ABSTRACT
In this essay, I aim to analyze the intricate ways in which popularity and unpopularity are—perhaps oxymoronically—part and parcel of contemporary country music. Importantly, I focus on commercially successful forms of country music and thus deal with a musical genre that is truly popular in one sense of the term at the same time as it thrives on its self-conscious distance from the perceived artificiality of popular culture and aims to establish itself as the true music of the common American folk—truly popular music in a slightly different understanding of the term. In this context, any study of contemporary commercial country music—thus my claim—needs to come to grips not only with the ways in which the music taps into a discourse of American popular culture, but also with its self-styling as this popular culture’s unpopular other. Even though country music truly is popular music, it relishes an image of un-popularity that stands in marked contrast to common ideas about popular music. At least in part, it does so by staging a notion of authentic Southern and Dixie identity that is constructed in and through the music and its visual representation in music videos. If we add to this claim Frith’s by-now classical observation that ‘popular music is popular not because it reflects something, or authentically articulates some sort of popular taste or experience, but because it creates our understanding of what popularity is’ (‘Towards’ 137), the interesting question remains: what identity does country music create and construct? And how does this idea relate to the notion of unpopularity rather than popularity as well? In an attempt to provide partial answers to these questions, this paper analyzes how country music constructs the idea of a truth, a real thing behind the music, in the first place, and how this produced notion of the real takes the form of proudly unpopular forms of cultural expression. Country music, I argue, constructs a notion of authentic identity that is both widely unpopular and that plays with the image of country as popularity’s metronormative other, in Judith Halberstam’s terminology. In order to do justice to country’s simultaneous popularity and unpopularity, my reading will argue that country music is popular culture, yet at the same time pinpoint the particular strategies used by the country music industry, its artists, and its audiences to mark their distance to it and construct an image of country music as the more authentic counterpart to supposedly artificial popular culture. 2
