COLUMN: Kacey Musgraves is here to lead the progressive country revolution

If you watched the 61st Annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, or were within an approximately five-mile radius of any member of The Daily Tar Heel's management team as their cries ascended to the heavens, you may know that Kacey Musgraves won Best Album for her widely acclaimed album “Golden Hour." 

It’s the first time a country album has won Best Album since Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” in 2010 (honorable mention to the Dixie Chicks’ “Taking the Long Way," the last good country album to win the award.) 

I’m not personally a huge fan of “Golden Hour," but I love Musgraves herself and her previous work. I welcomed the award as one would their own child, or perhaps particularly cute and well-trained raccoon. 

Musgraves music is forward-thinking, witty, and appeals to my Gen-Z sensibilities. She once posted this moth meme on her social media, so I would do literally anything she told me. She also, most importantly, is accessible to a whole new group of listeners who have been widely excluded from country music: young, city-dwelling folk like myself. 

Musgraves has a deep hold over “good morning girls and gays” Twitter; the venn diagram between Musgraves fans and Ariana Grande fans is a perfect circle. The “Golden Hour” singer exists online, with her fans, where her Twitter timeline is filled with retweeted posts from the community. She was a guest judge on Rupaul's Drag Race, for goodness' sakes.

To say that she is beloved by a community traditionally resistant to country music, and that country music has been extremely resistant to in turn, would be an understatement. 

That’s why putting her on stage with country legend and goddamn icon Dolly Parton was such a power play by the Grammys. 

If you’re unacquainted with Parton, you’ve almost definitely heard her song “Jolene”. The Tennessee native has been known for decades for her big hair and some other stuff too. Parton, perhaps more so than Kacey, or any other country artist, has been taken in as a living gay icon. There’s an entire sub-genre of drag about impersonating her. I’m not sure I can provide more evidence than that. 

More important to my point, she was one of the few forward-looking country artists during the 1970s and 1980s. Country music, despite its many innovations and contributions to music, has been advertised since the late 1930s as “traditional," conservative and looking back at an idealized and mostly fictional “good ol' days." 

When a new, innovative, and forward-thinking style of country music popped up it was either disavowed (western swing in the 1930s) split off into a new genre (bluegrass in the 1940s) or simply shunned entirely (Dixie Chicks post-2003). 

Enter Dolly Parton’s always relevant smash-hit “9 to 5”. Like the last days of Yee-Swiz (Taylor Swift pre-Red), “9 to 5” pushes the boundaries of how pop a song can be while being classified as country. But it also pushed the type of lyrics that would become opposed to the rampant commercialism of the Reagan era the US was about to enter. 

This is a song that has the lyrics: “They let you dream, just to watch them shatter. You're just a step on the boss man's ladder.” 

She’d go one to star in a movie with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin bearing the song’s name about the three women’s plot to murder their sexist, manipulating and abusive boss. For a country star during the height of conservatism in American culture, that’s pretty punk rock. I’m not making the claim Parton is a patron saint of liberalism in country music. Up until recently she used pro-Confederacy imagery in some of her performances, which is a topic almost every country artist has to seriously address, but it’s something. 

And now it’s Musgraves’ turn. While “Golden Hour” lacks anti-capitalist bops to make this argument, look to her earlier discography when she was establishing herself as an artist. Songs like “Good Ol’ Boys Club”, “Pageant Material” or “Follow Your Arrow” aren’t quite as confrontational as Parton was, but they’re all quietly subversive to the supposedly static ideals of country. 

“Golden Hour” was more focused on innovation in composition than lyrics, but let’s appreciate the body of work. Forward-thinking country is at the front of the genre right now. And that’s pretty dope.