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New Day Cafe: LGBTQ Progress in Country Music [1]
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Date: 2023-03-02
I’m probably not the ideal person to write about this, but I love progress, and I love country music. So I was happy to read about the recent book Queer Country.
Pitchfork.com gives some background:
“When gay Canadian singer k.d. lang began her career as a country musician in the ’80s, she struggled to win over an industry that saw something dishonest and even mocking in her approach. You can see her delightfully skewed performance of country sincerity in the video for “Turn Me Round,” a raucous cut from lang’s 1987 album Angel with a Lariat. Dressed in a bargain-bin approximation of cowgirl glamor, with her hair shorn into an imprecise mullet, lang twirls and growls her way across a honky-tonk stage as her male bandmates egg her on. She is, as music and queer studies scholar Shana Goldin-Perschbacher puts it, “totally fucking with gender.”
lang’s fight for acceptance in an industry bent on excluding her is one of many fascinating case studies in Queer Country, a new book that examines the contributions of LGBTQ+ artists to country and Americana music. When Goldin-Perschbacher first started research for the book in 2004, most people she spoke to about the project reacted with bafflement: Did queer country artists even exist? It had been over a decade since a newly-out lang left the genre to find greater acclaim and commercial success as a torchy pop singer, and the spectacular backlash against the Chicks (née Dixie Chicks) a year prior had cemented the country music industry’s reputation as a bastion of conservative values.
Now, what started as an underground scene appears to be reaching critical mass, with dedicated radio shows, zines, and even a gay country star in Brothers Osborne frontman T.J. Osborne (who isn’t alone in Nashville’s mainstream). Queer Country sketches out a rough history of this movement, spotlighting the contributions of lang and Lavender Country pioneer Patrick Haggerty, along with lesser-known figures including non-binary and trans musicians Rae Spoon, Joe Stevens, and Mya Byrne. It also features close-reads of contemporary stars like Lil Nas X, Orville Peck, Brandi Carlile, and Trixie Mattel, drawing a vivid portrait of a movement at a point of breakthrough.”
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/2/2135084/-New-Day-Cafe-LGBTQ-Progress-in-Country-Music
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