Earlier this month at the Academy of Country Music awards, there was minor controversy when the host, Nashville grande dame Reba McEntire, performed a new song and everyone got to their feet apart from Kacey Musgraves. Someone tweeted: “Have a little respect… at least for someone who paved the way for you.” It wasn’t the first time Musgraves had made headlines by failing to show rapture at an awards do. Country is worse than rap and pop for pitching its women against each other in imaginary battles. “At this point in my career,” 30-year-old Musgraves says down the line from Nashville, “if you see me at some kind of show, you should enjoy the fact that I’m not a robot. Do you ever see someone analysing Chris Stapleton’s face? Men don’t get that. Everyone needs to drop it.”
In February, Musgraves’s fourth album, Golden Hour, received the Grammy for best album – not just best country album, but best album period. The genre is transforming, the think-pieces said: there are liberal, outspoken young females in Nashville for the first time (as though the Dixie Chicks never happened). There are, of course, the Opry traditionalists. But there are pop artists, too, who like Taylor Swift happened to cut their teeth on Nashville publishing deals and used the occasional banjo in songs. Musgraves, who competed on the TV talent show Nashville Star in 2007, exploited the tension between the old and new worlds with her 2015 song Good Ol’ Boys Club. She exploited it with the title of her debut album, Same Trailer Different Park, which pointed to dirt-poor beginnings this daughter of an artist and a print-maker didn’t really have.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2UuGLPi
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