Switched on Pop - Kacey Musgraves: Transgressing Country

Episode Date: August 14, 2015

Can you be a country star and critical of the country at the same time? Grammy Award Winner, Kacey Musgraves, has two hit albums that challenge the small-town clichés of modern country music. Is she bucking the trend of big trucks and dirt roads, or embracing an old tradition of transgressing social norms? To answer […]  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Download the Eater. app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm Charlie Harding. And I'm Nate Sloan. Grab your cowboy boots and your pedal steel guitar because today we're going country. We're lucky to be joined today by Andrew Morant. He's an editor at The New Yorker and appears on shows like Radio Lab. Andrew, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So Andrew, you recently wrote a wonderful article. on Casey Musgraves, an artist who's very dear to our heart, she appeared in our very first episode about Heartbreak. And we see that Casey is between two different audiences that she's serving.

On one hand, the traditional country fans and on the other disaffected millennials, I think Nate and I might fall a little bit more into the second bunch. Along the way, she has managed to upset some people. And today we're going to explore whether or not it's possible to criticize the values the country is founded on while being a country star at the same time. So let's get into it and see what is so stirring and contradictory about her music. So to just jump right in, Andrew, what piqued your interest? Why Casey Musgraves? Why this article? I've been a fan of hers for a while.

Us too? Yeah, as you said, I think her first album was strikingly good. And then I was really excited for her second album, and I was frankly a little disappointed in it. And I, so the impetus for the piece was, I mean, it was a tricky one, right? Because on the one hand, for anyone who is like going to hear about Casey Musgraves, you want to be sort of evangelical and be like, she's awesome. You should, you should listen to all her stuff. On the other hand, for people who are more familiar or who are going to get more familiar with her, you want to raise the problems with this. second album and how it sort of stacks up slightly poorly against the first. So it was sort of a tricky

thing. And I basically felt like the problem of being someone who is perceptive and critical in a world that doesn't really want to hear criticism or doesn't want to reward it financially. And it kind of made me feel like, like basically I wanted to take Casey by the shoulders and say, Philip Roth would not be proud of you right now. Originally, it was going to be a piece about Philip Roth's whole essay writing about Jews and his whole problem of portraying your own community badly in the public eye and how an author or a musician or an artist has to basically transcend sort of like take on sort of sociopathic approaches to like burning bridges and stuff. The piece softened a little bit as I wrote it.

As perhaps Casey Musgraves has as well. Yeah, exactly. You write really beautifully about one of the standout tracks on her first album, Mary Go Round, which takes the unusual attack of criticizing small town life rather than celebrating it. What about this track really stood out to you? I guess the most basic thing is it felt authentic. You know, it felt like something she had been waiting a long time to say. Same hurt and every heart.

Same trailer different. I love it. It's beautiful. Yeah, it really is. Yeah, it's awesome. And then I don't think that being trenchant and cutting and negative is preferable to being sunny or positive or anything like that. I just think it felt truer than the other stuff, which felt a little more in the groove of stuff that people had said before. And because I think it was truer, the writing just seemed more inspired to me.

Yeah, an example of a lyric from that song, well, it starts, if you ain't got two kids by, By 21, you're probably going to die alone. At least that's what tradition told you. And it don't matter if you don't believe come Sunday morning you best be there in the front row like you're supposed to. Same hurt in every heart. Same trailer, different park. Even the little touches where you think like it's a little over the line.

Like she hits the word Mary really hard and like playing on like Mary with an E and Mary with a capital M.A. She just does it in this clever, controlled way. And then she does these phrases that I think I, I said something like it sounds like a cliche, but then you realize you've never actually heard it before, which is kind of the whole trick of pop writing. You know, just like Dust, we settle in this town.

That's a brilliant phrase. And like that kind of phrase, I don't think comes to you as much if you are writing less truthfully. Yeah, you could contrast Mary Go Round with a country song like, I heard this Jason Michael Carroll song on the radio recently and the chorus goes,

I'm from the front pew of a wooden white church, a courthouse clock that still don't work, where a man's word means everything, where moms and dads were high school flames and gave their children, grandmothers made a name. Yes, it may not sound like much, but it's where I'm from. I said I'm from the front queue of a wooden white church, a courthouse clock, it still don't work, where a man's word means everything. Yeah, yeah, I know their children, grandmothers made name. Yes, it may not sound like much. But it's what's right.

Yeah, yeah, I know that one. It's, it kind of feels like someone writing a screenplay about the mafia or about cops. And they've never actually, like, seen a cop. And they're just doing a carbon copy of a carbon copy of a something. Not to say that that country stars aren't actually from small towns that don't actually have wooden pews or whatever. Right. Not that that's not their real experience. It just feels like they're doing a copy of the platonic ideal of what they feel like they should be saying.

I don't want it to be that, you know, Casey's only cool because she's like taking a crap on the small town life. Like there's there it there is totally possible to be a, a booster of small town life. I mean, the, the piece I wrote talks about Loretta Lynn a lot, you know, Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, you know, are geniuses. and they did a lot of, you know, boosterism of small-town life. It's just they did it in a more interesting, specific way. Well, I was born to coal miner's daughter in a cabin on a hill in butcher holler. We were poor that he made sure of him.

He shoveled coal to make a poor man's dollar. I think you're absolutely right that we don't want to pigeonhole Casey Musgraves into she's just great at being transgressive because she's also a really great songwriter. And she writes just simply great country songs. And I particularly love this moment in Mary Go Round where she sings this line, same hurt in every heart. And this song isn't a major key. But when she sings that line, she goes to this flat six chord. which is a chord that you're only going to find in a minor key. And it has this sort of sense of nostalgia shifting from the major tonality into that minor tonality.

And I think it's just a perfect moment of marrying the words to the music. I also really like how she does this. She's talking about a merry-go-round, and the whole song has this sense of perpetual motion. It just keeps going around and around and around, never stopping. and she does that really artfully by having this constant banjo roll in the background. And then this snare drum and cut time,

just moving along, moving along, moving along. And the chorus almost feels like it's never going to end. It has all these sort of false resolutions. And when it even does finally resolve, it just moves right directly into the verse. And so she's doing all these things from marrying her chords to her lyrics, choosing the right instrumentation,

and pacing the song, just like any great songwriter would do. Totally. I mean, even the central image of the song seems like a fun childhood toy, and then it becomes this like claustrophobic, oh, I can never get off, kind of terror. It's like, it really seems like a song

that she spent like years perfecting. Yeah, definitely. And then from there, the momentum kind of carries her through the rest of the album. I mean, that's track three. And then every song after that kind of has a tinge of complexity or weirdness, I mean, to varying degrees, but even songs later in that album

that are just kind of, you think it's going to be a kind of classic breakup song, there's something kind of transgressive about it. I mean, the last song on the album is about a breakup, but then it's actually about kind of like having casual sex with your ex when you know you're not supposed to, which is, again, like a very transgressive country music topic.

So I think she just, once she broke that open on merry ground, it feels like she just kind of was like, all right, I'm just going for it. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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And something that I find about both of our albums, actually, is that they're really grounded almost in a more old-school country sound. Yeah. Right? So a lot more of the acoustic instruments, a lot less heavy drumming, heavy bass, more of your banjo, mandolin, light acoustic guitar. Yeah.

And so on one level, it feels like we're going to an older style of country. You mentioned Loretta Lynn. And yet you also say she's, managed to upset country fan conservatives. And I think in your piece, you quote her saying that she's been apologizing for a lot of this stuff ever since. So what has she done to upset these country fan conservatives? Ironically, you know, she is known as this boundary pusher, this, oh, you know, the country

star who, you know, is beloved by the latte-sipping set. Like people like us again? Yes, correct. or is willing to, you know, get behind gay rights or whatever, which is true. I mean, it's sort of a sad state of affairs that that's notable, but she actually is much more of a traditionalist than she gets credit for. And she's much more of a traditionalist than most of her peers on the country charts. And she is going out of her way to show everybody that. It actually kind of reminds me of a few years ago when Nikki Minaj was, her authenticity was challenged.

and, you know, she was going too far in this bubblegum pop direction, and she just spent the next year just, like, wearing black T-shirts and rapping really hard. That reminds me of what Casey's been doing recently, which is, like, no more sort of, like, going into these weird dark corners, like, I'm just going to wear a neckerchief and play an acoustic guitar and, like, remind everyone of Dolly Parton.

And... Right. But at the same time, I think her project is a little more complex than that, because she's also trying to remind people, like, not only am I traditional, but traditional country music has always had this dark streak in it, and not just dark, but self-critical. And I think the biggest signal that she's doing that is the hidden track on her new album,

which is the only cover on the new album. It's a Willie Nelson cover, which she sings as a duet with Willie Nelson. And it's called Are You Sure? and it is actually a very Casey Musgraves-ish song. It's very critical of being stuck in a small town and saying, are you sure this is where you want to be? Are you sure this is where you want to end up with your life? Look around you, look down the bar from you

at the faces that you see. Are you sure this is where you... want to be so look around you and take a good look and all the local used to be are you this is where i think her point in making that her cover is hey this this this sort of strain of country music has always existed you know don't blame me i didn't invent it on the other hand it's a little bit of a cop-out because that's the the only song on the album that's at all critical of small down life and it's the only one on the album that she didn't write. That's fascinating. I actually didn't hear that one. Yeah, it's a great, it's like, I mean, Willie Nelson is maybe the best country songwriter alive and he, uh, it's,

it's sort of a, a B side of his. And it's just really interesting that, you know, she met him and there's this whole story about how they basically like smoke weed together and like decided to do a duet, but the fact that she chose that one as the duet is very clearly intentional. So moving to this new record pageant material, which was released, I think, a month or so ago, this, you're saying this, are you sure, stands out in the context of this record, which otherwise is more in the sort of boostered small town country vein that you were describing. Yeah, I mean, you could almost go, like. like song for song and see the sanitation happening.

Like so, for instance, we talked about how the last song of the first album is this transgressive breakup track. The last track of the second album is just a breakup track. I mean, it's a beautiful, wistful song, but it's not, there's nothing off kilter about it. Right. All the, uh, all the songs about small town life are like, gee, isn't it swell to be? from a small town. And like there's a couple of moments of discord, but they all get resolved. And look, I'm not being totally fair to her because in the context of country music, it actually

does take courage to be full-throatedly in favor of gay rights, to be like dropping references to pot smoking, to be talking about misogyny. Like, I'm not trying to take those things away from her, but they are, in the grand scheme of things, pretty safe political positions in the large country to take, like not country music, but like the country that we live in. It's like little, little needling pushes, but it's not as like dark and weird and dystopian as the first album by any means. Yeah, a song like Dime Store Cowgirl from the new album, it's more generically country, I guess. but I'm just a dumb.

And that was the one that really felt like an apology to me. Right, where she says, you can take me out of the country, but you can't take the country out of me. Yeah, maybe for a minute I got too big for my britches, but don't worry, I'm still the girl from Golden, Texas. It's like, I mean, like, I understand what she's doing because authenticity and connecting to your audience is so important,

and it's almost more important now than ever, because the industry is fragmenting, and you can kind of only, you only really have super fans now, like people who will come to your shows and buy your albums are gonna make or break your ability to make a living. So, like, I understand pandering to those people,

but it just, it felt a little bit on the nose. I'm gonna jump in and say that, I think the real offender on the album is pageant material. And you had earlier said that a lot, that a law of this album kind of sounds focused grouped, as if she was running for office, as if she's appealing to only those super fans, as you were saying. And this song for me is such an offender

because it really just references country without any sort of the, I find, any of the creative songwriting tactics that she uses. So you have in pageant material this like very typical Johnny Cash 1515 guitar line. They're like, you know that sound? Yeah, I mean, look, again, to be fair to her, she has this line about I'm always higher than my hair, which is kind of cool. It's like, you know, get a little weed reference in there, you know, more power to her.

And like, yeah, beauty pageants are stupid and like it's good that we have young beautiful pop stars who are lashing out against that culture in some way. I just think the true, like, version of Casey Musgraves that's like at home writing in her diary about beauty pageants is way more cutting than she is on this song. Before we go, Andrew, we thought we would just ask if you have any favorite Casey Musgraves lyrics. Since we've been beating up on this second album, I do have to sort of take my hat off to this second album in terms of lyrics. I think late to the party, top to bottom has great lyrics. And I also love this one line from the Family's Family song. They own too much wicker and drink too much liquor. You'd wash your hands of them, but blood's always thicker.

That's a good line. a great line. Yeah. That's real nice. All right. So hats off to Casey no matter what she does. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. Really loved your piece.

Casey Muffscraves, Harper Lee, and the hometown dilemma. We'll make sure to link to it on our website. And thank you, everybody, for listening. You can find more episodes of Switchedon Pop at www. www.switchdownpop.com on SoundCloud or on the iTunes podcast app. Thanks again, Andrew. Thanks a lot, guys. As always, I'm Nate Sloan.

And I'm Charlie Harding. Thanks for listening. What's that? I swear we've done this like 17 times. Thanks for listening. I just want to make a quick plug for some non-switched on pop related news, which is that my two-man Gorilla vaudeville act, the Gideon and Hubcap show, will be performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. From August 5th to August 23rd, if you happen to find yourself in that great nation,

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