Bro-country has curdled

Morgan Wallen is a townie.

That might seem an odd thing to say about the arguable face of country music—a man whose albums are guaranteed chart-toppers and whose singles frequently reverberate their way out of the twanging, dark hollers of country radio and into Top 40 playlists—but the evidence from a decade of ever-expanding album tracklists is undeniable.

From “More Than My Hometown” to “Lies Lies Lies,” Wallen has remained consistent in crafting portraits of go-nowhere jerks making their stuck-in-a-ruttedness everyone else’s problem. It’s music that never met a mismatched rear spoiler it didn’t love—tunes that are likely to show up with an off-brand energy drink and a new exotic pet. Wallen’s narrators alternate between bitterly pining for and lashing out at (invariably “crazy”) exes with all the vagaries, vitriol and melodrama of a social media post from someone you haven’t thought about since high school.

Morgan’s flair for the mawkish would be fine, and maybe even interesting, if he didn’t make the mistake of making the country music industry piles and piles of money. In the wake of the former “Voice” contestant’s decade of unparalleled success, the men of country music have drafted behind the Tennessean like so many Bristol Motor Speedway also-rans. Country radio has become a parade of endless small-town f**k-ups whose vitriolic singles make it seem like the only industry left in the dying mill towns of middle America is spitting venom at faceless women who dared to point out problematic drinking.

Wallen’s hours-long pity parties didn’t spring up ex nihilo. The defining characteristic of a townie is coming from somewhere, and that holds true in his case. To understand Wallen’s weepy wave, we have to go back to the pop-country chart-toppers he wiped from the airwaves.

Journalist and author Jody Rosen noticed something strange with the country charts in 2013, an invasion of “tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty young American white dude[s]” he called “bro-country.” Led by artists Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line, this new subgenre emphasized getting lit and getting laid over praising the virtues of farm life and family.

Mega-hits like Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” did away with the sonic hallmarks of country music, pushing aside decades of bent notes and warbling vocals for crunching guitars, EDM-indebted production and autotune. Mirroring the wide-ranging streaming playlists of frat bros, the claps and heys beloved by rap producers like Mustard at the time seeped into country music radio, creating a genre whose raison d’être wasn’t a celebration of rurality but a soundtrack for ragers.

The reign of FGL and their ilk solidified bro-country as the sound of modern country music, brushing away the last wave of ‘90s women superstars and turning the entire genre, as popularly conceived, into a boys’ club. Just two years after “Cruise” debuted, duo Maddie & Tae had heard enough about arm candy and daisy dukes to satirize the subgenre’s views on women with 2015’s “Girl in a Country Song.”

“Bein' the girl in a country song

How in the world did it go so wrong?

Like all we're good for is lookin' good for

You and your friends on the weekend, nothin' more

We used to get a little respect

Now we're lucky if we even get

To climb up in your truck, keep our mouth shut and ride along”

Naming the problem didn’t fix it. Boats, beers and bros ruled the charts for the rest of the decade, and a young Wallen was not immune to a good time. He broke out with an assist from Florida Georgia Line on 2017’s parking lot party anthem “Up Down.”

But while Wallen was ascending, something was already happening among the bros who bought his records. Trump’s election and the YouTube algorithm teamed up like trap drums and banjo samples to worm a newer, angrier outlook into the brains of America’s young men. They were still bros, by virtue of being young, male and white, but they weren’t fielding invites to keggers in corn fields or weekend pontoon trips. They couldn’t afford the expensive toys of the mud pit or the lake, and they most definitely weren’t dating.

Morgan Wallen performs the song "'98 Braves" at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards at Truist Park in Atlanta, Georgia. (Christopher Polk/Penske Media via Getty Images)Even the more down-to-Earth parties of country music singles, held in RV lots and tubing-friendly creeks, were out of reach for the increasingly online and angry right. These would-be bros weren’t leaving the house at all, getting more and more of their social interaction from forums and streamers, and the most consistently conservative stripe of popular music would come to reflect that.

In the 2018 book “Hinterland,” Phil A. Neel described the sound of America’s exurban sprawl as “guns cocking over trap snares unrolling to infinity.” The small towns of America—emboldened by the election of Donald Trump and a 24/7 conservative media that drip-fed them white-hot rage—became bubbling cauldrons of resentment soundtracked by country music that had swallowed the totems of hip-hop and used it to push an anti-urban agenda.

MAGA conspiracies spiked the cortisol of aging boomers while their grandchildren raised their blood pressure over the inclusion of women and people of color in video games. Residents of the United States’ faltering towns looked anywhere but at the industries that left them behind to place the blame for declining economic fortunes.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild argues the increasing vulnerability of rural and exurban Americans crashes up against the bedrock conservative belief in the value of hard work and personal responsibility to create a “pride paradox” among modern-day Republicans . . . MAGA’s true believers can’t square their own bootstraps mentality with the fact that they personally are struggling to make a life in their hometown, leading to a bone-deep shame. In her 2024 book “Stolen Pride,” one down-and-out Kentucky man summed it up, asking, “If it’s such a privilege to be born a white male, what could explain me except my own personal failure?”

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Given decades of bipartisan support of the policies that hollowed out these towns, GOP politicians have crafted a pressure release valve in wars against pop culture. Attacks on “woke” progressives and the cities in which they live are the bread and butter of current conservatism. Rather than offering a positive vision of how they might make their constituents’ lives better, the MAGA wing is animated by animus toward urbanites and people who aren’t white and straight.

You can see the shift away from rock-ribbed, heartland conservatism to a philosophy entirely based on “owning the libs” in the singles of country music stars who have survived the shift on top of the charts. Bro-country hitmaker Jason Aldean debuted in 2005 with “Hicktown,” a single that paired screaming fiddles with distortion-drenched guitars to celebrate the ways single-stoplight towns make their own fun.

“We let it rip

When we got the money

Let it roll

If we got the gas

It gets wild

But that’s the way we get down

In a hicktown”

When big cities were mentioned at all, Aldean adopted the “live and let live” attitude of forebears like Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.” Aldean knew that there was more than one way to throw a party, noting that coastal parties in “martini bars” were not much different then “buying beer at Amoco” and cranking “Kraco speakers to that country radio.”

Compare that to Aldean's myopic and sinister 2023 single “Try That in a Small Town.” The track is a histrionic rundown of street crimes that could befall hypothetical meemaws and pawpaws if they dared to venture into a city, one that gleefully morphs into a promotion of vigilante justice in the chorus. “Try that in a small town,” Aldean suggests to anti-police protestors and flag burners, “see how far you make it down the road.”

Morgan Wallen was uniquely positioned to take advantage of increasingly incurious and angry country music listenership. His typical character sketches revolve around a man who’s completely given up on improvement, passing time getting pickled in the same bars he snuck into in high school.

On “Whiskey Glasses,” “You Proof,” “Wasted on You” and many other singles, he opts to blackout rather than face the pain of heartbreak or disappointment. In the event that he does have a partner, and that partner raises problems with the way he lives, Wallen’s narrator deflects blame.

“I ain’t an angel, you ain’t heaven-sent,” he sneers in “I Had Some Help,” a collaboration with a newly countryfied Post Malone. “Can’t wash our hands of this.” And he boils the faceless woman-bashing that’s par for his brand of country’s course into a concise thesis on “I’m the Problem” with the black-belt deflection of “If I’m the problem, you might be the reason.”

(L-R) Morgan Wallen and Post Malone perform during the 2024 Stagecoach Festival at Empire Polo Club on April 28, 2024, in Indio, California. (Amy Sussman/Getty Images for Stagecoach)While Wallen isn’t writing autofiction, it’s hard to separate the bitter drunk of his singles from the headlines he generates. In 2021, Wallen’s career was put on pause when he was caught on tape yelling racial slurs. Late last year, Wallen pled guilty to reckless endangerment charges that stemmed from him drunkenly throwing a chair from the roof of a six-story bar in Nashville. In March, he stormed off the set of “Saturday Night Live” as soon as the credits rolled, hopping a private jet back to his hometown and petulantly posting “Get me to God’s country” on social media. Whether he was playing the conservative guy scared of cities for his down-home base or he truly believed he risked getting the taint of New York City on him if he hung around too long, the end result was the same: a grown man who is constitutionally unable to enjoy career highlights because of his own resentments.

Trouble aside, Wallen’s brand of wallowing has inspired a battalion of imitators in Nashville. Artists like Mitchell Tenpenny, Koe Wetzel and the almost impossibly Gen Z-named Bailey Zimmerman have all mined the minds of men who would rather storm out and drive drunk than come to terms with their wrongdoing.

One-time hick-hop rapper Jelly Roll is old hat at songs to soundtrack shirking child support payments, but he’s found a bit of a new lane in the path blazed by Wallen. Roll turns up the schmaltz and narrows the scope of a typical Wallen track in operatic sapfests like “Save Me” and “I Am Not Okay,” songs that sound like they are meant to explain the entire world but can’t be bothered to venture beyond the confines of the narrator’s own put-upon head.

Given what we know about Wallen and the songs he likes to sing, it might not shock you to learn that his latest album shows little in the way of growth. Sharing the charts with a squadron of soundalikes hasn’t steered his new work in a less bitter direction. The self-pitying accountability dodge of “Problem” promised the same old Wallen across 37(!) tracks of mawkish, sadsack exurban pop. And fans are still receptive to his woe-is-me tales, as the album has already netted two No. 1 singles on the country charts.

Wallen works in country music, a genre that has always been about nostalgia. The original country music recordings were wails meant to be heard by the folks back home and the elan vital of the genre has remained remarkably consistent through the countrypolitan ‘70s, the neo-traditional ‘80s and even the hard-partying last decade, where stories of ragers past lingered around the charts like so much stale beer.

The word nostalgia quite literally means “a painful longing for home.” The pissed off and curdled towniecore of Wallen and his followers asks a question that has to be bouncing around the skulls of his wheel-spinning listeners: what is there to long for if you never actually left?