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Last weekend, Rolling Stone published a somewhat scoldy article whose author is frustrated by a purported constituency of people who — it’s suggested — are pretending not to know about a record-setting country track called “Choosin’ Texas” by singer-songwriter Ella Langley. The piece’s framing was classic rage bait and, in this sense, it was something of a throwback to a style of pop culture writing that was ubiquitous in the early and mid-2010s. True to form, it thus makes assertions like this: “At this point, though, if someone contends they’ve never even heard of ‘Choosin’ Texas’ or Langley, it may say more about the listener than the song. Or, for that matter, what they want to project to the world.”
You can probably guess where the article goes from here. Essentially, its author makes the case that performative disdain for country music can sometimes be synonymous with a kind of metropolitan, middle class snobbery. Fair enough, I suppose, but that’s not really what interests me here. (I also, for the record, think the incessant conflation of people’s cultural and aesthetic sensibilities with political and/or moral virtue we saw so much of during the 2010s was a bad idea, though that’s not what interests me either).
