The Suits Always Miss
Why does country always adopts pop trends right when they go out of style? And what does this have to do with Backrooms and WKRP in Cincinnati?
As I write these words, Backrooms is the number one movie in the United States of America (given my laxity in editing, that is no longer the case). I did not watch it. I do not like horror, nor have I ever posted a creepypasta. I have, yes, seen the original sketch on YouTube and it was cool in concept, certainly, but I was mostly interested in the technical side of the CGI. However, what strikes me about the Backrooms moment (as well as Obsession, even though that is a slightly different point) has nothing to do with the film and everything to do with what it represents. The fifty-to-seventy-year-old executives are now finally realizing that their perpetual target of youth culture has shifted somewhere they were not looking. The things being fed to the audience for the past few years were not what audiences actually wanted. By the time they figure this out, the moment has already been underway for a while.
Hollywood is now staring down the barrel of an unexpected future. I heard it best expressed in a podcast conversation between film critics Sonny Bunch, Peter Suderman, and Alyssa Rosenberg, who described this week, with Backrooms beating the new Star Wars film and Obsession posing unprecedented week-over-week growth numbers, as a week people are going to write books about. And as they pointedly noted, this moment is presumably only the lead-in to a flood of internet-based IP. Something has shifted. The reference material going forward is not what it was for so many years — reboots, sequels, cartoons, 80’s nostalgia, the 90’s comic book boom. The executives may have thought that would go on forever, but there is a new frontier to mine now. What is next is the internet as a whole. Memes that spread through the internet become the next generation’s template for films.…. Charlie Bit My Finger, coming soon to a theater near you.
Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to a confession. One of the records from 2023 that has genuinely stuck with me, that I continue to return to, is (and I say this with full awareness of what I am about to type) the Country x EDM crossover record One Night in Nashville by the Cheat Codes. On this record, they partnered with some of mainstream country’s most cloying, annoying, and generally irksome pop country acts, all of whom I have never given a positive review. I am talking about Lady A, Brett Young, Mitchell Tenpenny, Nate Smith, Russell Dickerson. And yet, I like it.
The reason for this requires a bit of context. My favorite genre is country music. My second favorite genre is not, as you may have expected, rock music (a common second), nor is it pop, nor is it rap. It is EDM. I am a sucker for a good beat. I love the energy, the vibes. It is awesome. I don’t know a tremendous amount about the genre technically, but that’s never stopped anyone from enjoying music. One issue with covering country music is that whenever I turn someone on, there’s an analytical side of my brain that fires up. With EDM, I can turn that off and just vibe with the music. Even though I prefer my country music traditional, I have a guilty enjoyment when my two favorite genres collide.
Sacrilegious or Sacramental
The idea of country EDM may seem to be an odd one. The naturally rooted, acoustic-forward genre of pop country seems an odd mix with the whole synthetic atmosphere-forward world of electronic dance music. But there is a reason that Avicii’s Hey Brother, one of the largest EDM crossover hits, features Dan Tyminski, the well-known bluegrass vocalist. His high and lonesome roots could not be further from the festival stage, but somehow it worked.
The fact that his voice is what elevates that song is not incidental. Because the focus of EDM is the rhythm, beat, and vibes, vocals in much of EDM are treated as just another instrument. While that can have genuinely cool effects, as is the case with Kygo and how he does interesting things with vocal manipulation, I enjoy the human voice as more than a mere instrument, and with the general decline of instrumental music on the charts throughout the decades, I suspect many others do as well.
Same as EDM has a flaw that it lacks a vocal component, pop country has fatal flaws as well. The genre limitations demand a vocal-forward approach, but the often synthetic elements of the arrangement hamstring the mix because they usually operate in competition with the singer. Country is a storytelling medium and therefore the vocal work must be front and center. However, pop music, especially modern forms, relies heavily on the groove, instrumentals, and beat of the song to be the appeal. Frequently, the TikTok-styled alt pop coming out barely cares about the vocals, with them being stretched and warped via autotune or vocal effects to fit the required instrumental. There’s a contradictory fight here between the vocal-forward requirement of country and the instrumental-forward pop music they desperately wish to incorporate.
Country EDM solves this problem in both directions. By pairing with incredibly talented pop country vocalists, it gives EDM the melodic and vocal richness it typically lacks, and by switching genre labels and giving into the whole-hog mentality of EDM instrumental styles, it gives the pop country acts a fresh sonic framework that lets their voices do the work without asking them to be more. The singer can focus on belting out a couple of bars here and there and not focus on telling a broader story. It doesn’t need to be The Gambler, it can be a slightly lengthier Turn Down For What. The production hides the weaknesses on both sides and plays to the strengths of each. The result is, like this Cheat Codes record, tasteful EDM that I return to time and time again.
A couple of tracks are worth highlighting as a demonstration of this at work. “Something’s Coming” with Lady A, who, in spite of my lukewarm feelings about them, have always been one of the better vocal acts in the game, features a folktronica-influenced mix that adds an acoustic warmth that meshes excellently with their vocals. Importantly, the song plays to the famed harmonies of the group. Brett Young’s contribution, “Hurt That You Gave Me” leans into his mournful register. The beat does not overtake; the drum pad work is sophisticated; the atmospherics restrained enough that his softer voice can get as husky as the hurt feeling requires. Crucially, the song has more going on then the bare snap track beats and minimal guitars of Young’s “country” hits. He doesn’t have enough to carry a song as the primary instrument, but here, with so much more going on, he excels in the additive role.
The Long Roots of Context or Why The Suits Always Miss
This album does not appear sui generis. EDM has been a popular genre in the United States for some decades before it began creeping into the edges of Nashville. As a rule, country takes longer to incorporate trends that are occurring on the pop side. Although some mild EDM elements existed in some corners of bro country, the EDM remix push in country only started the latter half of the 2010s. The Cheat Codes lined up timeline-wise and cracked the mainstream world of music in 2017. By 2023, their star, along with the rest of their genre, was well into a decline phase (to clarify, EDM is still huge; it just isn’t particularly relevant to pop music anymore. Pop moved pretty quickly to hip hop and then to 80’s retro pop, and now it dabbles with country. Pop is a fast-moving genre.) Yet it was only in the mid-2020s that a full-length country EDM album emerged from mainstream Nashville. What took so long?
In reality, this is not much of a question. It is hard to think of a generation of popular music that did not go through exactly this cycle. The late ’70s TV show “WKRP in Cincinnati” presented the young, rebellious Andy Travis switching the station over to rock and roll to appeal to the youth, while the older executives initially resisted. Rock music, by 1978, was already twenty-five years old. It wasn’t really a young people’s genre anymore, strictly speaking. The young genres were disco, which had already burst through the dam, or pop music, which was about to be driven in a radically different direction with the introduction of synthesizers. Rock was fully mainstreamed and had simply become the water that generation swam in. Like Backrooms, it is only well after the culture has been thoroughly permeated that the executive class finally sees the shift.
EDM is not so different. House music was developed in the seventies and eighties, building out of disco. There were popular electronic hits in the mid-1990s. Acts like David Guetta are in their fifties. We are not that far removed from legacy EDM acts shuffling around on stage in front of a mixer the way rock legends do nowadays with their guitars. The soundtrack of one’s youth starting out as the sound of rebellion, then becoming slowly adopted and swallowed by the mainstream, becoming passé, and then old, is simply what happens. Executives, especially those in country music, are hesitant to embrace a trend until deep into that lifecycle. Hence the shock of Backrooms. Hence the lateness of the country x EDM trend. And, hence, why I think this trend is nearly done.
Country music, for its part, frequently finds itself behind the trends. But the forward-thinking parts of the genre have always eventually accommodated, usually after a trend has been established for a couple of years. So while there may have been the occasional early attempt at country EDM in the late 2000s and early 2010s, country naturally lagged. By the mid-to-late 2010s, there was a clearer understanding that you had to meet the culture where it was. That accommodation produced the Diplo collaborations, the Cheat Codes record, and others. Now that time has faded. EDM has receded somewhat, still present in pockets, still producing genuinely great music (one of my favorite songs this year has been “Catharina” by Martin Garrix), but it is not coding as young the way it once did. The entire industry pivots around youth culture. So, if the youths have moved on, rest assured country will do so soon as well.
And if you want a tell about when it’s time to hop on board: by the time something is mainstream enough for country label executives to greenlight it as a bonus track on a deluxe edition (as was the case with Dylan Scott’s recent deluxe record), it is already too late. You are the Arthur Carlson, in charge of WKRP. You are (too) late.
Same Past, Differing Perspectives
You may protest at this accusation. And there is a currently brewing groundswell of support for this nascent subgenre that you might point to as evidence that the best is yet to come. There are rumors circling that Kane Brown, who has already collaborated with Marshmello and others, is considering an EDM-themed project. Thomas Rhett just dropped a Marshmello collab single. Diplo is booked on country festivals. Even the biggest star of this moment, Morgan Wallen, has said on a podcast that he would love to put out a house record. On the surface, this might seem to contradict the point. But I think it actually reinforces it, and here is why.
Brown and Wallen are in their thirties. They grew up in the milieu where EDM was the music of youth. Of course, now, as established acts, they want to make something to stretch and make a record that reminds them of their youth. But do not confuse these decade-old acts with actual youth culture. The actual young artists (23-year-old Sam Barber, 22-year-old Avery Anna, 24-year-old Wyatt Flores, 24-year-old Evan Honer) in country music right now are pulling from something else entirely. There is a Noah Kahan-style pop-folk-rock mishmash wave cresting through the genre, a resurgence of the late 2000s and early 2010s Mumford & Sons sounds. That was roughly concurrent with EDM’s rise, but took a different path as it faded and is now being resurrected by a younger generation as their own nostalgic reference point. They were ten years old when Mumford was everywhere, and now, as scrappy low-20-year-olds, they are boldly bringing that sound back and bending mainstream country music to their will.
The music of that era means something entirely different depending on where you were standing when you heard it. When Wallen was at clubs, Barber was being carpooled to middle school. He was barely in high school when the pandemic hit and the world collectively reached for their guitars and recorded lo-fi demos to pass the time. That cohort did not have the same formative live music experiences that shaped EDM as a cultural identity for older millennials. EDM was built around the live scene, parties, festivals, physical gatherings, and that entire apparatus was shut down precisely when this younger slice of Zillenials and Gen Z generation would have been entering it. When Wallen talks about wanting to make a house record, he is speaking the language of his own youth. When Sam Barber strums his guitar and wails, he is doing the same. And, to take this back to the start, when Kane Parsons uses internet lore to create a smash horror hit, he is doing the same.
For someone like me, who came of age consuming both EDM and comic books, the last ten-fifteen years have been pretty accommodating, honestly. Comic books took over film and television completely — the rom-coms got comic booky, the action movies got comic booky — and EDM infiltrated pop music so thoroughly that it briefly became the dominant sound of the mainstream. There is a particular feeling to watching the culture bend in your direction for a decade, to having your enthusiasms become, briefly, everyone’s enthusiasms. The Cheat Codes album may represent the last large-scale moment of genuine creative investment in country EDM as a possibly viable crossover lane. (As evidence, see the recent Diplo-produced tracks Whitcomb vs Flores that do not lean into a dance music sound. Certainly not nearly as much as his Snake Oil project from a few years ago did.) And I enjoyed it while it lasted.
What comes next is the genuinely interesting question. It does seem, as I detailed in “When the Hunter Becomes the Hunted,” that a country’s growing mainstream acceptance may disrupt the traditional relationship entirely — the genre may begin creating trends rather than absorbing them on a delay. Backrooms at the top of the charts, Ella Langley at number one on the Hot 100… it is a weird cultural moment and the vectors are hard to read. I am not a prophet nor am I the son of a prophet. I can see things possibly heading in several directions. This much is clear: the formative trends of fifteen years ago are losing their juice in the culture. We had our moment from around 2018-2025 or so. There will still be some efforts in this lane, but they will not be zeitgeist grabbing the way they once were. The passage of time ensures it.
As for me, I’ll gladly continue firing up the Cheat Codes record and not think too hard about it, and I do not entirely regret that. I am just a fan. Some eras you enjoy while you are in them, and you do not always know they are ending until they already have. Like Andy Bernard says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
Thank for reading,
Joe
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