Think it’s fairly telling that a handful of male country artists will come to defend the actions of their own in an instant, but remain silent when women have voiced their opinions about racism, sexism, etc in country music (and society in general).

There’s a multitude of reasons, but I think the biggest factor is this:

Country music has this Code where you rarely see folks openly criticize one another—it’s like Omertà or something. You don’t want the door opened upon yourself one day.

What that does is breed mediocrity for starters. But it also means the “average country music singer” (aka straight white male) doesn’t have an opinion on anything. It’s all great as long as it doesn’t rock the boat. “A rising tide raises all ships” type of approach.

But what we’ve seen is that a rising tide absolutely doesn’t raise all ships.
Women, minorities, and LGBTQ are commonly glossed left out. And why? Bc they’re different and don’t sing about trying to get laid/drunk on a dirt road and those songs are $$$$$$.

Course, I think that “______ don’t sell” is a fallacy. You don’t know because the industry has never tried or given the effort.

I think the worst you can do is dismiss an audience as being too dumb. You don’t have to write to the lowest common denominator every time.

Course, this is Twitter so this is just scratching the surface of all of this. It makes more than a short thread.