Switched on Pop - Is country the new hip hop?

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

For decades, hip hop has been the most successful genre on the charts. Then, in 2023, a shift occurred. For the first time, the country songs outnumbered hip hop songs on the year end charts. Last year, country’s boom was led by hyper-partisan hits like Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” and Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.” In 2024, country has taken a left turn. Beyoncé’s genre-busting album Cowboy Carter pushed the limits of what country can sound like, and who can make it. Two of her collaborators have since charted #1 hits: Shaboozey with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Post Malone with “I Had Some Help” featuring Morgan Wallen. Country music is growing, and its sound is changing. Will it replace hip hop for good?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nate Pop Quiz. What genre is this? Okay, let me break it down. I'm hearing whistling. That's giving me kind of 21st century pop, indie folk vibes. Sure. I'm hearing deep 808 drums. That's giving me hip-hop trap. And then I'm hearing acoustic guitar. That's like right out of the world of country music. So I don't know, whatever you get when you mix all those together is what I'll call this genre. This is Shaboozy's drink don't need no mix. And this is an important conversation because Shibuzi and a number of other artists are at the bleeding edge of combining hip-hop and country music. We've had two number one singles just this summer. Shibuzi's other song, A Bar Song, Parentheses, tipsy.

Tipsy. I know that one. And then hip-hop turned country star Post Malone also has a number one with I Had Some Help featuring Morgan Wallen. So what I want to look at today is whether or not country and hip hop are merging or is it possible that country music is even replacing hip hop? And we'll do that by looking at both of these songs very closely. But I want to start by looking at some of the numbers. Give me the Excel spreadsheet, Charlie. Oh, you know I've done it. I definitely have. I know. I know. You're a freak in the sheets. So there's been a lot of reporting over the last couple of years that hip hop is on the decline, right? Yes. It's the 50th anniversary of hip hop. And yet it's seems to be slipping from being the most dominant genre in popular music. And we can see this on the year-end Hot 100. I have done the number crunching. If you take the last five years from 2019 to 2023 and you look at a distribution of genres, the number of hip-hop songs on the year-end chart is definitely declining.

And the number of country songs is absolutely growing. We're talking about 2019, 2020, about 40 songs of the year in Hot 100, hip-hop. The last two years, closer to. 20 songs. Whereas country music has gone from like just short of 20 songs on the year in Hot 100 to now 30 songs last year. Of course, this is all depending on how you count genre is fairly subjective. Sure. But that suggests that actually in 2022 and in 2023, there are more country songs on the year on chart than hip hop songs. And of course, there's a number of explanations for why this might be happening. One is a proliferation of new and merging genres. Also, you just have

the whims of listeners. Maybe they are moving from one genre to the next. But also, country music fans have really started to catch up in streaming. Country music is a form that really has succeeded in radio. Country radio is dominant if you drive anywhere in this country out of the two cities that you and I live in. Country radio is still very much available. But in the last few years, country fans have caught up to pop and hip-hop listeners on streaming services. And so their streams are starting to count towards more things going on the charts. And though this seems like a very modern phenomenon, it also reminds me of conversations we've had on this podcast before about the shared roots between country and hip-hop, two genres that seem so disparate, sonically, racially, geographically, and culturally.

But if you dive into it and go back a century, these two genres have common musical ancestors, the blues, folk music, gospel music, spirituals. there was such a cultural exchange in the South that, like, decades later would give birth to both of these traditions. And it's only maybe music industry marketing that has really separated them in our collective imagination. Right, right. And I think just some very common musical things that we could hear. Both are very narrative forms. Both care a lot about place and citing the past, citing the songs that are their favorite songs and where they might fit into. that musical discourse. Intertextuality, yeah. Ah, yes, the intertextuality of hip-hop and country music.

You gave me a pop quiz, so I had to drop some, you know, some verbiage on you. So we've been covering some of these trends in country music. Just a few years ago, this sort of cross-genre hip-hop country thing was a bit more of an outlier. Obviously, Lil Nas-X's Old Town Road comes to mine. But when I think about just last year, it seemed like country was grown. but was also part of a larger sort of cultural backlash. Country really took a turn towards partisan politics, and we talked about the ways in which our political divides started to appear on the charts.

Songs like Jason L. Deans tried that in a small town evoked a history of lynching. Yes. Oliver Anthony music's Richmond North of Richmond went at the entire Washington, D.C. political class. Even Morgan Wallin's last night was even a sort of comeback after him being quote unquote canceled after using the N-word publicly.

I should also mention the outlier of Luke Combs' version of Tracy Chapman's fast car. Which doesn't really quite fit into that narrative, but was one of the big songs of last year. Yes. And perhaps that outlier was a leading indicator towards Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter. Beyonce really started to ride this wave early and be a leader of where country music could go. I think she has changed the narrative. Cowboy Carter was a record-breaking celebration of the black roots of country music,

a reintroduction to what country music can sound like with countless collaborators. And those collaborators are now continuing to care. Harry, I think, part of her narrative, especially Shibuzi. Shabuzi is an artist born in Virginia to Nigerian parents. He's been releasing music for nearly a decade and has been a pioneer of the blending of country and hip-hop. I think his tracks on Calais Carter were some of the strongest songs like Spaghetti, a sort of noir western with Linda Martel telling us about the confines of genre. Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they?

Yes, they are. Hey, how to the moon? How to the moon? I lost me. Ain't gonna show. He was also featured on the song Sweet Honeybuckin, a Feral production that blends soul, country, and hip-hop. And then, in addition to Shibuzzi,

Beyonce also features Post Malone, the New York-born, Texas, Ray's musician known for his auto tune singing, over the top vibrato, and combining trap music and pop music. He's featured on her song Levi's Jeans. So capitalizing on this early 2024 release of Cowboy Carter, both Shibuzi and Post Malin have put out their own work. It's topping the charts. And what I want to do is listen closely to each of those songs and see what they might say more broadly about this trend. Great. And so let's start with Shibuzi's a bar song.

parentheses, tipsy. I think Shibuzi has played his cards incredibly well. This is the fourth single off of his third album. He basically seems to have prepped to get out there right after the Beyonce feature and get his name out in public. And the song is a major phenomenon. Globally, it went number one in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Norway, Sweden. It's a top 10 in Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, New Zealand, South. Africa, UK. It's gone two times platinum in the U.S. And he's broken records for being the first

black male artist to chart number one on the Hot 100 and the Hot Country songs chart at the same moment. Previously, a record also held by Beyonce for the first black woman to do so. Right. Well, those are some impressive accolades. Yeah. But I have to imagine it's not just the timing and the Beyonce bump that has catapulted this song into the stratosphere. Yeah. Like, what do we think musically is going on that makes this particular track so infectious? Big picture, I feel like this is a song

about an emotional gray area. It's dark and it's brooding, but it's also upbeat and celebratory. And that is embedded right into the core of the track in its chord progression. The song begins in a melancholy, F-sharp minor, It rises up with some optimism, up to an A major. The hope continues rising up further to another major chord, a D,

before descending back down A, down to F shot minor again. Oh, yeah. Dark. So we're oscillating between this brooding quality and this sense of celebration going back and forth and back and forth. And the song does the same sort of thing. I love how he opens first one. His partner Birkin, she's been telling me all night long. Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on.

His partner wants a $100,000 handbag of Birken. That would be nice. But his expenses, gasoline and groceries, are weighing him down. And yet, there is a solution. You need to get rid of your problems. What are you going to do, Nate? Go to the bar and get tipsy. You're going to start dancing the two to three to the four.

You're going to be celebrating by remembering one of your favorite hip-hop songs from 2004, J-Quans, tipsy. this is a clever in a lot of different ways. First of all, taking the hip-hop classic, turning it into an updated contemporary country song, fun. The wordplay is also great. Shibuzi invokes two-stepping, a style of dance that exists equally in the world of break dancing and footwork as well as in country western you can two-step in either genre and i think we're

even hearing jacoans tipsy samples queens we will rock you what the classic stomp-stomp clap turns into this hip-hop beat wow a little more syncopated than the queen original that's wild Right. So we go from a sort of stadium anthem song, written literally by a queen so that people would stomp along. Yes. We're going to turn it into a hip-hop track and then we're going to two-step it into a country track. Check out what Shibuzzi does with that vibe. This is sample Inception. The stomp and holler of country music is connected to Queens. We will rock you via J. Kwan's Tipsy, by the way, we should hear the chorus of tipsy.

So, correction, we've gone from the stadium to the club to the bar. First of all, Charlie, I'm so glad we are catching this mid-2000s hip-hop interpolation. Because a few episodes ago when we talked about Camilla Cabello's dream girl, We missed the reference to the Dreams 2007, Shoddy as a 10. Yeah, I'm very grateful that we've identified this particular reference. Yeah. But what's so interesting about hearing the J-Quan to the Shibuzzi is that that chorus, everybody in the club getting tipsy, becomes a little less celebratory in Shibuzi.

And a little more... A little more like a drink away your sorrows with your friends kind of song. Yeah, yeah. Like when we were listening to that first verse, you know, it sets the context for this. It's like, it's not like, hey, we're all going out and celebrating. It's like, man, my life is so hard. And this is my only respite and my only escape. And that little bit of melancholy is really supported by the plaintive fiddle that comes in right at that moment, too.

and really tells you, okay, we're not in the world of pure hip hop anymore. We're somewhere else. Well, when we lean into country tropes as well, I love the sort of double entendre of they know me and Jack Daniels got a history. What I like about this line is that he personifies a bottle of Jack Daniels, turns into a person, someone that he has a history with, and is battling with at this bar. He continues this metaphor in the second verse in a very clever way. He's been boozy since he left. He's still himself.

He is shiboozy. He is also boozy. Maybe this is a little obvious, but I love it. Listening to it now with the frame of reference of that queen, stomp, clap, sample lurking in the background. And then you hear these background vocals, that sound like they were recorded in a crowded bar. Yeah. I'm loving the texture of this song

and how it's made to feel like it's a bunch of people actually singing from a bar in Nashville. That's a really fun quality that I didn't kind of pick up on it first. Textural intertextuality, if you will. I like it. Okay, so through the use of sampling culture, We didn't know there's also auto tune in the vocal. Yes.

And the sort of stories of going to the club, or in this case going to the bar, there are all of these connections to hip hop within this country song. And so when I hear this on country radio, I feel like I'm hearing a blend of musical genres. I wonder if we're going to hear the same thing in Post Malone, who maybe is making a harder turn towards traditional country. Right. We're going to check that out right after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. So you might recall that Post Malone first blew up with his song White Iverson back in the mid-2010s. Right. using the basketball prowess of Alan Iverson to cast himself as the sort of white equivalent in the world of hip-hop. White Ivers song when I started bowling I was young. You won't think about me when I'm gone.

I need that money like the ring I never want. I want In retrospect, this sounds so tranquil. It's almost like spa music, Charlie. I don't know. It's like if spa music had a face tattoo. Yeah. Well, Post Malone has been updating his image over the years

and has sort of shifted away from hip hop and trap. We've covered his last two albums, Hollywood's Bleeding, and Austin, which feature more indie pop in acoustic sounds. Circles. Is that the post Malone bleeding goat? Yes. The album is Hollywood is bleeding,

but it should be Hollywood is bleeding. Oh, God. Usually you make the dad jokes. Someone had to step up today. Both these albums have had, you know, some hints of his earlier hip-hop stuff, but now he has announced a major country turn And after making a career as a white hip-hop pop artist, he has taken a convenient turn towards country.

It started in 2022. He went on the Howard Stern Show announcing that he might make a country album. You've said, you know, man, I would love to put out an album of country music. If I get another year to myself, maybe I'll make a fucking country album. And then he's made a bunch of clear indicators that he is making this country turn. He has a Spotify playlist featuring his favorite country songs called Country Forever, featuring George Strait, Carrie Underwood, Kenny Chesney, and alongside Brad Paisley, major country star,

he recently performed a country set list at Stagecoach, the Coachella of Country Music, wearing a red trucker hat, a plaid cowboy button down, and blue jeans. He, of course, is still sporting his grill and face tattoos. Of course. And now he has his latest album coming out, August 16th, F1 trillion. It features country stars like Morgan Wallen,

Blake Shelton, Luke Holmes, and Chris Stapleton. But some might say that it's a return to form after capitalizing on black culture and hip-hop's commercial dominance. He's returning to his Texas roots. He has been seen making folk and country music at the very earliest stage of his career. On YouTube, he has a great cover. Well, you be the judge of Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice. It's All right.

Well, it ain't only used to sit and want to why be. If you don't know by now. He's only used to sit and wonder why, babe, it'll never do somehow. He's wearing an American flag t-shirt and silver chain necklaces. Maybe that bleeding goat and sade vibrato is an ode to Bob Dylan, who also has a curious way of singing. I remember being very struck when I saw that cover because I think it was after Post-Malone had come to prominence with songs like Rockstar.

I've been fucking holes and popping pillies, man, I feel just like a rock star. And then people were like, oh, look how he used to sound. And on one hand, it was like, oh, wow, this is so cool to hear this other side of him doing this finger-picking guitar and these kind of tender folk vocals. But I think there was also a sense by some critics that, wait a minute, you know, was post-Malone just dipping into this trap hip-hop sound in order to get. commercial success. Yeah. And if so, do artists of color have the same freedom to transgress the borders of genre, like a white artist, like Post Malone?

I think that was a question that people were raising as well. Yeah, that was a part of the discourse. I mean, that's quite a few years ago. And I think certainly Beyonce and Shabuzzi have been working to challenge those notions. In terms of Post Malone, here he is singing Bob Dylan. And he says, look out to your window and I'll be gone. A little bit of a twang. Look out your window and I'll be gone.

You're the reason that I'm traveling on. I think that's the maybe create a nice slant rhyme with traveling on, but perhaps as a leading indicator of his now real shift towards country music. And what I'm curious about Nate is whether or not you identify any of his early. earlier hip-hop leanings in the song, I had some help. And this one, of course, features Morgan Wallen. One connection between Post-Malone's earlier hip-hop and this song I could hear is the vocal phrasing.

It's reminiscent of rapping the way the words just kind of cascade outward. It's very dense. It doesn't kind of have the same kind of a lyrical spaciousness that a lot of traditional country music does. And that's something I heard in the Shibuzi track as well. It has like the kind of pacing and the phrasing of hip-hop. But otherwise, I'm not sure where I would locate that. I mean, this feels like country through and through.

I totally hear you. This sounds like a modern country song. Why don't we listen back to it from the top and break it down, see how it's working? First things first. The song begins with the kind of riff that you wish you wish, wrote. It is so simple. It uses the four most common chords in popular music, the one, the six, the four and the five. In this case, it goes four, one, six, five. I feel like this is usually your job, but can I make an outlandish musical comparison real quick? Are we hearing shades of

blue oyster cults, don't fear the Reaper here? Okay, four arpeggiated chords where each new chord is anticipated. Same key, I think, G major. Wait, Charlie, that's kind of loving that mashup. Okay, not, you know, mirror images, but perhaps some similarity. Now we can move on

and never mention that again. That's fun. I love that. Except I do need to say more cowbell. I could have used a little more cowbell. Okay, now we can move on. Okay, okay, okay. Let's get into the meat and potatoes of the song. This is about another gray area.

kind of emotion. It is a relationship on the rocks. And really, it's a relationship that has failed, and it's all about the finger pointing of whose fault is it? You got a lot of nerve going around telling everybody, hey, it was my fault. Like, you're saying, I'm crazy. It's not just me. When we go into the pre-course, we get this great sort of about face where the finger pointing turns in the other direction. You're saying it's me who brought this whole thing down. No, no, no, no. This was you. Who are you to be throwing stones if you're living in your big glass house with a view? A wonderful double meaning. Country songs are so good at this, right? Having that sort of turn in a lyric where there's a phrase that you've used in the past. The hinged figure. The hinged figure. That's what it is.

The two meanings, you know, you picture the big glass house with a view kind of saying, hey, you're an ostentatious person with an oversized home. but it also evokes the cliched proverb as well, which I have to admit I did look up. Dates back potentially to as far as 1385. We say country music likes to cite its sources. We're going all the way back to Chaucer here. A epic poem called Troilus and Cressida. Yeah.

Later became a Shakespeare play as well. And in it, Chaucer uses the line, Who that hath an head of there for cast of stones will are him in the ware, basically for he who has a head of glass, should beware of stones in the conflict. And I want to apologize to all of the medieval scholars who are very upset about my old English accent. I'm always happy to indulge a historical excursion,

but what does this have to do with this song? Well, the Chaucer is an epic poem about a failed relationship between a Trojan warrior and the daughter of a Trojan, profit who have a short-lived love that is absolutely going to fail and is in many ways mimicking the story that we're hearing in the post Malone Morgan Wall on track, which cites the exact same proverb. Clearly intentional. All right, let's go to the chorus.

You hear something in common with rap, flow here. Sure. But really, I just hear a very clever country song. What a great chorus. Like, I had some help. It's a great shift of meaning of what it means to help somebody. I had some help in tearing this whole thing down. And they continued to play on old cliches, like, teamwork makes the dream work, which is such a...

It's like I feel like that's a Etsy crochet kind of line. But they place it in here so cleverly, which forces me to also go to the bridge for just a moment, if you don't mind. Generally, I'm used to the aphorism. It takes two to tang. but here it takes two to break a heart in two. I love this. I mean, I do too. I feel like you're giving them a lot of credit here.

This is probably the 500th country song to use, you know, don't throw stones and glass houses metaphor. But your enthusiasm is contagious. I have to say, when we get to the bridge of this song, am I the only person interpreting this as post-Malone and Morgan Wallen because they're singing back and forth now right it's Morgan Wallen gets the first line post Malone gets the second line they're singing back and forth in this bridge section yeah it seems like it's pretty easy to interpret that they are the two lovers talking to each other I love that I mean

like they're going back and forth baby it takes two it's like oh did you guys like uh have have a thing and now you're trying to work it out I mean that's clearly not what they're trying to do they're Clearly, I guess, both, they're two bros, both going through the same thing and singing about it. But when they're singing back and forth like this, it's like, oh, wow, yeah. Work it out on the remix, fellas. Do you think this is some, like, very covert queer baiting in a country song? I mean, I'm just saying I feel it's not, it doesn't seem hard to get there. No, no, not at all.

Teamwork makes the dream work. Really, though, I pose this question of, like, is Post Malone moving into the world of country? like, I think it's hard to find many direct connections. If anything, I hear the stomp and holler vibe from tipsy, but much more in just a country sort of way. The only other connection I am making is that he's working with Morgan Wallen, who famously employs 808s and contemporary hip-hop drum production in his country songs. But that's all I'm catching.

So big picture, Twang is trending. There is so much country on the charts right now. Everything from Luke Holmes, Ain't No Love in Oklahoma. Dasha's, Austin. Zach Ryan has a new album, The Great American Bar Scene. Joe Wetzel, Jesse Murph have got High Road. Morgan Wallin has a lot. another feature very much in the world of hip hop with Moneybag Yo,

and the song Whiskey Whiskey. Make it a double. And so what I'm hearing in some cases, like in Shabuzzi's track, yeah, the world of country and hip hop are blending. Maybe in the case of Post Malone and Morgan Wallin, what we're hearing is just country being country. Well, I'm glad we did this dive today, Charlie, because when we're listening to the new hip hop of country with this chart takeover with the streaming takeover with this like

omnipresence in the culture right now. This is the level of detailed listening that I want to bring. I want to be able to unpack what is happening in any given country hit and not

just kind of say, oh look, there's another Nashville hit. I want to be able to say what are the layers here? How is this particular song? dealing with its country past and reaching across the aisle to different genres like hip hop because this country moment isn't just a redux of the past. It's like something new. Yeah. And the words of country great Linda Martel.

Genres are a funny little concept, aren't they? Yes, they are. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineer neighbor Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb. Our executive producer is Nashah Kerwa. Remember with the Box Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine

at NYMag.com slash pod. And we want to send a special farewell send-off to Abby Barr, who's been with the show for five years. We love you, Abby. Keep on popping. Tell us your favorite hip-hop country mashups of the moment on social media at Switched on Pop. Find more episodes of our show anywhere you get podcasts and find us on social media at Switched on Pop to tell us what your favorite country hip-hop mashups of the moment are.

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