If you listened to country radio any 
time in the last six months, there’s a 
good chance you heard one of Justin 
Bieber’s latest singles. Alarming, I 
know, but thanks to country duo Dan 
+ Shay, Bieber can claim a hit country 
song with their collaboration “10,000 
Hours.” A mushy-gushy, country 
lite ballad dedicated to their wives, 
“10,000 Hours” epitomizes the latest 
trend to sweep mainstream country 
music — “boyfriend country.”
Coined by Tom Roland in Bill-
board, “boyfriend country” is what 
you’d expect to hear over a compila-
tion video of rustic wedding decor. 
Beige and flowery, its lyrics compile 
a scrapbook of stock photo memories 
— picture-perfect picnics, candle-lit 
dinners, walks on the beach. Like 
wedding cake, boyfriend country is 
sugary and frequently bland. It’s no 
wonder, then, that “The Bachelor” 
franchise has made use of the sub-
genre. Boyfriend country staples like 
Russell Dickerson, Chris Lane and 
Matt Stell have all serenaded couples 
on the show. 
In a genre that prides itself on 
being “real,” boyfriend country is 
often less “dreamy” and more nause-
ating. Its idealism and soft pop pro-
duction are convenient entryways for 
outsiders, resulting in country’s most 
generic — and popular — duets. It’s 
a disheartening, foolproof formula. 
Pop stars like Bieber, and their coun-
try counterparts, score a quick num-
ber one hit on the country chart with 
slightly acoustic-sounding pop songs. 
Take Jimmie Allen and Noah Cyrus’s 
single “This is Us” for example. The 
chorus says nothing in so many 

words: “but it was just you and that 
was just me / before we found love / 
now this is us.”
From around 2011 to 2015, songs 
about tailgates, beer and trucks, also 
known as “bro country,” dominated 
country radio. Comparatively, boy-
friend country is bro country’s sappy, 
straight-laced older brother. In some 
cases, however, the “bro” himself has 
merely grown up. The seeds of boy-
friend country were not sown by pop 
stars, but country music’s own. One 
of the sharpest, most telling career 
pivots was taken by Thomas Rhett in 
2015. Rhett went from singing about 
a girl “shakin’ that money maker” in 
his first hit “Get Me Some of That” 
to being content with holding hands 
on his biggest hit “Die a Happy Man.” 
Fellow bros of Florida Georgia Line 
got the hint and started worshipping 
their wives with their 2016 single 
“H.O.L.Y.” Shortly after, other bros 
like Jason Aldean and Cole Swindell 
followed suit. 
Still, boyfriend country’s roots 
extend past the tidal wave of bros-
turned-boyfriends. Lovestruck pop 
country itself isn’t new. Lonestar’s 
“Amazed” from 1999 fits the bill. 
“Wanted” by Hunter Hayes was a 
massive hit in 2012, right in the mid-
dle of bro country’s rise. It’s worth 
noting though, that Hayes’s career 
did end up suffering for arriving a 
trend or two too early. Nowadays 
a higher voice, boyish looks and a 
youthful glow can carry male coun-
try singers far. Brett Young’s resem-
blance to a Hollister model has made 
him the poster child for boyfriend 
country stardom. 
Obviously, love songs aren’t inher-
ently bad. And, despite its tendency 
toward gooiness, boyfriend country 
isn’t either. Like candy, sweet and 

sappy pop country songs sound good 
in moderation. In fact, male artists’ 
sensitivity can be refreshing when 
it’s done right. What’s frustrating is 
when boyfriend country is the only 
sound that’s given a platform. And 
what’s bad is when this sound grows 
increasingly more homogenous. A 
song like “10,000 Hours” already 
sounds like the conglomerate of many 
shallow, boring love songs — we don’t 
need 10,000 more.
As you may have noticed, I haven’t 
mentioned a single female country 
artist throughout the entirety of 
this article. Country radio has the 
same problem. Women have been 
hovering around 10 percent airplay 
for years. Despite being marketed 
as a Band-Aid for the way women 
were portrayed in bro country, boy-
friend country actually makes coun-
try radio’s gender problem worse. 
Instead of playing more women, the 
exclusion of female country artists is 
now the work of songs that claim to 
“respect” them. This issue is bigger 
than boyfriend country, but “sweet” 
songs by men certainly don’t make 
women in country any less voiceless. 
Laying country radio’s gender 
politics aside, it’s normal in country 
music to bash what’s played on the 
radio and long for the sounds of the 
past, the “authentic.” Memes wish-
ing for the return of bro country have 
already begun circulating the Inter-
net. A back-and-forth in the popular-
ity of certain styles and themes is also 
to be expected, not just in country 
music, but any art form. All this is to 
say that, like any subgenre, boyfriend 
country has its share of both thought-
ful and careless content. My advice? 
Find the trendy songs you like and 
enjoy them while they last. The pen-
dulum will swing sooner or later. 

6

Thursday, May 14 , 2020
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

On ‘Boyfriend Country’

KATIE BEEKMAN
Daily Arts Writer

In April 2016, author, his-
torian and professor Ibram X. 
Kendi published his Nation-
al 
Book 
Award-winning 
“Stamped from the Begin-
ning.” In what he subtitles 
“The Definitive History of 
Racist Ideas in America,” Ken-
di’s exhaustive research chron-
icles the timeline of anti-Black 
racist ideas and their shifting 
power throughout American 
history. 
Kendi, one of America’s 
leading antiracist voices, was 
the 
youngest-ever 
winner 
of the National Book Award 
for Nonfiction in 2016. The 
same year, Jason Reynolds’s 
“Ghost” was nominated for the 
National Book Award in Young 
People’s Literature. This pres-
tigious celebration of the best 
literature in America is where 
the two men met.
But, it wasn’t until March of 
this year, nearly four years later, 
that “Stamped: Racism, Antira-
cism, and You” was released — 
the remix of Kendi’s original 
book, reimagined by Reynolds. 
In an interview with “CBS This 
Morning,” Reynolds reveals 
that he initially declined Ken-
di’s request to write the remix: 
“I said no because I’m careful 
about tampering with things 
that I believe are sacred.” Yet, 
he finally agreed when he real-
ized “this work was bigger 
than the both of us, and it’s not 
about either one of us.” 
Reynolds’s remix is geared 
toward a younger audience, 
readers 12 and up. While Kendi 
is a scholar who holds a posi-
tion as the Director of the Anti-
racist Research & Policy Center 
at American University, where 
he is a professor of history and 
international relations, Reyn-
olds is a writer of books and 
poetry for young adults and 
middle-grade audiences. On his 
website, Reynolds declares that 
he plans to “not write boring 
books.” He goes on to say that 
“I know there are a lot of young 
people who hate reading… but 
they don’t actually hate books, 
they hate boredom” — which is 

one of the initial obstacles he 
faced with the remix. 
So Reynolds, who has said 
that young people don’t like 
to read history books, decided 
that his remix wasn’t a history 
book, “but a book about the 
present: here and now.” 
Like Kendi’s original ver-
sion, Reynolds structures the 
book using five historical fig-
ures: Puritan minister Cotton 
Mather from the 17th century, 
founding father Thomas Jef-
ferson, 
abolitionist 
William 
Lloyd Garrison, writer and 
activist W. E. B. Du Bois and 
radical activist and writer 
Angela Davis. The division 
of the book into five sections 
coincides with the five guides, 
spanning from the 1400s to 
modern day. While that encom-
passes over 600 years of his-
tory, Reynolds’s remix caps at 
248 pages, half of Kendi’s 500-
page original. 
Another important similar-
ity in the remix is the three 
different 
definitions 
used 
to identify and describe the 
people 
explored: 
segrega-
tionists, assimilationists and 
antiracists. These three cat-
egories are repeated frequently 
throughout the book, helping 
us to understand the histori-
cal figures represented along 
with their motives and beliefs 
(which we often discover to be 
contradictory). 
Reynolds simplifies the defi-
nitions to help young readers 
grasp the complex material, 
calling segregationists “hat-
ers,” assimilationists as “the 
people who like you, but only 
with quotation marks” and 
antiracists as “the people who 
love you because you’re like 
you.” Later, when discussing 
figures like Abraham Lincoln, 
it was helpful to have these 
definitions as we approached 
his contradictory views — like 
that he wanted slavery gone, 
but didn’t think Black people 
should necessarily have equal 
rights: an assimilationist. An 
assimilationist I found I knew 
very little about. 

A ‘remix’ of a 
historical work 

MUSIC NOTEBOOK
MUSIC NOTEBOOK

LILY PIERCE
Daily Arts Writer

BOOK REVIEW

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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