" "Everything Except Country and Rap:" What You Really Mean"

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Where there’s class issues, there are race issues. This is no surprise. But that’s where the story of “everything but country and rap” starts: a formal racial division... 

While they seem completely separate, hip hop and country sit on the extremes of the spectrum of popular musical genres, and find themselves subject to many of the same criticisms. This, to me, threw open the door on why “everything but country and rap” is a bigger deal than it seems.

Authenticity is important in both musical communities, both policed inwardly and from outside listeners. Can you be a country singer if you didn’t grow up on a farm? Can you be a rapper if you didn’t grow up on the streets of a big city?... 

To admit you like country music is admitting you like something inherently and purely working class, which jeopardizes your status as middle class. There’s a real anxiety in this, and country music is an immediate “flashpoint,” in Hubbs’ words, for this internal struggle of outward presentation.

“Country music’s potency as a creator of classed taste and identity is evident in the derision and anxiety it arouses in the dominant culture,” Hubbs explained."

http://www.runoutnumbers.com/blog/2015/11/16/everything-except-country-and-rap#

So fascinating. There is a lot of common work to be done

Related: Anti-racist rednecks 

FB: "

The middle class white actively avoid identifying with country music and hip hop because it represents something they’re afraid of being perceived as: something other than white, and something lower than middle class."