- It’s not just Lil Nas X and Blanco Brown. Mainstream country music is looking to hip-hop to reinvent its sound and aesthetics.
- We take a look at country’s growing embrace of hip-hop culture, and some of the strategic reasons why country artists are stepping outside their genre to adapt to today’s music landscape.
- Columbia University ethnomusicologist Dr. Kevin Holt explains why the recent marrying of country and rap is nothing new, but part of a long and complicated history the two genres share, dating back to the segregation of the music industry in the 1920s.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Following is the transcript of the video.
Narrator: Country videos are looking a lot like hip-hop videos these days. And it’s not just the girls and the cars.
For example, you might recognize this type of low-angle shot because it’s been a signature of rap videos since the ’90s.
And dance moves like this? Straight out of hip-hop choreography.
As for the music itself, well, country’s sounding a lot like hip-hop too. You’ve got trap beats. 808 kick drums. Rap-like rhythms. Even beatboxing. So, why is Nashville borrowing so heavily from hip-hop these days? It turns out the two genres share a long history, and in today’s music landscape, country artists have strategic reasons to embrace hip-hop sounds and aesthetics.
Country’s drift toward hip-hop started in the late 2000s with the wave of so-called “country rappers.” Just listen to the rapid-fire delivery of Colt Ford, Jason Aldean, and Blake Shelton. See how they all spit their lines like they’re rapping? This first generation of new country acts paved the way for another crop of singers with hip-hop-inspired cadences.
One of them, Sam Hunt, has even been dubbed “the country Drake” for his slick, streamlined R&B production and his conversational flow. Notice how when Hunt switches from singing to speaking, he’ll often deliver bursts of syllables on offbeats. There, he’s using a technique called syncopation, which is a major part of rap flow. Almost all skilled MCs use syncopation to create complex rhythmic patterns that defy expectation. Hunt is taking that skill and applying it to a country power ballad. And Sam Hunt is hardly an isolated case.
Pandora did a large-scale analysis of every song on their platform to see how much has changed since 2010. They found that hip-hop’s presence in country has exploded over the past eight years. You’ll hear the difference if you listen to the Country Top 100 and pay attention to the instruments in the songs.
Mainstream country is relying less and less on the genre’s traditional string instruments in favor of beat machines like the 808 and other synthetic elements long used in hip-hop production.
Kevin Holt: The shift toward digital instruments in general, you know, is always gonna have a bit of a hip-hop connotation.
Narrator: That’s Kevin Holt, an ethnomusicologist at Columbia University who’s studied the relationship between music and Southern hip-hop.
Holt: Hip-hop is one of the first mainstream music movements that really focused on prerecorded music and digital manipulation in process.
Narrator: So, just how far has country strayed from its homegrown, bluegrass roots? Well, take one of the most controversial digital-processing tools, Auto-Tune.
Hip-hop has had a long love affair with the software, with innovators like T-Pain and Kanye West embracing it as an over-the-top artistic choice. The hyper-artificial sound they adopted seems directly contrary to country music, with its emphasis on raw, organic acoustics. And yet…
Country’s also warmed up to the sound of the synthesizer. Like Auto-Tune, synth has had a major presence in hip-hop since the early ’90s, when pioneering producers like Dr. Dre used it to make that whistle sound… now associated with West Coast G-funk. You would rarely hear much synth in mainstream country until about five years ago, when country’s songs started getting synthier… and synthier. A trend that’s backed up by actual data.
But hip-hop’s most pervasive mark on country is in these clap or snap tracks, drum-machine loops that use canned finger snaps or hand claps to emphasize the even beats of the song. That’s the second and fourth beats of each measure. These are the backbeats you’re used to hearing in hip-hop and R&B.
Holt: That was absolutely the central beat of the hip-hop subgenre snap. So, like, D4L or some late Ying Yang Twins.
Narrator: It’s clear that Nashville artists are replicating hip-hop methods of storytelling, and that applies to their look as well as their sound.
For example, these ultrawide ratio shots, a technique that first appeared in the videos of the Beastie Boys and then was pioneered in the ’90s by legendary hip-hop director Hype Williams. Using this type of close-focus, wide-angle lens creates a fish-eye effect that distorts the camera view around its central focus, the performer, whether it’s a rap or country star. Low-angle shots are another key part of the rap-video aesthetic that you’ll now see all over mainstream country videos. Shooting your subject from below makes them appear larger than life and puts them in a position of power, where they’re looking down on you in the audience. Hype Williams, in a 2002 interview with the LA Times, said, “The stars are like giants to me, so I want them to look like giants.”
Hype William’s videos created an exaggerated spectacle around the performer, so they served as great artist promotion, helping turn a whole generation of rappers into bona fide video stars. It makes sense, then, that country artists would take a few cues from the rap videos that took over MTV in the ’90s and early 2000s.
And in today’s music arena, country artists have even more incentive to look to hip-hop for inspiration. The simple reason? Hip-hop is everywhere. It surpassed rock as most popular genre in the US, accounting for a whopping quarter of all songs streamed in 2018. And Spotify says it’s now their most listened-to genre in the world.
Holt: One thing about hip-hop is digital distribution was sort of in its bones. You know? So when, sort of, the internet took off, you know, hip-hop was right there, like, already ready to go.
Narrator: Country, on the other hand, has struggled in the digital-streaming era. Its audience skews older and has been slow to switch from radio and CD sales over to streaming services. It doesn’t benefit from the very online fan base that hip-hop enjoys. And the more purist forms of country music can have limited appeal among younger listeners. Country artists looking to cater to a more open-eared audience might blend hip-hop flourishes into their music in the hopes of making it more stream-friendly.
Holt: The idea of who your audience might be has completely blown up. Maybe my country experience is more baseball cap than cowboy hat. People are creating their own, like, radio experiences, and so at any moment somebody might jump from alternative to hip-hop to heavy metal. So there’s this question of how do I create music that speaks not just to, you know, my locality?
Narrator: As we saw in 2019, one potent strategy for catapulting country songs into the mainstream is through memes and viral dances taking over platforms like TikTok.
In April 2019, country newcomer Blanco Brown released a series of videos aimed at creating a dance challenge around his single “The Git Up.” He was using the same tactic that’s propelled so many rap songs to the top of the chart.
And it worked. Meanwhile, Sam Hunt first got his name out there by dropping a free mixtape, a move that’s pretty unheard of in country. He got the idea from watching the career beginnings of rappers and R&B artists like The Weeknd. Other country singers have started using audio snippets to tease upcoming releases, which has long been one of rappers’ favorite ways to build hype around their new music.
For country artists looking to introduce their music to younger and wider demographics, there’s another approach that’s potentially even more lucrative: partnering with hip-hop artists on tracks and even on tour. Tim McGraw showed the power of the cross-genre collab back in 2004 when he teamed up with Nelly on the single “Over and Over.” Their duet topped charts around the globe, thanks largely to crossover airplay. The Nashville duo Florida Georgia Line followed suit in 2013, tapping Nelly for a rework of their song “Cruise.” The original single had climbed to No. 16 on the charts but then dropped off the Hot 100, until the new version with Nelly was unveiled a few months later. With the rapper on board, the “Cruise” remix surged all the way up to the top five on the charts, where it proved its long-term staying power.
These country-rap connections may have seemed far-fetched to some listeners at the time, but the boundaries between country and hip-hop were never that cut and dry to begin with.
While country is typically associated with white artists and audiences, the genre actually grew out of the black folk music of the American South. It all starts with this instrument right here.
The banjo. One of the defining instruments of country music actually originates in West Africa and came to America through the slave trade.
That all changed at the dawn of the commercial recording industry, when record labels decided to start segregating their music into racialized genres.
Holt: When genres were first created in the American popular-music world in the 1920s, you know, there were just three genres. You had hillbilly music, race music, mainstream. As time went on, hillbilly music became, it was referred to as “country and Western.” Race music became rhythm and blues, R&B, and mainstream became pop.
What defined those genres wasn’t so much what they sounded like; it was who was making the music. And so for race music, it was the music by and for African Americans. For hillbilly music, it was music by and for poor, working-class white people, and mainstream was for middle-class, wealthy white people. One thing that country and hip-hop certainly share is telling the stories of poor and working-class people. Be they urban or rural, part of understanding the genres as authentic has been tied to grounding them in the worlds that they came out of and sort of, in a way, paying homage to those spaces.
Narrator: That’s why an artist’s roots matter so much in both country and hip-hop. Storytelling and lived experience are part of what gives a performer their authenticity, what’s known in hip-hop as “realness.” And in country as, well, “countryness.”
So the classification of music into genres was never just about the way the music sounded, but rather the race and class of its intended audience. Although the segregation of the record industry took place way back in the ’20s, you can still see its legacy at award shows.
Drake: Even though “Hotline Bling” is not a rap song, the only category that they can manage to fit me in is in a rap category.
Narrator: Yet, a segregated industry has never stopped different genres from sharing common musical DNA. The birth of hip-hop, in the ’80s, arose from a variety of black musical traditions, some of which, like blues and rock ‘n’ roll, have also shaped the evolution of country.
Holt: These musicians, these artists have been kind of influencing each other all along, but it’s happening in a very pronounced way.
Narrator: We’ve seen that hip-hop has shaped the direction of modern country music, both sonically and visually. But what about the other way around?
Holt: There has definitely always been a bit of a country voice in hip-hop, even if it’s not so pronounced.
Narrator: Country’s had the most marked influence on Southern hip-hop, the music that’s come out of places like Atlanta, New Orleans, and Memphis, Tennessee.
Holt: The 1990s into the early 2000s, there were music makers and audiences who felt that the hip-hop that existed didn’t really make space for them, because they were Southern. There was this need to sort of brand themselves as authentically Southern and authentically hip-hop and distinct from the East Coast and the West Coast. Country music and images became fertile ground for asserting the hip-hop aesthetic that wasn’t just a replication of the urban landscape. Groups like OutKast, who, in “Rosa Parks,” there is a harmonica solo, there is hamboning and clapping with stomping. Having that type of moment, that very bluegrassy, country moment, at the climax of this hip-hop song was a assertion of saying, well, you know, we’re hip-hop, but we’re not just defined by this urban centrality.
Narrator: Atlanta, the city that birthed OutKast, is arguably the epicenter of hip-hop today. Home to pioneering artists like Young Thug, who’s freely experimented with country-trap melodies in his music.
Now, when the South is widely credited as the center of innovation and hip-hop, it’s easy to forget that during the ’90s, groups like OutKast faced backlash from hip-hop’s gatekeepers, who didn’t like their distinctly country sound.
André 3000: It’s like, we got a demo tape, but don’t nobody wanna hear it, but it’s like this: The South got something to say. That’s all I got to say.
Narrator: That knee-jerk reaction was echoed in the recent controversy over Lil Nas X and his genre-defying hit “Old Town Road.”
Holt: I’m sure for some, when that beat dropped… It suddenly didn’t represent the type of space that people imagine country music should be in. Hip-hop being so centered on poor, working-class urban and country being so focused on poor, working-class rural, those differences can seem like this huge barrier, and now it’s a barrier that’s much more permeable than before.
Narrator: So why does this genre mingling always seem to create so much controversy? Some fans worry that genre distinctions will eventually erode completely and all forms of music will blend together into a bland, undefined mono-genre.
Holt: And that’s, I think, one of the fears that sort of underlies that position, is that when genres start to hybridize, is that they lose their potency and meet somewhere in the middle and there’s no discernible flavor to either. But, as we know, you add two flavors, you might get a unique flavor, you know? It doesn’t necessarily have to turn into nothing.
