Photo of Wednesday by Martina Gonzalez Bertello
The music that has meant the most to me lately has been music that has put me in touch with my roots. I grew up poor. I grew up rural. I grew up angry. This year, I’m finding music that gives voice to this feeling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those songs have skewed country/western/folk.
I’ve been paying attention to a young man who goes by the name of Billy Strings since I saw his viral video for the bluegrass meth-ballad “Dust in a Baggie”
This past month he graced the stage of NPR’s tiny desk, and played another dark ballad called “My Alice.” Beneath the cold rage of jealousy fueling the song’s narrator runs another, deeper undercurrent of class hatred. The fluidity of resentment that propels Billy’s “My Alice” is squarely 2025, a year struggling to see the class war through the fog of culture war.
The country is angry. Downward mobility, material deprivation, the affordability crisis—whatever you wanna call it—the legacy of 45 years of rampant neoliberal pilfering is coming to a head. Offered as remedy are two versions of power. One beneath the thumb of billionaires that nonetheless offers rational assurances. The other, beneath the same thumb—but offering the catharsis of destruction. It’s little wonder that, given the choices offered, many choose, as Billy sings, to sublimate their grievances and “stare into the ashes and fire.”
On that note, one particular video this year, an excerpt from last year’s landmark film Civil War featuring the song “Breakers Roar” by Sturgill Simpson, perfectly captures the feeling of watching the country burn with little recourse except to warm your hands by the fire. YouTube keeps serving it up, knowing I’ll reflexively keep watching.
But, these two versions of power are, of course, fighting to contain course correction via a third way—where capitalist greed is reigned in to serve the needs of the many. The situation has become so sickeningly obvious, so frustratingly apparent, that you will find me out here tapping my toes to any old yelpy pop/country song that dares state the absolute obvious.
Jesse Welles, who I tried to champion last year, continues to self-release modern folk classics, garnering himself a handful of Grammy nods this year, and releasing an extended live session Jesse Welles With the Devil—with jaw-dropping full band southern rock versions of many of his best tracks—singing our moment of crisis as it happens
A couple years back, I suggested we’d soon see an AI hit song, and that happened this year—sort of—at the crux of country and AI. “Walk My Walk” by the appropriately cliche sounding AI entity “Breaking Rust” topped Country’s “digital billboard charts.”
Digitally created photos suggest a white artist, while the song’s computer-generated voice sounds uniquely black—singing a song of self-empowerment in the gospel tradition. Listening to the track, it’s a perfectly affecting culture war torch song—one squarely among the new conservative counter-culture. Yes, I said conservative counter culture. I would suggest watching a few episodes of another of this year’s obsessions, Joshua Citerella’s podcast “Doomscroll” to understand why and how this is the case. In short, “woke” got so mainstream and preachy it couldn’t possibly be cool anymore. If you don’t like this interpretation, I suppose you are welcome to “kick rocks.”
This maybe gets to something peculiar about the place and time in which I grew up: it was damn near impossible to be both country and punk. I really liked a lot of country music as a kid, but had to leave all that behind as a teen and pick a side. These sides, of course, came with their own political beliefs—exemplified by how swiftly the country scene will turn on you if you don’t support their party (see: The Chicks, FKA The Dixie Chicks)—all this especially true in Post-9/11 America. It’s a distinct feature of the 2020s that those distinctions are falling away, and artists are increasingly occupying this country/punk space.
“Snapping Turtle,” a song among S.G. Goodman’s newest album Planting by the Signs, is one great example—a song that fights back against wanton cruelty in our year of deportation and concentration camps. In her broken Kentucky drawl, S.G. tells the story of finding some kids torturing a snapping turtle and slyly suggests she join them…and …well…. I wouldn’t want to ruin it. She connects the scene to the life of a woman Leana, a life seemingly swallowed up by poverty and violence in the town where they grew up, and reflects on her relative privilege.
“Small towns where my mind gets stuck”—S.G. sings about the act of living through and paying witness to the violence, and deprivation of rural America. She connects that deprivation to greed in her song “Work Until I Die” from 2022’s Teeth Marks—in the Appalachian fashion. Kentucky, having a particular tradition entwining country and folk music and workers solidarity. That is, connecting in the popular imagination deprivation and its source: obscene wealth. Bringing that punk spirit home to the hinterlands.
This is, of course, a spirit you will miss in much of modern country music, replaced instead with songs about self-reliance, work ethic, patriotism, and the peculiar freedom of trucks and dirt roads. That freedom, and those dirt roads, are indeed part of the fabric of growing up rural but like many parts of rural life, their fetishization in song often reveals the shadow of envy—enough resentment to fuel the culture wars for generations to come. Put in this context, these new artists represent an explosive short-circuiting of the culture war revealing the prickly class war beneath.
Indeed, the album that stands out as my go-to this year is a pastiche of small town vignettes that swerve between plaintive country and shaggy alt rock—Wednesday’s Bleeds. It’s an album that puts the country music I grew up with right up next to the grunge, indie, and punk music I grew into. It claims a space that neither the alt-country of the ’90s with its allergy to anger, or that era’s southern-fried alt rock with its requisite campy quirkiness has yet occupied.
Instead, Bleeds captures the burned-wry poetry of the hinterlands. Like the work of bandmate MJ Lenderman, guitarist and vocalist Karly Hartzmann situates the plaintive in the absurd. Bleeds moves toward humor to allay the rural violence and deprivation it witnesses. It strikes a very particular tone of being connected to one’s ragged locale while feeling a cheeky youthful transcendence—something they have lovingly called “creek rock.”
For me, Bleeds is nostalgic, both for the spirit of comradery I felt growing up around rural punks, and for some other thing I’m experiencing only in hindsight—a satisfying synthesis of my country roots and my punk sensibilities that I’m only fully working out the dimensions of later in life. A synthesis that perhaps needed the intervening 30 years to happen. Bleeds feels like a party I’m 30 years late to but loving all the same—hopefully one that helps unite us in our common cause.
Perhaps what those 30 years can offer is the knowledge that this spirit of youthful transcendence necessarily fades, and one inevitably finds themself in the material conditions of the world. To witness the decay without recourse to humor or poetry—that’s something you’ll rarely find in a song, but maybe exactly what we need more of. | Mike McCubbins
