It’s hard to say exactly what “country” means these days, but even if you can’t define it, you know it when you hear it. “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen—the biggest song of 2023, and the defining country crossover hit of the 2020s—is country to the extent that Wallen sings in a macho Tennessee accent, though its wispy fingersnap beat almost sounds like ringtone rap. Earlier singles like “7 Summers” and “More Than My Hometown”—both from the 2021 blockbuster Dangerous: The Double Album—are no doubt country in their small-town love stories featuring fishing, beer, and God. But they remind me of the radio songs being piped into the pool where I worked in the early 2000s: a pleasant, vaguely poignant blur of pop and rock and country, the kind of thing that sounds today like simpler times.
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