“Show, don’t tell” is a phrase ingrained in just about every brain that sat through a creative writing class at some point in their schooling, regardless of how much attention was paid after that. At its core, it prioritizes immersion into a place over its mere description, harboring the truth that seeing is the only way to lead to believing. While the saying gets its best practice in more visually inclined media, like movies and television, its truths still ring true over a fiddle and steel now and then.
Songwriters and song-singers for decades have reached astronomical heights both commercially and artistically by painting a picture for their audience, inviting them in for a meal rather than letting lost-looking souls wander any farther. From Loretta Lynn crooning over hot coals at the height of a Depression-era Kentucky, to Colter Wall taking listeners on a trot to tend his pasture, engrossment yields far more fruitful results than pure identity signaling. And boy, do people from just about everywhere love to tell you how much better it is on this side of the river rather than wherever you came from.
But in the TikTok crazed, algorithm driven, smorgasbord of a scene that is 2025, how much does regionality or listing off lifestyle dogwhistles really carry you? Sure it can get a foot in the door, but it doesn’t do much to plant a personal flag in the ground after that. Hell, if anything, singing your own praises from the mountaintops is about as conformist as it gets when you look at the long list of has-beens who did the same thing before you. The standard, for better or for worse, is different; the quality should reflect something more innate than a sound that, quite frankly, is far more diverse and open-minded than many would be willing to give it credit for.
It’s a feeling that’s become more played out and hostile, as commercial viability has taken hold in country music. It’s not any sort of revelation to say that this genre is going through its biggest identity crisis since Hank Jr. stumbled into town. If you throw a rock down Broadway in 2025, you’re bound to hit an Alan Jackson impersonator, a former vocal show contestant, and a tattered troubadour with attachment issues all in one swift motion. It’s a turbulent, albeit diverse ride, that only really goes to confirm the thought that’s permeating everyone’s brain for the last five years: genre is dead, and what’s left of what you thought you knew only exists in small bits and pieces. Rather than an overt cultural theme surrounding banjos and steel, there’s tidbits of this culture placed around a much more crowdsourced collection of influences rather than a direct lineage.
And while the former invites innovation where it can, the latter feels like it’s carving out a carcass that had the best of its meat rot off a decade ago. Where the new school at least attempts to invigorate this multitude of a mess with diversity, the “old school” seeks to self-aggrandize to a point of unlistenable parody. One finds common ground, the other alienates any approachable parts of itself by declaring its prowess in the most minute, surface-level details of a genre rich in its history and even richer in its means and modes of storytelling. The new age country centerpiece is almost always a fable about how God, guns, and momma’s homemade apple pie are the absolute extent of artistry in this camp, and to accept anything less (or more) is bastardizing the form. Country songs about country music, in this day and age, are a dead end where wheels spin and spin and spin to no forward progress; only mud on the windshield of the guy behind you.
Yes, you could argue that HARDY’s breakout hit “Rednecker” was the match to this sonic gasoline, erupting a line in the sand between the bros and their cosplayers in an attempt to establish an “in” crowd at least amongst those who orbit Nashville proper. In many ways, it condensed the solid structure into something a little more tongue-in-cheek, and that alone can almost be forgiven. On the surface, it reads like Trey Parker and Matt Stone sent Cartman to Nashville with a cowboy hat in an episode of “South Park,” and this is what he came up with. But instead of playing into the tropes or poke at them a little more, he doubled down. “Unapologetically Country As Hell” comes to town two years later, brandishing those pistols with an Eastwood stare-down rather than a shit-eating grin. The bit, as fun as it was in the moment, slowly swallowed him.
But you could even dig deeper than that. Tracks like Waylon Jennings’s “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” or the Books & Dunn romp “Play Something Country” both embellish on and glamorize the themes surrounding the South’s biggest stars and the lives they lead. The former plays it straight, the latter is beaming with hokey charm, but neither acts to further over this line between self-awareness and a hostile break of the fourth wall to tell its audience off because their boots weren’t scuffed enough. They were sure of themselves in a far more suave manner than most of today’s frontrunners; they didn’t have to tell you how “country” they were, they just showed you.
That’s not to say that the blame lies entirely in HARDY’s or any of these predecessors’ laps either. Plenty of single-churners and radio regulars have hit the nail through the wall before them, and are certainly continuing to make that hole bigger afterwards. But the problem doesn’t lie in the innate structure of the product, more so what’s been left of it in our aforementioned, flattened sense of identity within art as a whole. There are hardly any barriers to defining what constitutes a genre anymore, despite archaic charts and categorization. Blues is a heartbeat away from soul, which is a heartbeat away from hip-hop, which is a heartbeat away from just about anything left on the table, yes, including country music. The game has changed, and its players are scrambling to find the piece that best suits them. The least secure amongst us are still trying to convince everyone that the rules haven’t changed, YOU have.
As a reaction to this world of collectivism, where sounds and scenes are being plucked from every tree in the garden, the old oak of honky-tonkin in the corner is wincing whenever a leaf is torn off one of its many branches, claiming it won’t fit the form of whoever just tugged on it. Artists at the top of the pipe, timid to vacate their comfort zones, clutch their country pearls with a white-knuckle grip to ensure that when the next grifter or culture vulture comes knocking, they won’t be getting the family’s crown jewels. But it’s not enough to denounce this new shared normalcy, like so many have done with certain artists delving into the fray; to earn your stripes truly, you have to announce your claim to the treasure artists like Post Malone, Lana Del Rey, Chappell Roan, and plenty of other perceived sonic tourists are after. The house of country music, for better or for worse, is a crowded one these days. Its longtime tenants are on the defensive, trying to shoo off potential new residents with a broomstick. But screaming that you belong there from the top of your lungs doesn’t help anybody in this cramped space find a seat any easier. If anything, its regressive of a culture that has so much to learn about itself amidst this new normal.
Sifting through the modern age, there’s been a SLEW of these bros incidentally careening toward spoof territory as they try to puff their chest. You’ve got Thomas Rhett pulled together a baker’s dozen of half-baked references that somehow landed on a few verses and a chorus on “What’s Your Country Song,” while Dylan Scott slinging them out in record time, his newest offense coming in the form of the boom-bap affront on the ears that is “Country Till I Die.” Last summer, Bailey Zimmerman threw his hat in the ring for an anthem of the season with “New To Country,” a TikTok fuckboy farmland teeming with little man jaw flapping Zimmerman hopes to veil as bravado.
Earlier this summer, Lee Brice employed an all-star cast of true-to-form country artists to preserve this line of thinking, with Randy Houser and Jamey Johnson crooning along to the collaboration of the summer “Said No Country Boy Ever.” It’s as much of a dumb-guy rug-pull moment as its title suggests. It’s loud, obnoxiously mixed, a mushy marsh of one-liners without a shred of clever winks or charm that could (and should) populate the writers’ room with this hanging over the whiteboard prompt list.
I drag all of these songs and laud their predecessors to exemplify how smart, fun, and unserious this whole shtick can be taken without sacrificing any of the identity or culture of the music that many believe is at stake by opening the gates to a wider audience. Even amongst these more hollowed out examples, there are still glimmers of irony and self-understanding merging into something that’s, at the very least, listenable.
For all his faults, Gavin Adcock seems privy to the fact that mascoting and personality can intertwine on a track like “Unlucky Strikes.” Here, the former football star hits about all the highlights of a country boy’s life in the first eight bars before crashing into the verse. Or how about “When Country Came Back to Town,” where Brent Cobb chronicles his journey through the fold of the genre’s traditional-minded revival? While the intentions of both are apparent, the modes of character and subtle hints at its roots are apparent without being so brash that it alienates anyone unaccustomed to the norm.
In 2025, we’ve breached rigid genre structure and torn down walls between southern music’s many sects. It’s time to stop enforcing this doctrine of country music being about country music simply for the sake of and based on it being… You guessed it, country music. This is not to say we should endorse anything that chooses the label, but rather be more mindful of how the culture has impacted artists personally, rather than be stuck with a roster so worried about their seat at the table that they forgot to bring a dish from home in the first place. With the way the genre is and the way it’s moving, to keep prescribing an extremely rigid set of rules to it is a moot point that will leave you in the dust if you keep chasing it.
