Death of the cowboy hat

Pack up the 10-gallon hats and the dirty, worn-thin Wranglers: The tough guys lost. This month, Tailgates & Tanlines (Capitol Nashville), the third album by the country singer Luke Bryan, made its debut atop the Billboard country charts.

Like his previous releases, it’s full of genial and only slightly dusty country, with specific rural referents few and far between. But while Bryan’s success says a great deal about the state of male singers in Nashville, it is more crucial as a matter of — as any political campaign manager would describe it — optics.

Try to find a picture of Bryan wearing a cowboy hat: virtually impossible. He’s notionally rugged, tall and handsome with a 5 o’clock shadow that never grows to 6. But he’s slick, Bryan is. A cowboy hat on his head would be an indictment. The closest he’ll come is a trucker hat or beat-up baseball cap. After all, a baseball cap can be worn on the farm and also at a college frat party. (Or worse: by a Nashville hipster.)

Bryan is among a handful of younger singers who are making Nashville hat-agnostic. This shift in headgear is a stand-in for the continuing war for country’s masculine centre, and for the intra-genre class politics that have been complicating country music for years but rarely more intensely than now, as the genre almost inexorably slides into soft rock.

Country has been flirting with anti-rural styles and attitudes from the beginning, long enough to make return-to-roots cries a recurring feature. But at the moment, Nashville’s country-pop crossover is at a peak not seen since the days of Shania Twain, a feat accomplished by the steady scrubbing clean of features that might appear foreign to outsiders.

This shift has been less of an issue for female singers, who have often been marginalised from country’s grittiest corners. But even several mini-outlaw movements in recent years haven’t given the modern cowboy much traction. The new model is a genial heartthrob, probably lives closer to the city than the country, knows his way around a frat party, and never gets too dirty.

And yes, he wears a baseball cap. They have been infiltrating for more than a decade, and come in all styles: your flimsy Kenny Chesney numbers, washed out from the sun; your Rodney Atkins beaters; or the rigid one, with a mild biker affect, worn by Eric Church on the cover of his third album, Chief (EMI Nashville), which made its debut atop the Billboard country chart the week before Bryan’s.

Church has always looked tough on the outside, though his rowdy exterior belies a far more conventional interior. Chief, though, is perhaps the most symbolically country album of the year. There’s banjo on the first song, two songs with Jesus in the title (one about intense love, the other about needing a country music savior), at least three songs about intoxication, and shameless red-state-baiting on the hit single Homeboy. And class rage to boot. Bossman can shove that overtime up his can, Church sings on Drink in My Hand, his tart sneer in overdrive. I got a 40-hour-week worth of trouble to drown.

In the context of contemporary Nashville, this qualifies as extreme bravery. In recent years, even the burliest of male singers have gone tender. The onetime bad boy, Alan Jackson, has evolved into the genre’s chief dignitary, and Toby Keith, who practically invented post-9/11 cultural jingoism, has grown into a country-soul balladeer. (His new single, Made in America, feels like late-game pandering.)

The burden of country music’s recent resistance to brawn can be heard in the album that made its debut just below Chief on the country chart: Proud to Be Here (Show Dog/Universal), the 10th studio album by Trace Adkins. He was supposed to inherit the mantle of country’s stern conscience from Keith, to whose label he’s now signed.

Pickup-truck wide and with pure gravel for a voice, Adkins is the most theatrical male country star of the last decade. And yet so much of the performance on this album feels superfluous. There are flashes of class tension, but also It’s a Woman Thang, which almost qualifies as country disco.

Where have Adkins’ country bona fides gone? Here, at least, they’re buried in the bonus tracks: Semper Fi, a choked-up Marines love song, and More of Us, which, by the time you read this, may already have been adopted by Gov. Rick Perry’s presidential campaign.

“Don’t you think we’ve taken enough of all this giving in?” Adkins says, surlier than ever.

“It’s about time for pushing back.”

A fascinating, unexpectedly frilly duet with Blake Shelton, If I Was a Woman, is tucked away here too, a reminder of Adkins’ lighter side, and also of Shelton’s role in this broader transformation. An aw-shucks troubadour with a regular-guy mien, Shelton has been an important figure in the sanding down of country’s rougher aesthetic edges, as important as Brad Paisley and his humour, Chesney and his beach-bum attitude, and Keith Urban and his hair.

The true patron saint of contemporary country soft rockers, though, is Charles Kelley of Lady Antebellum, lighter in presence and better in grooming than anyone since Kenny Rogers. (Or Eddy Arnold.) What’s emerging now is practically a modern updating of the countrypolitan movement, the moment in the late ‘60s and ‘70s when country became almost indistinguishable from certain strains of pop music.

The years since saw the emergence of power country in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, which gave Nashville a pop lingua franca all its own, and a couple of iterations of outlaw country, which sought to right the wrongs of the music’s pop-minded practitioners by preaching a return to basics (and a dedication to inebriation).

The promising young singer Chris Young is a master of those basics. The winner of the fourth season of Nashville Star, he’s a traditionalist in an era hostile to them, with a dark, wounded voice. But even he has met a fate similar to Adkins and others. He’s cowboy-hatless for the first time on the cover of his third album, Neon (RCA Nashville). (He’s wearing it on the back, though.) He also barely wears it in the video for Tomorrow, the lovely but overly polished single that advertises only a little of what Young
can do.

There’s little room for the singer Young has demonstrated he’d like to be, so here, he’s trying to be something slightly different. It’s an affliction that’s also struck the ambivalent outlaw Justin Moore, and will probably creep up on thoughtful bruisers like Jerrod Niemann and Lee Brice soon enough. Their raw masculinity feels like a relic in this age.

That’s been especially clear in the response to Jamey Johnson, the ramshackle and vivid traditionalist who’s spent the last few years swimming upstream, achieving critical acclaim but not much popular traction, demonstrating that the outlaw era —any outlaw era — is over for now.

Instead, there are singers like Bryan, who has little muscle or bend to his voice, and who despite the odd mention of cornhusks and the crickets and the critters and the squirrels on his new album, feels almost completely genre neutral. Jake Owen, similarly handsome and equally hatless, fares slightly better on Barefoot Blue Jean Night (RCA Nashville), his third album, which conjures the Eagles and maybe even Warrant as much as traditional country.

But the current movement toward tenderness shows most cleanly with newcomers like Randy Montana, whose love songs outnumber rougher ones on his self-titled debut album (on Mercury Nashville) by a ratio of four to one. There’s an evening dress in the closet/with a red wine stain on the sleeve, he sings on Ain’t Much Left of Lovin’ You, though he sounds much better intoning, When I was 6, I had two .45s on Cowboy.

What remains at the fringes isn’t, strictly speaking, resistance, but rather small pockets of innocence. That’s clear from the emergence of Bradley Gaskin, who appears to be hoping that Johnson has left something more than a faint aura of alcohol and weed hanging over Nashville.

Mr. Bartender (Sony), Gaskin’s debut single and one of the year’s best country songs, is hard, traditional country, enamoured of drink and its debilitating effects: Oh please, could you give me the best drink you’ve got?/Mr. Bartender, take me out with one shot.

Thus far, Gaskin is a purist. The internet doesn’t turn up much more of him beyond that song and some carefully chosen covers: George Jones, Keith Whitley and the like. In the video for Mr. Bartender, his head is bare: He looks like he could use a cowboy hat.