The aesthetics of country music

Abstract

Country music has not gotten much attention in philosophy. I introduce two philosophical issues that country music raises. First, country music is simple. Some people might think that its simplicity makes country music worse; I argue that simplicity is aesthetically valuable. The second issue is country music’s ideal of authenticity; fans and performers think that country should be real or genuine in a particular way. But country music scholars have debunked the idea that country authenticity gets at anything real; widespread ideas about country authenticity are rooted in a racist and fabricated picture of country music. In discussing these two issues, I highlight the importance of community in country music.

Country Music and the Problem of Authenticity

“…Authentic works are by the same group of people who made works like this in the beginning (or are made with the same intentions that those people had). As we have seen, however, all of these stories are simply factually wrong (Dyck 2021).…”

“…While philosophers have so far not paid much attention to country music, there is now a small but growing body of work dealing with the unique aesthetic features of the genre (Shusterman 1999;Dyck 2018;Berhardt 2018;Dyck 2021). Surveying this literature, the question of how we ought to understand the genre's notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions.…”

Outlaw epistemologies: Resisting the viciousness of country music's settler ignorance

“…Its use of the first‐person plural signals a shared perspective; and it doesn't matter whether Haggard and Burris created the character in this song to tell a story, or to depict something they valued. Even if Okie doesn't tell us to dislike hippies, it depicts a practical identity that can be identified with as a source of pride or a source of community; and it provides scaffolding for constructing this identity, especially for people who don't live in the situation it depicts (compare Dyck, 2021, p. 4). This is why it is so important to notice what Okie leaves out.…”

“…But there is enough communal structure in country music to build a richer understanding of community, and a richer understanding of how our perspectives are bound to our history. Like other family traditions, country music helps people to become who they are (Dyck, 2021); but it is important to remember that history and tradition go beyond one generation, and beyond the boundaries of narrowly defined family units. Family traditions can support viciously sedimented settler colonial imaginaries; but they can also be used to build more robust kinship relations, by taking a long and hard look at sedimented reality, and the way it prevents us from exploring possibilities for co‐flourishing.…”

“…It can also remind them to love deeper, speak sweeter, and do things they enjoy—because we never know when such opportunities will be snatched away (Nichols & Weissman, 2004). It can even help “people become who they are, even when their location won't” (Dyck, 2021, p. 4). Finally, by focusing on engagements with country music that support a broader understanding of the world and its possibilities, we might come to understand how country music inflects the epistemic machinations of settler colonialism 2…”