“Straight Outta Nashville”: Allusions to Hip Hop in Contemporary Country Music

Orosz, Jeremy

doi:10.1080/03007766.2019.1652794

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“… 4 Though outside of the scope of this project, the inverse construction of innocence and White country boys appears in the adultification and criminalization of Black boys (see Goff et al, 2014). Additionally, the extent to which country music, particularly the sub-genre of bro-country, appropriates hip-hop style and musical language reveals the tension between what some might call appropriation and violent othering (see Orosz 2021). The practice of coopting Blackness to shore up identifications of Whiteness in country music is also known and studied by scholars of minstrelsy (see Mather 2017).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

#yeeyeenation

Putcha

2022

Du Bois Rev.

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Using methods from country music studies, performance studies, hashtag ethnography, and Black Feminist Thought (BFT), this article employs sonic, discursive, and social media analysis to examine performances of White masculinity known as “country boys.” In the opening sections, I describe examples of country boys that emerge from Texas A&M University (College Station), bringing together confederate statues and the men who identify with and defend such statues. I then turn my focus to critical analysis of one country boy in particular: county music singer, brand progenitor, and Texas icon, Granger Smith a.k.a. Earl Dibbles Jr. Highlighting the importance of country boys to the cultural identity of Texas A&M University, I argue that White publics aggregate and accrue racialized and gendered meaning in social media spaces through signs associated with Smith like the hashtag #yeeyeenation. Such signs are predicated on and normalize a rhetoric—in this case, that something or someone “is not racist”—even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Extending the insights of scholarship on the former Confederacy to contemporary country music cultures and to the present political moment, this article interrogates how White identities and related genealogies in the U.S. context are not simply established to sanitize and excuse expressions of racist, gendered, and exclusionary thought, but are sustained by aestheticized deceptions. I refer to these deceptions as mythopoetics. In this article I demonstrate how Smith’s success, particularly since he is best known for his “redneck” alter-ego, Earl Dibbles Jr., is a testament to the power and reach of mythopoetics in a hegemonic White and heteropatriarchal society. I argue that mythopoetics are not only essential to majoritarian cultural formations today, but also normalize White supremacy to such a point that its violence can circulate without consequence and in plain sight.

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Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

#yeeyeenation

Putcha

2022

Du Bois Rev.

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“…Many notable studies in the sociology of culture have shown how intermediaries—including literary, food, music, and film critics—subtly devalue categories associated with non‐white producers (Childress and Nault, 2019; Chong 2011; Gaultieri 2021) and others highlight the obstacles black performers face in crossing racialized genre boundaries (Erigha 2019; Murray 2021; Orosz 2021; Schaap and Berkers 2020). In contrast, we consider how this is inconspicuously manifest in the discourse of popular music critics when they assign genre labels to musicians and their records.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Race and Genre Ambiguity in the Critical Reception of Popular Music

Venrooij

Miller

Schmutz

2021

Sociological Inquiry

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In this article, we link the sociology of culture with the sociology of race and racism to examine how race shapes perceptions of genre ambiguity in popular music. Notable studies in the sociology of culture have recently shown how intermediaries, such as food or literary critics, subtly devalue categories associated with non-White producers and highlighted the obstacles Black musicians and audiences face in spanning racialized genre boundaries. In contrast, we focus on a less visible yet pervasive racial structure that shapes the likelihood that critics identify a musician or group as spanning genre categories. We bring insights from critical race theory (CRT) into direct conversation with empirical scholarship on categorical ambiguity by analyzing 47,230 reviews of 3,252 albums archived on the Metacritic database from 2000 to 2007. We find that critics are less likely to describe Black musicians as category spanners relative to White musicians, and that multiracial music groups are the most likely to have ambiguous genre identities.

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“Straight Outta Nashville”: Allusions to Hip Hop in Contemporary Country Music

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

#yeeyeenation

#yeeyeenation

Race and Genre Ambiguity in the Critical Reception of Popular Music

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