Kacey Musgraves Deserves Credit For More Than Her Rebellion
A lot of music critics can’t help themselves when it comes to Kacey Musgraves. Since there’s plenty about her self-presentation that resembles the indie artists they’re accustomed to–for instance, that she’s super casual about speaking her mind, smoking weed and sporting a delicate nose ring—they hold her up as the antithesis of the homogenous, retrograde bro-down they presume popular country to be. (The poptimist outlook that ushered in a critical embrace of so much music that was once dismissed as lowbrow–i.e. so much music identified with women, queer people or people of color–reaches its limits at country; as Nadine Hubbs has explained, classism has everything to do with it. Carl Wilson has briefly addressed this too.) As for Musgraves herself, she might roll her eyes at the notion that the contemporary country landscape, and her place in it, is so simplistic that the only two possibilities are complete conformity to countrified mass taste or wholesale rebellion against it.