This year’s Country Music Awards began on Wednesday night with Garth Brooks—who, at fifty-six, inhabits the role of country music’s wise elder statesman—calling for a moment of silence to honor the memory of the twelve people who were gunned down last week at the Borderline Bar & Grill, in Thousand Oaks, California. Brooks, wearing black from boots to hat, didn’t say the words “gunned down” but, rather, spoke about how those killed had been “lost far too soon just a week ago tonight,” as if they had been victims of a natural disaster. (Later in the show, firefighters in California were praised for their bravery.) “Let the music unite us with love in their enduring memory,” Brooks added, before the camera cut to the singer Luke Bryan, standing alone onstage, who was put in the tough spot of suddenly turning up the fun. He looked ever-so-briefly daunted but then shouted, “Let’s be proud of what makes us country tonight!” segueing aptly into his song “What Makes You Country.”
The takeaway lyric in Bryan’s hit is “We’re all a little different, but we’re all the same / Everybody doin’ their own thing,” a gesture toward country’s current vision of itself as a big tent, at least for those who enjoy a series of country tropes referred to in the song: farming, fishing, hunting. Another lyric, however, was carefully edited on Wednesday night. At the point when Bryan normally sings, “Waiting for the fall to finally come along / So I can grab my gun and get my outside on,” he and his guest partner, Luke Combs, subbed a word that sounded like “wood” in place of the word “gun.” It was easy to miss amid the crashing guitars and stage pyrotechnics, but the switch was emblematic of the entire night.
It’s an achievement, of a perverse kind, for a modern awards show to have nothing unexpected take place, to be entirely devoid not just of profundity but even of awkwardness or discomfort. The presenters read dutifully from the teleprompters, the winners thanked their parents and spouses and management teams and fans and then swiftly skedaddled off the stage. No one mentioned President Trump or the recent midterm elections or, beyond Brooks’s careful introduction, the way that the shattering epidemic of mass gun violence has touched country music, first with the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival, in Las Vegas, in 2017, where fifty-eight people were killed and hundreds more shot by a gunman, and now with the deaths of the people enjoying what was supposed to be just a night of music and dancing at the Borderline. “This is an escape, and that’s what people need right now,” one of the night’s hosts, Brad Paisley, said about his plans for the show, earlier this week. And that is what he and his co-host, Carrie Underwood, managed, with their familiar bit of light Opry vaudeville. (If there was any touch of bad feeling on Wednesday, it was the hurt that the industry seemed to feel that Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, of the country drama “A Star is Born,” hadn’t decided to show up.)
Paisley and Underwood are old hands at the C.M.A. gig—this was their eleventh go-around as hosts—so it wasn’t a surprise to see them stick to the script. The odd thing was to see so many other people—presenters, performers, winners—so dutifully toe the same line, especially on the issue of guns. Several of the show’s featured performers have spoken out in favor of gun control in the past year. After the Parkland shooting, the Brothers Osborne, who won last night for Vocal Duo of the Year, tweeted, “Nothing will be done. Nothing,” clearly a reference to political inaction following mass shootings. The next month, Brooks dedicated a version of his classic “The Dance” to Emma González and the other organizers of the March for Our Lives rally. “Your generation is the generation for the school shootings,” he said in a Facebook video. “Let’s make sure the next generation is not.” Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris (both nominees for Female Vocalist of the Year) also tweeted in support of the student protests. A score of other country performers, including Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Jennifer Nettles, and Sturgill Simpson, have called for restrictions on guns, as well.
After the show, Fox News praised it for “leaving politics out,” which is another way of saying that it practiced its own kind of politics, one that prized unity and civility and the status quo over any moment of discomfort or conflict. One of the cruel twists of last week’s shooting at the Borderline was that several of the victims had been survivors of the mass shooting the previous year in Las Vegas. In each case, the music itself was not connected directly to the crimes—these were venues that attracted crowds, which in modern America are also targets. But guns themselves are not incidental to country music; they’ve been a constant subject of the music and a key element of the genre’s attendant life style. If there is to be a reckoning between performers calling for greater gun regulation and a large portion of the fan base (as well as other musicians in the genre) resisting it, that wasn’t going to happen on what the industry has branded as “Country Music’s Biggest Night.” “Business is booming,” Paisley exclaimed early on, and that was the point.
There was a time when Kacey Musgraves, who won on Wednesday, for Album of the Year, said interesting things on a range of subjects—including brash and ill-considered things about guns, as when, after the massacre at the Pulse night club, in Orlando, in 2016, she tweeted and then deleted, “Let’s go back to saloon days where every muthafucka is carryin a revolver and anyone walkin in to disturb the peace might maybe think twice.” Musgraves may have thought better about leaving that tweet up, but it is not a radical political position—it’s one that’s been voiced, with some alterations in language, by the President and the N.R.A., and one which is undoubtedly shared by many country-music fans. Yet, on Wednesday, Musgraves wasn’t going to offer a counterargument to her peers about guns, or say anything else of note—she sounded fully absorbed into the mainstream of the industry. “Ten years ago today, I moved to Nashville,” she said. And then she added something about beauty and love.
I’m not exactly sure what I expected to hear—what anyone was necessarily prepared to say about the ways in which mass violence has entwined itself with country, or about the various other unspoken political tensions in the genre. It’s not exactly the stuff of awards-show banter, but the complete absence of any attempt at genuine human reflection made the sombre opening of the show all the more hollow and manipulative, trading as it did on the emotional resonance of the Thousand Oaks shooting without giving it the substance that it deserved. Instead, it was little more than another gesture of thoughts and prayers—offered by a musician who we know has so much more to say on the issue but chose, with millions watching, to say nothing—the kind of response that Susan Orfanos, whose son Telemachus died in Thousand Oaks after surviving the shooting in Las Vegas, has said that she never wants to hear again.
Sourse: newyorker.com
