My Secret Soft Spot For Country
Unpacking the urban vs. rural divide and country's moment in the sun. Plus, the genre's Black roots and BTS of a luxury NYC hotel.
Last fall, I made a rare trip to the country. On the long drive to my hotel from Milwaukee airport I chatted with my driver, a local Wisconsiner in his early twenties. We got on the topic of city vs. country life after he warned of how unsafe Milwaukee has become. When I asked why he’d never been to New York City, he told me it’s too “cultured”—there are too many “dangerous people” there. As a former veteran, he’s naturally on guard and a city like New York has too many unknowns. I told him, it’s funny, I feel the opposite—having so many people on the street is what makes New York feel safe to me. It’s when I’m out in the country—walking alone on an empty road with no person or store in sight—that I feel unsafe. As we drove past a Piggly Wiggly, the lone grocery store in a vast expanse of open fields, I told him I feel more unsafe in places like this.
I left the conversation feeling more vindicated in considering myself a city person. It’s been a core part of my identity since I was a kid. I grew up in Canada’s biggest city, one that (by Canadian standards) has a reputation for fostering all the negative traits associated with city life—being cold, selfish and uptight. Every summer, I made an annual trip to visit my best friend on the West Coast. I would spend half the trip in Calgary—a city where I lived for a few years as a kid—and the other half at her cabin. Set deep in the Rocky Mountains, the family built the cabin themselves, so it had no electricity and we had to bring in our own water. I didn’t consider myself uncomfortable or out of place in this foreign environment—I could wear a plaid shirt and pretend I knew the difference between the safe berries and the poisonous ones that we picked in the surrounding forest. Occasionally, however, my cityness would reveal itself, when, for example, I couldn’t easily brush off finding mouse poop in our shared bed.
Even then, at a young age, I could sense the judgment that I was a city girl not equipped for country life. I responded with defensiveness, and from then on, I leaned into my cityness by always choosing to live in cities with particularly vibrant cultures, like Montreal and New York. As I got older my associations with city vs. country life became more entrenched. The former came to represent ambition, diversity, education, openness, opportunities while the latter I associated with stagnation, tradition, slowness, simplicity and narrow-mindedness. Obviously these black-and-white characterizations are reductive, but for most of my life, I’ve held these presumptions.
For context, my negative presumptions about country life have a psychological explanation. When I was eight and my mom was in a coma with little chance of waking up, I was forced to move from a city neighborhood in Toronto—the only home I’d ever known—to the suburbs of Calgary. I remember marvelling at how big the moon looked in that open prairie sky, wishing to its glowing face that my mom would wake up. Living in Canada’s “wild west,” I experienced racism for the first time at school, and came home to grandparents who weren’t exactly the supportive type. Eventually my mom awoke from her coma and we moved back to Toronto. But having my first exposure to the “country” (Calgary is still a city to be fair) coincide with a particularly distressful part of my childhood, meant I developed a natural disinclination towards anything country.
Every time I dabbled in country thereafter, I was reminded that it was a space in which I didn’t belong. On the second half of that annual summer trip out West, my best friend and I would go to the Calgary Stampede. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s the world’s largest outdoor rodeo. Yes there are literal cowboys and cowgirls lassoing atop a restricted bull, but there’s also a carnival amusement park and concerts with big name headliners (this year’s lineup includes the Jonas Brothers, Miranda Lambert and wait for it… Nickelback, lol!). The city comes alive for the festival—grocery stores host free pancake breakfasts with many Calgarians donning full cowboy attire for the week. As a teenager, the Stampede was an excuse to party. And what better way to soothe over my anxiety about not belonging then by dressing up for men’s (boy’s) approval and drinking myself to oblivion. What happens at the Stampede stays at the Stampede, but even then, the whole thing felt like a performance; me trying to fit in with the blonde, white country Barbies around me.
And yet, I’ll admit, sometimes I find myself drawn to country. Typically, via country music. Now, I’m not talking a top 40 Tim McGraw song, it’s never deep country. It’s usually country lite, like Johnny Cash or The Chicks’ Landslide, or even a Taylor Swift song that has a hint of twang. There is something comforting about country music that reminds me of home, not my main home (Toronto) but that other second home I’ve for so long tried to erase from my memory. In reviewing Beyonce’s new country single 16 Carriages—which describes Beyonce leaving home at 15 to become a star—Sam Sanders made the astute observation that country lyrics are often about leaving. That’s exactly what country represents for me—the place I left. As much as we might want to forget the place or person we leave for something better, it’ll always be a part of us.
Maybe this is why people love country music so much. The genre evokes this sense of longing; tapping into nostalgia and our relationship to home. Its simplicity and innocence has an alluring appeal when life gets complicated and hard to handle as an adult. Still, whenever I’m listening to something country(-ish), I double-check the music is playing in my air pods, because a part of me is ashamed. But lately if I take out my air pods, country is all around me—from people wearing cowboy boots on a Brooklyn street to Luke Comb’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car becoming a viral hit to cowboy romance books trending on TikTok. Country is more popular than it’s ever been: last year it was one of the fastest growing streaming genres in the U.S., with streams exceeding 20 billion, a 23.7 percent increase compared to 2022.
Once I look beyond the more obvious signs of country’s big moment—like the new albums from Kacey Musgraves and Beyonce (and the welcome discourse the latter has sparked around the overlooked contribution of Black country artists to the genre)—I notice that country has been trending in more subtle ways for years now. While cottagecore arguably reached its peak when we were pandemic nesting in our homes, the slow, bucolic life it promotes still appeals. The city girls are no longer needle-working in their apartments, but they’re running around town dressed like the girls of Little House on the Prairie, with corset-inspired tops; flowing, floral fabrics and oversized puff sleeve dresses.
Meanwhile, some women are choosing to be at home and take care of the kids, as the modern tradwife romanticizes female domesticity and traditional gender roles. We see the romanticizing of country life in food too—farm-to-table is no longer a trend but the new normal as consumers increasingly demand organic and minimally processed foods. Amidst the uncontrollable rise of big tech and global crises like climate change, people crave softness and slowness; a return to a simpler time.
The irony of country’s big moment is that it excludes people who actually live in the country. The reality is that poverty rates are higher in rural areas, and many people who live in the country can’t afford the expensive, slow-food diet their city counterparts idealize. A woman who actually lives on and operates a farm is most likely not spending her days in a pretty paisley apron baking sourdough and reading a country romance novel in a candlelit bath. And in music, it’s yet to be seen whether Beyonce’s new album will catapult other Black country artists to fame, but it’s always been and continues to be the white country artists who profit most from the industry.
Is the reality of country life what we actually want? Probably not. Caving to country’s allure is like seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. Country, for me, is about longing—longing for the person or home you left; a simpler life; the way it was. And longing, at its core, is a fantasy. Still, I will listen to Kacey Musgraves softly sing about the cardinal who brings her messages from the other side as I lie on the floor of my apartment, imagining the root of my spine connected to the roots of the Earth below, when I’m really just lying on the ceiling of my neighbor’s apartment in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Best,
Anna
Published 📝
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A good first-person piece reads as light and easygoing, but injecting your personality into a story is surprisingly difficult. So I loved that in the editing process for this, my editor encouraged me to lean into my sense of humor. As someone who has tried countless wellness treatments, I was curious to find out if sand bathing is a traditional practice with real benefits or just another wellness fad. What I discovered surprised me.
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Reading 📖
I was so bummed I missed my last book club meeting because I actually finished the book for once: Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans. As someone who spends a lot of time in hotels, I adored Bemelmans’ musings on the guests and BTS accounts of hotel/restaurant life. This description sums it up perfectly: “Picture David Sedaris writing Kitchen Confidential about the Ritz in New York in the 1920s, which had the style and charm of The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
“[Bemelmans] was the original bad boy of the NY hotel/restaurant subculture, a waiter, busboy, and restaurateur who told all in a series of funny and true (or very near true) autobiographical accounts of backstairs folly, excess, borderline criminality, and madness in the grande Hotel Splendide. If you like stories about old New York as I do, this classic will have you laughing out loud.” - Anthony Bourdain
Articles:
🎶 Will Country welcome Beyonce? That’s the wrong question.
🪕 A brief history of Black pop artists going country.
🤰 The rise and fall of the tradwife.
🎤 An oral history of Beyonce and The Chicks’ audacious CMA performance.
😂 Forthcoming Beyonce albums in surprising genres.
🤳 The dumbphone boom is real.
🌶 On Momofuku and Trader Joe’s coming for small food businesses.
🍽 I’m devouring this look back at the restaurants that defined NYC.
⚰️ The last will and testament of a broke New Yorker.
Watching 📺
I’ve seen every episode of Sex and the City too many times to count, so in recent years, I’ve restricted my watching to when it happens to be on cable in my hotel room. As one of the formative shows of my adolescence, it always makes me nostalgic and feel at home (even the parts that haven’t aged so well). But seeing it recently added to Netflix, I’ve been dabbling in it at home when I’m craving comfort. The ‘Sex and the Country’ episode in which Carrie goes up to Suffern, N.Y. to stay at Aidan’s cottage is a shining example of city people (and Carrie) at their worst.
I love the final scene of the episode when Carrie concludes, “city girls are just country girls in cuter outfits.”
Listening 🎧
I’ve always considered country music to be an exclusionary genre but I had no idea just how far back that exclusion goes until listening to this episode of Into It on the history of country music and it’s relationship to race today. Some history I was fascinated to learn:
At the turn of the 20th century, music was divided into genres. There was country, classical, rock, all the genres we know today, but there was also a category for “race music.” Everything else was identified by its type/sound, but the music created by Black artists was identified by the race of the musicians, irrespective of genre.
The banjo is an African instrument. It travelled to the U.S. with enslaved people, refined in the cultural exchange with Native Americans and Mexican Indigenous.
A lot of the hillbilly music that became country music took from minstrel and blackface shows.
I’ve also been listening to Beyonce and Kacey Musgraves new albums on repeat. Beyonce’s ‘YA YA’ is a tour de force. Brendon Holder’s description of Musgraves’ music sums up the vibe perfectly:
“Her vocals lull the listener into a lullaby of sorts, a hexing rhyme that softly tucks you back in after you’ve felt the harsh wisps of the morning rays. It feels like the melting of snow. Like the change of seasons and the blooming of spring. It feels soft. It feels like home.”
Snacking 🍌
When a friend invited me to the Korean American Family Service Center’s 35th Anniversary Gala Dinner, I naturally said yes because of the cause. The center provides support to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. After the pandemic, the number of calls to their hotline tripled to over 4000 calls in 2023. In that year alone, they provided more than 21,000 services to immigrant survivors and their children, highlighting the scale of the issue.
Upon arrival, I was immediately intimidated—among the incredibly well-dressed, prestigious crowd, I might as well have been a country gal. But once inside the breathtaking landmark building on Wall Street, I was struck with a feeling I can’t put into words—aside from actually being in Korea, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a space filled with so many other Koreans. Obviously there were people of other races too, but seeing so many Korean Americans dressed to the nines, brought together by this good cause, was so meaningful. I also had some really insightful conversations with media professionals, including one who described Succession as a depiction of his real life.