Country music is about storytelling. That’s been the party line of Nashville’s most successful songwriters over the past few decades, and it’s a mission statement that has served the genre well and led to more than a few excellent tracks. Modern story songs like Whiskey Lullaby, Unanswered Prayers, and Austin have not only become smash hits; they’ve joined the pantheon of narrative classics like He Stopped Loving Her Today and Love Without End, Amen. Most of today’s country hits still maintain a narrative perspective, even if the tales being told by mainstream artists are feeling increasingly one-note: Hey girl, let’s hook up.
Lately, though, country music’s version of storytelling is starting to look rather different. Narrative yarns have begun to disappear from the airwaves, replaced instead with carousels of nostalgic images that attempt to evoke a feeling rather than provide any particular account. This phenomenon was labeled “ country checklist” by one influential industry blog in 2012. “Cornbread, biscuits, fried chicken, dirt roads, ice-cold beer, pickup trucks, hay fields,” the article rattled off. “Over and over they beat you over the head with their backroad, barbed wire, Budweiser barbarism of authentic country culture.”
Songs like Country Must Be Country Wide and Dirt Road Anthem (both co-written by Colt Ford, the man behind Rick Perry’s presidential campaign song) ushered in the rise of regional portraiture tunes a few years ago. But it wasn’t until this past year, when the checklist subgenre got a poppy suburban makeover, that the prevalence of these songs became truly undeniable. Visual pastiche is the flavor du jour.
Kenny Chesney launched his latest album with the single American Kids, one of the defining country hits of 2014 – and a perfect example of this kind of song. In the first verse Chesney describes his hometown in a garble of gibberish that makes little sense when read, but nonetheless provides enough whirring images of soda, school buses, and MTV to suggest small town adolescence in the 1980s:
Doublewide quick stop, midnight T-top
Jack in her Cherry Coke town.
Momma and daddy put their roots right here
‘Cause this is where the car broke down.
Yellow dog school bus kickin’ up red dust
Pickin’ us up by a barbed wire fence.
MTV on the RCA, no A/C in the vents.
Jake Owen’s newest single, Real Life, takes a similar approach. “We drank RC, no real Coke/But our neighbor had a pool,” he sings in the first verse before name-dropping “Waffle House for some real food” in the second. Owen recently made headlines by releasing the ballad What We Ain’t Got to radio and calling country artists to strive for more substance, but his performance of Real Life at the CMT Awards last week, replete with choreography and inflatables, suggests that what he really wants to strive for is mimicking Katy Perry’s Super Bowl performance.
Newest to the scene is Keith Urban’s latest single John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16 – a song that, like American Kids and Real Life, was co-written by Shane McAnally, Nashville’s most-wanted songwriter and the current king of this new style. The bass-driven track employs the same every-nostalgic-ingredient-in-a-blender strategy as its predecessors. “I’m a 45 spinning on an old Victrola/I’m a two-strike swinger, I’m a Pepsi Cola/I’m a blue jean quarterback saying ‘I love you’ to the prom queen/In a Chevy,” Urban croons in the opening verse. (Mentions of soda and prom, in case you hadn’t noticed, are very important in this type of song.)
John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16 goes on to reference John Wayne, Kris Kristofferson, Marilyn Monroe, the Garden of Eden, Green Day, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, Gibson guitars, Wheel of Fortune, Texaco gas stations, jukeboxes, and of course, the titular Johns. Once again, the array of examples all work to evoke a sense of nostalgia for adolescence in the late 20th century, but they don’t combine into a coherent narrative. (For the sake of this piece, let’s just skip the discussion about the woefully misguided double key change at the end of the song.)
There’s an argument to be made here that this is all lazy songwriting – and given the glaring sameness of many of these songs, that’s not entirely incorrect – but there’s also a less foreboding argument to be made that songs like John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16 represent a decidedly modern form of storytelling. After all, we live in an age that values visual consumption above other forms of media, so it’s not all that surprising that a song that merely lists recognizable cultural touchstones might resonate with listeners.
According to a report by the Global Web Index last month, the social network Pinterest grew its user base by 97% in the past year, as users fell in love with “pinning” images of wedding cakes and summer dresses on to their virtual pin boards. Pinterest’s growth far outpaced every other social network, especially Facebook, which saw an 8% dip in active users. This provides a convenient metaphor for the state of country songwriting, which currently resembles the mood board stylings of Pinterest far more than the traditional narratives of, say, a Facebook wall post.
Film-maker Terrence Malick has built a prolific career out of using what the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has called a “transcendant visual language to evoke heartland America”, and although his films aren’t plot-driven they nonetheless transmit enough winsome imagery to evoke genuine feeling and provide profound experiences. That said, in recent years, a mini Malick-backlash has lately been brewing. Critics are growing tired of the meandering visual tropes, which once were key to Malick’s intrigue. Bradshaw wrote in his review of Knight of Cups, “His style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody.” Likewise, country music is building an intriguing repertoire of these Pinteresty Viewfinder tunes, but such songs are already on the brink of self-parody, and if the genre’s gatekeepers are wise, they’ll avoid overdoing country music’s next big trend. Here’s hoping that traditional storytelling will never lose its place in Nashville.
