On a recent weekday commute, hoping to escape Donald Trump’s voice on NPR, I hit the scan button on the radio and fell into the past courtesy of New Hampshire’s Country music station 93.3 The Wolf.

The Wolf seems to play 2005 on a loop, looking neither back nor forward, eyes and ears fixed on the days of Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was.”

The station’s listeners are not Country’s traditional working-class heroes. According to its own website, The Wolf’s pack are affluent suburban homeowners (70% own homes, 61% earn over $75k) who are college-educated (59%) and between 25-64 (84%) -- comfortable professionals cosplaying nostalgia.

That they are trapped in this way is a sign—a return trip to Denial after years of the stages-of-grief playlist Country has been offering up since the assumption that Americans were one people moving forward together fully collapsed. Country music, which has always claimed to represent the American heartland, has spent the past 35 years weeping in confusion.

If you track the month of November’s top Country songs across four decades, you can see the genre move through the stages of grief—denial, bargaining, depression, anger—never quite reaching acceptance, and finally fragmenting so hard the Grammy Awards had to draw a white line across the playroom floor. Starting in 2026, there will be two separate awards -- Best Contemporary Country Album and Best Traditional Country Album -- and never the twain shall meet.

This isn’t about music getting worse (although it did, but some of it’s getting better again). It’s about a genre reflecting the death of the perception of a shared American identity—and the economic gap that killed it.

In the 1970s, we still shared roughly similar economic realities. A union autoworker, a small business owner, a teacher, and a farmer had different incomes but similar security. Most could afford houses, raise families, retire with dignity. They inhabited the same economic world and that created the foundation for shared culture. After all, the Energy Crisis — and the draft — came for all of us.

Conway Twitty’s “Hello Darlin’” (1970), Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” (1978), Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” (1981) told working-class stories that resonated across economic lines because that class still existed as a coherent category.

Somewhere between 1980 and 1990, that changed. (I’m not going to say it was Reagan, but … it was Reagan.) Income inequality, relatively stable through the 1970s, exploded. Union membership collapsed. Real wages stagnated. The top 1% captured larger shares of national income. The middle class hollowed out. By 1990, the idea of We the People was dying because the shared economic reality that sustained it was crumbling. You can’t have common culture when working people and the wealthy inhabit different economic universes.

The hits: George Strait’s “Love Without End, Amen,” Randy Travis’s “Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart,” Garth Brooks’s “Unanswered Prayers”

The message: Nothing has died. The old ways still work. This is how life should be lived.

The songs of this time period made declarations. They told complete stories with clear morals about how fathers should love, how faith should work, how life should unfold. They said life has rules. Faith provides answers. Traditional wisdom works.

The Cold War had just ended. America seemed triumphant, unified, but beneath the surface, the economic foundation that sustained shared identity was cracking. The middle class was still viable, but barely. Working-class jobs still provided dignity, but unions were fading and real wages were stagnating.

The hits: Tim McGraw’s “I Like It, I Love It,” Shania Twain’s “Any Man of Mine,” Alan Jackson’s “Gone Country”

The message: Things are changing, but we can control it. We get to choose. We can adapt on our own terms.

Tim McGraw’s hit was pure personal preference over collective prescription: “I like it, I love it, I want some more of it.” Shania Twain wasn’t accepting what she was offered—she was listing requirements. Alan Jackson celebrated wholesale reinvention: anyone could become anything.

This was the neoliberal bargain rendered as country music. You don’t need unions or collective institutions, just make good individual choices. Work hard. Reinvent yourself. The tech boom masked inequality. “Get rich” narratives were everywhere. Individual entrepreneurship replaced collective bargaining.

The Clinton boom created an illusion that rising inequality didn’t matter if the overall economy was growing. We traded economic solidarity for individual opportunity, collective security for personal freedom. Country music bargained too: forget prescription, embrace permission. Everyone writes their own story. It’s gonna be fine.

The hits: Craig Morgan’s “That’s What I Love About Sunday,” Keith Urban’s “Better Life,” Toby Keith’s “As Good as I Once Was”

The message: We’ve lost something irreplaceable. We can’t get it back. All we can do is remember.

Craig Morgan’s hit cataloged small-town Sunday rituals: sleeping late, church, football, family dinner. But it wasn’t prescriptive—it was mourning the days when working people could afford not to work on Sunday, when one job was enough, when economic security allowed for leisure and community. When housing was affordable.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs had gone overseas. Real wages stagnated. The middle class collapsed. The top 1% captured larger shares of national income. Working harder yielded less security.

Post-9/11 America was at war, culturally fractured and economically anxious. Bargaining hadn’t worked. Individual opportunity hadn’t replaced collective security. Working harder didn’t guarantee stability. Red America and Blue America were becoming economic identities—coastal elites and rural workers, college-educated professionals and high-school-educated laborers. Two Americas, different economic realities, different futures.

The hits: Thomas Rhett’s “Die a Happy Man,” Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey,” Sam Hunt’s “Take Your Time”

The message: Nothing makes sense. The economy is rigged. All I have left is what I feel, and at least that’s real.

Thomas Rhett’s hit was pure emotional declaration: if my life amounts to nothing but this moment, I’d die happy. No story, no moral, no broader economic hope. No path to prosperity, no promise of security—just personal feeling because that’s all that’s left. When the economic system offers no hope, emotion becomes the only refuge.

Post-Great Recession. Wealth concentrated at the top. Gig economy replacing stable jobs. Working three jobs to survive. The top 1% owned 40% of wealth. Two separate economic Americas. The promise that hard work leads to prosperity revealed as complete fiction.

This was anger turned inward—not at the system that failed, but at our own inability to succeed within it. Country music couldn’t teach (the old economic lessons didn’t work anymore), couldn’t empower (what power against a rigged economy?), couldn’t even preserve memory (remembering security just hurts). All it could do was validate raw feeling. Working people—country music’s core audience—were economically crushed, politically enraged, offered no economic solutions, only therapeutic validation of pain.

The hits: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Morgan Wallen and Tate McRae’s “What I Want,” Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help,” BigXthaPlug and Ella Langley’s “Hell At Night”

The grief response: We can’t even agree on what we lost or what country music is or what America is.

This isn’t acceptance. This the failure to complete grief, resulting in dissolution of coherent identity.

Extreme inequality. Billionaires and gig workers. Two completely separate economic realities sharing no common ground. Rich and poor Americans don’t share neighborhoods, schools, experiences, or futures. Economic segregation complete.

The songs have no complete narratives (like 1990), no confident self-determination (like 1995), no nostalgic preservation (like 2005), not even emotional intensity (like 2015). Just hooks—but hooks that sample hip-hop and blend R&B with steel guitar, that bring rappers and country singers together, that break every boundary traditional country once policed. Collaborations. Genre confusion. Fragments that can’t cohere because the economic experiences they’re built on share nothing. Which one is the REAL country?

While Country grieved, the other music genres faced the same reality.

And, so, Rock dissolved. By the 1990s, Rock became so inclusive it stopped meaning anything. Grunge, Alternative, Pop-Punk, Nu-Metal, Indie, Classic Rock—all called “Rock” while having nothing in common. In 2016, The Who’s Roger Daltrey declared: “Rock has reached a dead end. The only people saying things that matter are the rappers.” Rock gave up on coherent identity, became cultural wallpaper, faded from relevance.

It was OK for Rock to dissolve because it never claimed to represent permanent American identity or economic solidarity. It was about the moment, youth, rebellion. When its moment passed, when the kids grew up, it diffused into irrelevance.

And Hip-hop integrated. From the get go, Hip-Hop contained multitudes: East Coast vs. West Coast, Conscious Rap vs. Trap, Boom-bap vs. Drill. Regional sounds were wildly different. Generational shifts brought radical changes, yet Hip-hop never fragmented.

Why? Hip-hop maintained thematic coherence while celebrating musical diversity. The core stayed constant—Black experience, urban reality, economic struggle, verbal innovation—while allowing infinite variation. Hip-hop has always been music of economic struggle, by and for people locked out of prosperity. When inequality exploded, Hip-hop already had the vocabulary and cultural framework to address it. Economic divergence didn’t shatter Hip-hop’s identity because economic struggle had always been central to it.

Country couldn’t dissolve like Rock because it claimed to represent enduring values and working-class dignity. It couldn’t integrate like Hip-hop because it had built an identity on an economic solidarity that didn’t exist. So Country did what working-class Americans did: moved through grief as economic solidarity collapsed, never reached the acceptance stage, and fragmented into pieces that can’t recognize each other or agree on what they lost.

The genre that confidently prescribed how Americans should live has broken into incompatible pieces. Traditional, contemporary, frozen in nostalgia. All claiming authenticity, none recognizable as what Country music once was. Because the America it once represented no longer exists.

Which brings us back to The Wolf, playing 2005 on repeat for suburban professionals earning $75k+ in their owned homes. What’s with that? They’re refusing to move ahead to Stage Five’s fragmentation, where at least there’s genre-bending creativity and cultural mixing. They won’t even get angry like 2015. They’re just... frozen. Stuck in Stage Three, depression, endlessly mourning a version of America that was itself already in mourning.

And that’s just fucking sad.

A Little Writer’s Note: This is a weird essay. I knew I wanted to write something about the changes over time in Country music, and I decided to try the Stages of Grief as a framing device because it works on so many, many things. I like using it when I teach Journalism. It works when talking about higher-education. Lo and behold, it works pretty well on Country music, too.
Also, when this essay talks about America, it’s really talking about the Culture of Power, AKA White people. Sure there’s a little nod to Hip-hop, but it’s mostly COP. And interesting that the acronym of Culture of Power is COP and that the reverse of that acronym is POC (Person of Color). I promise not to blow 1,600 words considering that.

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