instincts and experiences of their perceived audience. Collectively, the creators are predicting what listeners will recognize as events in their own lives, what will make them smile, cry, or hurt along with the song on the radio, in knowing solidarity.

Of course in their very creation they are probably saying something about today, about how we imagine other people view the world. Along with the songs, country radio as an entity throws in other assumptions about what its audience wants to hear. Stations often tie the inherent commercialism of mainstream radio in with notions of patriotism, faith, “family” and conservative politics. One local station is partway through its “Summer of Freedom”, which lasts “from Flag Day to 9/11”. It involves concert ticket giveaways and fundraising for medals to give local Vietnam War vets. It ends on 9/11, when the grand prize of a Harley Davidson will be given away. (That contest is the answer for those of us who have been wondering when the anniversary of 9/11 will become just another consumerist occasion.)

The country-radio stations present a set of messages that they imagine jibe with the perspective of the listeners, and of the songs. The songs themselves are more interesting than they get credit for, though. Some of the basic messages of life, as depicted in the country radio top 20, are:

• People hurt each other; the hurt wish the hurt-er would be dead or gone (“Pray For You”, Jaron and the Long Road to Love; “Undo It”, Carrie Underwood; “Lover, Lover”, Jerrod Niemann)

• Men in general don’t know how to treat a woman right, but some specific men do (“Love Like Crazy”, Lee Brice)

• People make each other smile (“Smile”, Uncle Kracker”)

• Everybody’s working for the weekend (“All About Tonight”, Blake Shelton; “Work Hard, Play Harder”, Gretchen Wilson)

• Nature ties us all together (“Water”, Brad Paisley; “Rain Is a Good Thing”, Luke Bryan)

• Summer ties us all together (“All Over Me”; “Water”, Brad Paisley)

• Summer is about sex, really (“All Over Me”; “Free”, Zac Brown Band; “Water”)

• Marriage is a sexual contract (“Little White Church”, Little Big Town)

• Heartbreak is temporary (“Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong”, Martina McBride; “She Won’t Be Lonely Long”, Clay Walker)

• Love is high-stakes (“I’m In”, Keith Urban)

• Love is all we need (“This Ain’t Nothin’”, “Free”)

• Love is bigger than us; it’s worth dedication even if your lover lies and cheats (“I Keep On Loving You”, Reba)

• God can remake us into better people; alone, we cannot (“The Man I Want to Be”, Chris Young”)

• Growing up can break us (“The House That Built Me”)

These songs are populated with solitary figures, looking towards others with hope, disdain, appreciation, or anticipation. The vocals, too, are mostly individuals. Just three of the songs listed here are by groups. That is a classic country quality in a way. For every successful group there are at least a dozen successful solo acts. In lyrics and music these songs contain an internal dialogue between the past and the present, or at least between what’s imagined to sound “classic” and what’s imagined to sound “fresh”.

Those Bittersweet “Hollywood Moments”

Though there are plenty of cheatin’ songs, loneliness songs, and feel-sorry-for-yourself songs on country radio, and in this top 20, there are few real hollow-heart songs of complete devastation, in the Hank Williams mold. Williams, Patsy Cline, et al are invoked in song lyrics mostly as a reference to ‘tradition’.

Among this top 20, Craig Morgan’s “This Ain’t Nothin’” describes the saddest events, but does so in a survivalist, triumph-over-tragedy way. The heartbreak-focused “Wrong Baby Wrong” is similar. McBride plays the role of motivational speaker. The protagonist of “Lover Lover” (originally a Sonia Dada song called “You Don’t Treat Me No Good”) has a lot of spite for his mean soon-to-be ex (described with the generic “woman oh woman”) but the tone of the song is rather happy-go-lucky. The backing vocals on the chorus, which first seem reminiscent of Alabama or the Oak Ridge Boys, end up more like Glee.

Reba McEntire’s “I Keep on Loving You” has loads of sadness at its core, not to mention some clever writing, where dialogue is turned into nouns (“through the baby-don’t-leave-mes and never-will-agains and I promise tos”), but it is also a song of trying, with the feeling that things can still turn around for the better.

The closest in spirit to Williams and Cline may be Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built Me”. The song carries both pain and a sentimental nostalgia, but when the song ends the pain is still lingering. In it, the protagonist returns to her childhood home to try to recapture the positive feelings of her youth. “I thought if I could touch this place or feel it / this brokenness inside me might start healing,” she sings. The song plays as the deep pain of someone who feels lost in the world. Yet in the looking-back it has enough nostalgia to be read in a more sentimental direction.

For example, my local country station played the song spliced together with listeners’ personal messages to their graduating children. To my ears, though, the song ends with questions, without revealing whether the trip back home was as healing as she imagined, and is powerful for it.

The hollow sadness of someone trying to make her way in the world could be heard in reference to our current global economic crisis. The songs in the top 20 that explicitly mention money troubles, however, are more about overcoming or ignoring them. “No we don’t have a lot of money / all we need is love,” Zac Brown sings, and it seems representative of the lot.

Musically the songs in the top 20 touch on country music of the past while having the clear stamp of the present. They generally try for an ‘everytime’ quality: steel guitar touches added to moderate pop balladry. In that process the songs become of the moment, marked by their era, in the ways they try to evoke the “classic”.

The songs that are most overtly of the moment, the least self-consciously ‘country’, are those that sound the most ‘80s rock: Carrie Underwood’s “Undo It” and Jason Aldean’s “Crazy Town”. “Crazy Town” is also one song that is essentially about today, a commentary on today’s Nashville. Then again, it’s just a rewriting of the old dreams-shatter-in-Hollywood story: small-town kids move to the big city in pursuit of fame and get corrupted. Then again, Nashville is just “Hollywood with a touch of twang”, according to Aldean.

The most “Hollywood moment” of the top 20, though not in the way that Aldean means, comes during Craig Morgan’s “This Ain’t Nothin’”, a 2009 song from a reissued version of a 2008 album. A man who lost his house in a tornado tells a reporter that it’s nothing compared to real loss, like losing your brother and your arm in the Vietnam war, or losing your wife of 50 years to cancer. It’s a tearjerker with a triumphant anthemic chorus. The most heart-wrenching moment comes when the man reaches into the rubble (“with the hand that he still had”) and pulls out an intact photo of his wife.

A similar trick is pulled in a musical sense in nearly every song. Most of these songs are designed with big moments, usually near the end, where the music quiets down, the spotlight shines fully on the singer, and something happens – usually the singer emphasizes a particular phrase while showcasing the strength of his or her voice. In these songs, those moments usually repeat a key phrase, the one most likely to draw an emotional reaction from the audience.

For example, Martina McBride sings, “he’s good and gone” as a build-up and release, showing the way things will be better when the heartbreaker has left. These moments feel exciting, like a pivotal change in the song’s direction. Yet more often than not they serve to reinforce the central message of the song. They emulate change in their sound, yet they reinforce the natural state of things. Among the top 20 songs, none have “big moments” that actually turn the songs in a different direction. Instead, they make it sound like something important is happening, but they lead you back to the song’s essential truth.

Even in a state of excitement, these good ol’ country songs come down to this is the way things are. This is what life is all about.