A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Everything Else - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 1,731 words · saved by 1 readers

Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. If you ask Americans about their favorite genre of music, the top pick tends to be classic rock. But if you ask them which genre is “most representative of America today,” you get basically a split: 36 percent say country, while 37 percent say rap/hip-hop, according to a 2023 poll from the research firm YouGov. (Participants could pick more than one answer from a long menu of genres.) These findings would seem to support various preconceptions about a red/rural America and a blue/urban America, united only in affection for “Don’t Stop Believin’.” But what if these genres needn’t be all that separate? What if hip-hop and country merged into something that felt like classic rock? The idea sounds like it would be profitable for the record industry—and it might be what’s happening now. At least, that’s one theory to explain all the ragged-voiced dudes on the Billboard Hot 100 recentl

Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 11:26 If you ask Americans about their favorite genre of music, the top pick tends to be classic rock. But if you ask them which genre is “most representative of America today,” you get basically a split: 36 percent say country, while 37 percent say rap/hip-hop, according to a 2023 poll from the research firm YouGov. (Participants could pick more than one answer from a long menu of genres.) These findings would seem to support various preconceptions about a red/rural America and a blue/urban America, united only in affection for “Don’t Stop Believin’.” But what if th

A Little Bit Country, a Little Bit Everything Else - The Atlantic

related reading