Rad or Bad — Country-Rap
A few years ago I was on tour in Vancouver and I was staying at a friend-of-a-friend’s house. She was a cute girl with dreadlocks who wrote poetry and sang cool indie pop music at dive bars. That summer I was on a mission to be the top Chance the Rapper evangelist in the world. We spent a few hours sharing our favorite songs and I played a bunch of Chance records while I explained why his newest album was the most important thing to happen to my life in a musical and spiritual sense. Through delivering these diatribes, we built enough trust between each other that we began to share our guilty pleasures. I played her some Justin Bieber and Ja Rule tunes that continue to move my soul to this day. When it was her turn to share her guilty pleasures, you could feel a shift in the room.
She began explaining her tastes in a way that felt like less like she was talking about music and more like she was talking about a weird leather fetish she developed in college. She proceeded to take me on the most disturbing musical journey of my life. This cute indie pop singer with dreadlocks began playing some stadium country songs that used hip-hop verses. Normally when any cute girl shows me anything I can convince myself that I also love it but this was different. It was the first time music ever truly offended me. I learned about what a Florida Georgia Line concert was like. I felt betrayed, how could someone this cool, and this cute like something that was this bad. I wished we were talking about her leather fetish instead.
Since then I’ve developed a morbid curiosity with popular country music and all it stands for. I want to understand it, I want to know why people love it. Which is why last week when I was scrolling through Reddit and saw a link to some more “country-rap,” I knew it was my time to explore. I don’t know much about country music but I do know rap music. I feel confident in my ability to separate the good from the bad. So I went on a mission, not just to understand country rap, but to find something good about it, something redeemable about this art form. Something to contextualize this genre of music and that cute girl from Vancouver.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when country-rap started, but music critic Chuck Eddy wrote a very good and comprehensive history of how country and hip-hop have intertwined for Spin magazine. You can find that article here.
Finding the good in country-rap proved to be a much harder task than I anticipated. I spent two weeks of my life mostly listening to country-rap with a few palate cleansers every once in awhile to remind me that good music exists. A lot of it (all of it?) is really bad. This seems facetious but I must mention that this whole genre is also hurt by its unfortunate name; the term country-rap is just begging to be abbreviated to “crap” — actually almost all country songs I’ve heard are begging to be referred to as “crap.”
The first country-rap song I heard was the song was the song, Workin’ by Big Smo
This song does a pretty good job of representing what country-rap is. It’s not good by any means, but it’s at least comparable in quality to low-level popular rap music. It shows the ethos of “hick-hop.” Workin’ is basically Big Smo’s attempt to brag about how hard he works and how many hours he puts in at some vague blue-collar job. Here are a few choice quotes about how hard Big Smo is workin’:
— “Cause I’m working till it’s hurtin,
That’s the only way to make an honest days pay”
— “Fingernails dirty, my back stays hurting”
— “You ain’t pushing hard enough if your hands don’t bleed”
I’m extremely fixated on what job he’s actually talking about here. I’ve done some research on Smo and between his music career and his A&E reality show, there’s no evidence that Big Smo moonlights as a back-hurting, dirty finger-nailed, bloody-handed ditch digger. It seems like he mostly records music from his home studio and makes Facebook videos.
If he does have this blue collar job somewhere, he should really consider getting in contact with an HR rep. Smo makes these bold statements about his job:
— “I ain’t asking for a raise”
— “Spend more time on the clock than I do with my wife”
— “My overtime’s strong, I don’t pay him no attention”
These lyrics make it sound like Smo is in a very problematic work environment. Smo props up these irresponsible acts as being virtuous, which is super funny when you consider the fact that Big Smo doesn’t even have a real job. It’s very interesting to send the message to your blue collar fans that asking for a raise makes you some weak-limbed liberal snowflake.
My intention of writing this article was to be very positive about country-rap. It’s an easy and lazy take to talk about how bad this music is, but in all honesty my journey through country-rap has been slowly draining the meaning out of my life. The content and themes are ridiculous and as much as I want people to be able to celebrate where they’re from, I keep running into abhorrent songs like City Bitch by Mini Thin — WHICH HAS 15 MILLION VIEWS. This song makes a legitimate case for the worst song ever recorded in human history. (editor’s note — I’ve accounted for 2 million of those views)
This tune also brings home the most obvious elephant in the room with this new genre of music — Country-rap is about 99% filled with white artists. There is nothing inherently wrong about this fact, but it feels weird. This genre is about celebrating southern, country dirt road culture in a BIG way. Almost every music video I’ve watched has featured ATVs and big trucks and Bud Light and girls wrestling in sketchy looking bodies of water. I haven’t heard anything explicitly racist — but there is a sense that after each of these videos wrap, someone in the crew drops a hard-r slur in a way that let’s you know they’ve been holding it in for a long time.
You can hear it in this song; he uses the phrase “Obama loving” as a derogatory term. Now, there’s technically nothing wrong with doing that. Maybe he doesn’t agree with Obama’s foreign policy, maybe he thought Barack’s drone strikes were an overlooked part of his presidency; that’s entirely possible. BUT, it feels a little off. Mini Thin doesn’t strike me as a group of very politically active citizens, and this lyric strikes me as potentially racist.
I don’t mean to say country-rap is racist. There have been some weird moments, namely the song Accidental Racist by Brad Paisley and LL Cool J, which could be more aptly titled “We Missed the Point.” However, I don’t want to make this article a piece that condemns embracing where you’re from. It’s okay to be a white rapper and to disagree with Obama’s policies; and on the surface there’s nothing wrong or racist about country rap (low-key though country rap is for sure super racist).
Despite all the bad music, despite all the ATV’s and lo-fi music with antiquated ‘80s rhyme schemes, I continued to push forward with my mission to find some value in this form.
I ran through all the artists on the country-rap equivalent of Def Jam — Average Joe Records — and it was grim. I listened to a Moonshine Bandits verse that starts out rhyming “rap” with “rap.” I listened to Colt Ford, Cowboy Troy, Montgomery Gentry, and The Lacs; and this experience has left me feeling like I had entered into some dystopian future surely influenced by people wearing MAGA hats. Not only do these artists exist, but each of these videos have over 14 million views. I thought I met one wayward cute musically misguided girl, but it turns out she is not alone. Country-rap is a true underground movement swelling up to big heights. Country rappers are selling millions of records and playing sold out shows.
Besides YouTube comments, it’s challenging to find where country rap fans exist on the internet. The music seems to be populated by a fan base who aren’t quite plugged in on Reddit, or the obscure music websites I look to for new music. The few country rap fans that are on the internet point me to two rappers to try and legitimize their favorite art form. Those rappers are Yelawolf and Bubba Sparxx.
These two artists were my last hope, my last chance to redeem not only country music but also my memory of the cute girl from Vancouver.
I listened to Bubba Sparxx’s album Deliverance and Yelawolf’s album Trunk Muzik and I saw my first glimmer of hope for this genre.
Deliverance is largely produced by Timbaland and it bangs a little bit. Like, it doesn’t bang right now, but you could tell it was hot in 2001. It also does a fantastic job of mixing country twang with contemporary hip-hop sounds in a way that feels semi-natural. Bubba Sparxx has some good verses and does a good job of celebrating his country roots without antagonizing the “urban” culture that made hip-hop possible.
The Yelawolf album is worse than Deliverance but it’s still interesting. His style is like a mix of Eminem shock lyrics and Snoop Dogg’s laid-back west coast flow. There are some interesting lines and he’s really good at rapping fast, but overall it’s a tedious listen and not something I would ever willingly engage with again.
Finally, after listening to these two artists and spending the last couple of weeks painfully combing through the country-rap genre, I think it’s fair for me to answer our original question.
Could I find anything good, anything redeemable, about country-rap?
And my answer to this question, which I can give to you in good faith — from a real and true and open part of myself is…
No.
There’s nothing good about this art form. There’s nothing redeemable about this garbage genre. Yelawolf and Bubba Sparxx are fine rappers who could easily exist without the label of being country-rappers. The rest of the artists I’ve found are doing nothing but presenting the worst sides of two great forms of music. If you mixed the lazy song-writing and pandering lyrics of country music with the disorganized sound and grade-school level rhymes of popular rap music, you would get this abomination of an art form. There’s nothing wrong with celebrating where you’re from and making music that represents the people you surround yourself with. But, there is something wrong with sucking this bad.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I just don’t understand country-rap. Maybe I don’t understand what it’s like to be country — maybe if I grew up on dirt roads and spent time in the southern hemisphere of the United States, I would be able to identify with this celebration of southern roots and I’d be playing Big Smo’ songs as my personal anthem while working 12-hour shifts digging ditches somewhere. Maybe if things were a little different, me and that cute girl with dreadlocks from Vancouver would be at a Mini Thin concert getting lost in each others eyes as we sing about City Bitches.
Probably not though. I probably could have been born anywhere and been able to recognize that country-rap music sucks. So country-rappers, please stop making music for the sake of country music and rap music, and mostly for the sake of that cute girl in Vancouver, because if a girl that cool and that cute can’t make me like you, you have no hope.