Country music artist Maren Morris opened up about her recent decision to get out of the genre which she suggested was overflowing with misogynists, racists, and homophobic bigots who exposed themselves during the Trump years.
“I thought I’d like to burn it to the ground and start over,” she said of country music in an interview with the LA Times last month. “But it’s burning itself down without my help.”
“After the Trump years, people’s biases were on full display. It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic,” she said. “All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music. I call it butt rock.”
Morris sat down with The New York Times for another interview this week, further explaining her decision to distance herself from the industry that made her rich and famous on the outlet’s latest edition of its Popcast.
cleared a few things up about this whole “country music departure” with @nytimes Popcast.
also, viva la Buc-ee’s 🙂 https://t.co/lAO36XzMsT— MAREN MORRIS (@MarenMorris) October 4, 2023
The singer provided some clarity on her previous comments, saying that she’s not completely shutting the door on country music but that she has little desire to “participate” in a “really toxic” industry that props up “white men.”
“When I zoomed out, just in looking at cold, hard facts, numbers stats,..[I realized] this is getting significantly worse each year for people on the margins, women,” Morris said, according to Fox News. “Women on the radio, people of color, just anyone who is not [a] White male.”
She also wondered whether women who are fans of country music are actually self-loathing misogynists.
“The audience is like, 90% women. So, is this like internal misogyny going on here? Because they are the ones that are buying the tickets, they are buying the merchandise. What’s happening?” Morris asked.
Morris also bemoaned the popularity of the recent hits, “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony and Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town,” and that the country music genre has become a part of the left’s culture war on traditional American values.
“It is so steeped in, weirdly, like patriotism or quasi-patriotism, lots of like, overt hypermasculinity, Whiteness—that’s just like how it’s been from the jump,” Morris told the NYT.
“It does feel like the flame is getting hotter, so maybe it’s this last stand of hatefulness,” she added, parroting the Orwellian idea that love for America is hatefulness and racism.
She later suggested that her announcement that she was cutting ties with country was blown out of proportion.
“I think it’s a little bit hyperbolic to be like she’s ‘left country music,’ because that’s ridiculous,” she said. “But I certainly can’t participate in a lot of it.”
“I love living in Nashville,” Morris explained, but “I couldn’t do this sort of circus any more of feeling like I have to absorb and explain people’s bad behaviors…after 2020 particularly…I’ve changed.”
“I’m not shutting off fans of country music. Or that’s not my intention. It’s just the music industry that I have to walk away, a few factions, from,” the singer said.
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