Most of the music industry spent their Thanksgiving like normal people: back at home after arduous stints on the road, slapping gravy on every inch of the plate, commiserating with friends and family, getting a quick meal in before heading back to the stage or the studio to close out the year—most of the music industry. At least two on the roster of that fraternity were holed away, clacking keys into the void, sending messages that swirled down the digital toilet bowl, a few split-second interactions that left sour tastes in mouths since one of them found that punching down made for a good marketing strategy, and the other took the bait.
The two duelists in this round were Gavin Adcock, Georgia’s newest notable hothead, and Benjamin Tod, the Thirty Tigers-repped independent country singer who’s existed as a secondary character amidst the new cosmopolitan scene of retro acts, and a self-appointed spokesperson for the grunts of the genre’s core that have kept the train chugging along. This isn’t the first time the two have butted heads, maybe not even the first time in that week that they had verbally sparred, but it was maybe the last straw before Punchy turned into pathetic.
You could trace the beef back as far as Gavin Adcock’s statements concerning pop star Beyonce’s seat at the table, a year after the release of her Cowboy Carter LP, yet strangely mere weeks before Adcock’s third effort. It resurfaced when Charley Crockett spoke to that growing discontent within a disjointed community he saw as misaligned frustrations rather than some yuppie invasion. This only further added fuel to Adcock’s fire, who punched back hard and even coaxed Morgan Wallen, whom he was then supporting on tour, to make some less-than-pleasant gestures toward the Texas native. Where flowers were sent by one party, birds were flipped by another, beautifully illustrating the crux of the American arts in 2025. Unlimited in its talent, access, and resources, yet its proprietors are too stupid to get out of each other’s way.
But while the main card seemed to be unfolding before our very eyes, the depths of those reply boxes saw Benjamin Tod hammering down on points made by Crockett, his contemporaries, or really anyone who had a bone to pick with the biggest bully on campus. Where Crockett was dismissive, passive-aggressive, or blase about his distaste for the bull-in-a-china-shop ethos that had become so rabid in popular culture, one that evaded any sense of earnestness that wasn’t predetermined to drive up engagement numbers, Tod was straight-up mean. Originally airing out his grievances on a country music podcast in early November, he performed a diatribe against this specific strain of mainstream that felt more toxic than was the tendency even in the genre’s rowdiest of days. He’d come at Adcock’s online presence as if it were his personal character, chastise habits that had no doubt been emphasized as a selling point, going as far as to straight up denigrate and label him a “lazy, stupid, shiftless motherfucker” in a rant posted to Instagram.
There’s a plethora of great one-liners to pick apart as emotionally charged nothingburgers throughout the past month’s worth of exchanges, and we’ll try to hit the marks as best we can. First, it’s still important to acknowledge two things. The first: Benjamin Tod is a more intense, less stoic version of Crockett’s presentation in the months prior. Part of that is purely commercial: Charley Crockett is maybe at the height of his success, with a new label deal, records, and venues that guys like Tod would froth over. The hunger is still palpable there, the insults far more personal when they’re being lived in, and the discourse is far more visceral in a quieter echo chamber. Hard to tune the noise out, good and bad, when it’s half the inbox.
The second contextual factor to point out is that Adcock is a schoolyard bully, as to why that is, maybe a little more abstract, probably a little more nuanced than the “entitled little brat” moniker Tod gave him in one of his many tirades. The fact of the matter is that if you acknowledge the absurdity of his claims, you’ve basically already rolled over on your belly and cried uncle. To entertain his juvenile cultural criticisms, in any regard, is a loss by default. Is it a shame that artists with such conflated egos and confrontational personalities can hog the same spotlight from a saint with twice the talent? It’s an absolute travesty, but it’s not a revelation. If the revivalists of traditional country disengaged from this sort of subpar, performative, paparazzi-beckoning madness, the attention would just get shifted to more productive places; that, I’m confident in.
What I’m not as sold on is that, in a roundabout way, every party involved in this mess is benefitting from a fight that is absolutely cancerous to modern music. It’s not as much of a shock with Adcock, who feels bred for this kind of behavior, with his “Morning Bail” single being teased just as he was exiting a short stint of legal troubles and plastering his own mugshot on any channel of communication he could. The writing was on the wall from the moment he broke containment and found out that debauchery, purely for the sake of it, could be monetized.
But I’m also not so keen to paint the blame entirely on Adcock, either. As I said, the game is played both ways, and like most people’s mothers told them, the only way to get a bully to back down is to disarm them. Tod’s reaction, in all facets, practically bent the knee to gift Gavin with a grenade launcher. Loud, unabashed, unrehearsed, and to a point where endearment started to feel invaded by personal priorities. In recent weeks and months, Tod has been pushing these soapbox sessions parallel to new merchandise and music, and you have to wonder if he’s not seeing some of the lucrative side effects of this public display in some fashion as well. This isn’t to say that Tod’s criticisms aren’t valid; it’s more in his continued barrage of an approach that leads me to think that this beef became a tactically decided one, at least after the outlaw realized there was a buck or two to be made in it.
And maybe what’s the most heartbreaking about that is in the notion that Tod, in a lot of ways, is correct. To platform an act that’s seen a pretty frictionless rise to fame yet loves to orchestrate chaos in Adcock, and allow him the space to denigrate those he’s stepped on the shoulders of to get to his current level, is astoundingly sad. Engaging an audience through online vitriol and lukewarm takes spat out with such veracity they’re delivered like a violent truth is a toughwatch. That lack of earnestness is shameful, benevolence that’s only accentuated in the midst of PR course corrections, but his antithesis isn’t totally rid of blame either.
The sheer nature of the argument is just a symptom of where American culture at large, and certainly country music, rests today. Jack detailed this in a previous op-ed surrounding Adcock’s beef with Charley Crockett, noting the post-pandemic rift between students like Charley and spotlight stormers like Adcock, who ultimately butt heads over territory they’re failing to realize has ample real estate. Where Tod falters in Crockett’s place isn’t just in the fact that he’s grossly possessive of an identity that’s rendered meaningless in the hands of certain circles, it’s that he’s speaking with such authority on behalf of a community that Adcock really has no bearing over and is actively separating himself from. Their Venn diagram of shared fans is so slim, what disservice actually holds any value if some guffawing Georgian is talking smack from the other side of the bleachers?
Tod also incessantly requires Adcock and those with similar silhouettes to be well-read, well-studied students of a game they again have virtually no relation to outside of name-brand value. While I do understand the argument that citing influence while being ignorant of its conditions is irresponsible, the performers that are now acting historians of the genre (like Tod) arguably make labor out of form to feel art with this line of thinking. Gatekeeping, in so many ways, is a deterrent to new blood into this centuries-old form of expression. If that’s what you want, fine, quality over quantity, I suppose. But realize that country music is allowed to act with its newfound authority in large part because of the rise of acts that can easily lend themselves to more resistant ears by plucking and cherry-picking key motifs from across genre lines. New markets, new opportunities: a large portion of the boom the community has seen in recent years is due to more mainstream-adept personalities. You don’t have to like them, but to call out a Gavin Adcock for not doing his homework and having no words to say on a Zach Bryan for disavowing the niche he’s found his most success in paints a pretty flippant picture of the priorities surrounding this conversation.
But the main moment of pause in all of this comes from how an in-house culture war has been spun into a pivot point for all parties. Aside from Adcock’s aforementioned boy-who-cried-wolf rollout strategy, Tod has been capitalizing on the moment in ways that aren’t as noticeable, but they, too, are hilariously on brand. In the weeks after his first exchange with the “Actin’ Up Again” singer, Tod began pushing a new line of merchandise that plastered the phrase “piss on bro country” across various pieces of swag on his website, an obvious shot at his opponent that scored points with fans wanting to virtue signal their dog in the fight.
In early December, he released a single titled “Hell I Have,” which is an ostensibly charged consolidation of the singer’s ramblings set to time and melody. If you saw his aforementioned rant on Instagram, you could probably mad-libs most of the lyrics to this one. Engaging in digital hostility as a former busker is questionable on its own, and I understand that it is called the music business for obvious reasons, but seeking monetization off a symptom of this crucial moment, from the mouths that helped perpetrate it no less, is cause for some concern. Specifically in Tod’s case, as a self-appointed ambassador for the right side of the tracks. Is it really permissible to criticize bad acting in your peers when you yourself are being brazen about trying to sell off the back of a few fired-up thumb tirades?
I am not trying to say that one of these artists has a stronger claim to residency within the country music umbrella than the other. They both pass the sniff test in different ways, and their existence in the same sentence is a testament to how broad and expansive that definition has become over the past ten years, a blessing in its own way. What’s really worrying is the turf war that’s resulted out of that expansion, these two’s scuffle being a microcosm of that notion. Still, the fact that it’s been handled like most things in American culture since the internet was recognized as such a powerful tool and extension of the human personality in a space of shared community is worrying. People are angry at profile pictures rather than real flesh-and-blood people, and the orchestrators of the madness are profiting fully from it. In a few months, both Tod and Adcock will be playing the Saturday of the Stagecoach festival, and their followers will be in pretty proximity to one another. Would these two camps even acknowledge each other’s existence if this squabble never happened? I’d be willing to say no. Will there be a Malice at the Palace-style brawl breaking out now that they’ve both been exposed to each other? I also doubt it. But they should know that there are only two people to blame for the rise in tensions in this instance, and that number will remain the same regardless of who either of these artists decides to pick on next.
