“The Bones” by Maren Morris, Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Some of the best musicians work in Nashville. Country music is famous for some of the best musicianship, and whenever a rock band or pop act wants some of the cleanest tones, they’ll record in Nashville. There’s certainly a community in Nashville that seems to be extending far outside Country music, but at the core is an ill-defined genre that is more of an identity. Unpacking that identity in a post-George Floyd America, though, is tricky. There are at least two popular models Country music is taking: 1) protect the status quo and 2)inclusion and diversity. The first model is rarely overtly racist or trans/homophobic, but when an n-word slip up happens the status-quo warriors are quick to defend themselves with arguments “This is just the way we talk.” This is often met with pushback from the second camp.

THE PAINT COULD PEEL; THE GLASS COULD SHATTER. Maren Morris is an artist firmly in the second camp. Much like pop stars Kacey Musgraves and early Taylor Swift, Morris has flirted with pop music ever since her Columbia Nashville debut record, Hero in 2016. In 2018, her biggest pop hit to date was a feature on the Zedd/Grey track “The Middle.” While the EDM hit wasn’t Country in the least, Morris as an artist continued to stay in the genre, recording music with the distinctive country twang. Besides singing rebel country music with confident, often feminist lyrics, Maren has used her platform to promote country artists of color. She is loved by a number of LGBTQ+ followers and is a lover of queer culture. Of course the status quo of Country clashes vocally or subtly with Morris. She was one of the few voices in the genre to call out singer Morgan Wallen when he used a racial slur in a leaked video in 2021. This immediately created backlash for the singer and even death threats online. Because of this backlash, Maren announced this fall that she would be leaving the genre.

THERE AIN’T A CRACK IN THE FOUNDATION. These days I’ve found myself in Spotify’s country playlists, and I’m not sure how much that will affect my future song selection. I’m not a big country music listener, much less a fan, but I have been gaining a greater appreciation for the broad, often ill-defined genre over the years. While Spotify’s playlists are not definitive of the genre nor what is actually popular in America’s heartland, the sounds are making me nostalgic for my youth, when I lived seemingly the biggest contradiction: a yankee boy growing up in the South. In a globalized America, though, it turns out that isn’t much of a contradiction at all. While the genre of Country is one of the biggest musical cliches, it’s the artists like Maren Harris that cause me to question that stereotype. Today’s song is a mixed metaphor about a house, a body, and a relationship. Harris assures the listener that “There ain’t no crack in the foundation,” I know she is not referring to the music industry she has made her home. She tried to reform it from within, but ultimately she had to give up. She explained to the New York Times’ Popcast Deluxe that she doesn’t plan to stop making music that sounds like it is Country, but rather to disassociate with the corporate structure of the industry.

Read “The Bones” by Maren Morris on Genius.

Official Video: