Are Hipsters Going to Start Liking Pop-Country Soon?

Last December, the writing staff at Pitchfork Media placed Usher, music criticism’s go-to answer to the question, “What is commercial R&B?”, at #3 on their Top 100 Tracks of 2012 list, with his Diplo collaboration “Climax.” At this point, it is a fact pretty well established that Usher hit his commercial and creative peak with 2004’s Confessions, which exemplified not only his versatile and enduringly subtle voice but also the height of commercial R&B’s Billboard dominance. To take Pitchfork to task for this apparent inconsistency would be silly: while many expect their year-end lists to be in some way infallible or comprehensive, Pitchfork’s are most useful as an analog for the current critical opinion in the indie world than a survey of the good music that came out across the board in any given year. The fact that “Climax” placed 16 places higher in 2012 than the far more pervasive “Yeah!” in 2004 is, however, a strong indication of a long shift in opinion. A publication first made notorious for its heavily cerebral and personal defense of unsung and ethos-filled musicians (and acerbic attacks of popular and insincere ones) has embraced one of the cheesiest, publically visible, and openly manufactured genres. What was once seen as, at best, a guilty pleasure reserved for special, recklessly indulgent occasions now stands next to angsty indie rock and lyrically lyrical hip-hop—two indie pillars of depth, subtlety, and authenticity that have stood for at least a decade.

Feel free to be both relieved and horrified that technology is mostly to blame for this phenomenon. For a music snob, finding good, relatively unknown music to lord over lesser folks (e.i. independent/underground music) used to be relatively easy if you had the time and energy. Know the right people, go to the right record store, buy the right magazine and you were well on your way to a region of good music with obscurity you could count on. Brave the attitude of a douchey record store clerk and you were headed home with a guaranteed-hip 7-inch.

Today, underground music is far more available but with far less structured distribution. Want to find good, yet obscure music? Trawl through pages and pages of blogs that update you daily with Soundcloud remixes, mixtape trailers, thousands of unimaginatively produced clips from faceless and purposefully anonymous projects/bands/duos/ghosts. It’s fucking hard, and a lot of people end up simply trusting the production quality of a video or Bandcamp album, or worse, the advice of the arbitrarily gimmick-seeking hype cycle to tell them what’s good. There are, of course, well-curated blogs out there, but reputations take years to build and even then, online recommendations are a far cry from the personal recommendation a retail employee who has seen you face to face.

So, like a people driven from their homeland by tyrannical technocrat imperials, the indie community has been forced to turn diasporic, spreading their specific cultural habits to the lands of other genres in search of new obscurities. You see, after years of careful discrimination, most indie listeners have backup tastes that, even as they have been dismissed as low-brow, have been nonetheless absorbed. Those who developed a healthy love of music in late-1990’s and early-2000’s have a lot to choose from: we came of age during the height of commercial urban music, the flowering of weepy-eyed pop-punk, emo, and post-hardcore, the golden age of boy bands and girl pop, and late ‘90s mini-wave of country crossover.

What was once the realm of guilt and secret enjoyment is now a point of pride for many critics and listeners. You may have noticed that after the recent breakup of My Chemical Romance, one of the last decade’s most expressive pop-punk bands, a surge of write-ups arose praising the band’s previously unrecognized greatness. After two platinum albums and tons of attention from mainstream media, calling MCR obscure seems hilariously subjective, but, heavily influenced by the poptimism vs. rockism debate of the early-to-mid-2000s, young listeners and writers now look to cultural, rather than commercial, obscurity.

Just as indie icons like Arcade Fire and Sleater-Kinney eventually shuffled their way out of suffocating pressure of indie obsession into a more widely recognized but far less intensely praised popularity, these obscurities will also become far less obscure with time, and likely in a much shorter time than their vinyl grandparents. Just as John Darnielle’s now infamous forum monogoue about “Ignition (Remix)” probably opened the minds of thousands of indie-rock fans to the possibility of enjoying R. Kelly unironically, recent enthusiasm on the part of Tavi Gevinson, Lena Dunham, and Grimes, three of indie-culture’s most currently coveted opinions, have raved about Taylor Swift’s talent and thematic relatability.

And as the move towards R&B made space for minor crossover acts like The Weeknd or Miguel, indie-directed country acts will likely do the same. Kacey Musgraves, who has been releasing music independently since 2002, has become, after some growing and an image reboot, what Jezebel’s Tracy Moore called “Your New Favorite 'Country' Singer, Especially If You Don't Like Country.” Her grandfather is a record collector, she’s got weird piercings and fun hair, she sings about smoking weed, and her song “I Miss You” kind of sounds like Radiohead. She lyrics consist of lines like “I drink to feel, I smoke to breathe,” classic country wallowing in the language of the mildly rebellious independent lifestyle of 2013. Like her R&B counterparts, her music is very much still country music (her single “Merry Go Round” was all over country radio last year), but it’s got the recognizable ancillary elements to allow it to be sold to an entirely separate audience as well.

As Solange’s Knowles’ #DeepBrandyAlbumCuts confusion and the Finally Richwars that rocked the rap internet in late 2012 have taught us, listeners from different backgrounds can have wildly different internal understandings of what makes R&B and Hip-hop enjoyable and from what angle the cultural skylines of those genres should be viewed. Country music will be no different. Presenting a vast overenthusiasm in the face of a huge body of music can look amateurish, or worse, disrespectful, to seasoned fans. Those whose recently discovered love of R&B music stemmed from the VH1 videos of their youth, for example, took some time to figure out that their seemingly fresh tastes were actually quite out of date. As a result, we get “Climax” at #3, a relatively unexceptional (but alt-pandering) hit amongst Usher’s quite intimidating catalog, instead of, say, Future’s “Turn on the Lights”, a far more exciting, relatively challenging, and current R&B hit.

Regardless, the R&B surge has generated a new appreciation of longstanding, if mildly past their prime, stars who deserve honest attention. Late career wave-makers like Ciara’s “Body Party” might not be these artists’ most enduring records, but Ciara deserves the credit regardless. And maybe similarly established country staples like Jason Aldean or Miranda Lambert do too.

Colin Small wears cowboy boots at all times. He's on Twitter - @ColinSSmall