Country Music and the Pedestal: Are We Allowed to Sing About Women Anymore?

Country music has always had a strange relationship with women.

We put them on a pedestal so high they probably need oxygen.

She’s an angel.
She’s the reason the sun comes up.
She saved his miserable life.
She’s beautiful in blue jeans.
She’s standing barefoot on the porch while some poor bastard drives 900 miles through a thunderstorm just to tell her he’s sorry.

Apparently, the average country woman is somewhere between Mother Teresa, Marilyn Monroe, and a licensed therapist.

And the man?

He’s drunk.

He forgot the anniversary.

He lost the truck.

He cheated.

He’s sitting in a bar crying into a glass of whiskey because, once again, he screwed up the greatest woman who ever walked the earth.

That’s country music.

And I’m only half joking.

Because there does seem to be a funny little double standard hiding in modern songwriting.

A woman can sing:

“My man is lazy, stupid, cheating, lying, useless, and I threw all his clothes onto the lawn.”

Everybody says:

You go, girl.

A man writes:

“My woman is driving me crazy.”

Suddenly somebody wants to schedule an intervention.

“Whoa, Elvis. Sounds like you’ve got some issues with women.”

No. Maybe she was just driving him crazy.

Women occasionally do that.

Men occasionally do that too.

Breaking news: human beings can be irritating.

I checked.

There are approximately eight billion of us, so the odds are pretty good.

Country music used to understand that relationships weren’t fairy tales. Men and women loved each other, lied to each other, cheated on each other, forgave each other, left each other, came crawling back, and occasionally wished the other person would get hit by a Greyhound bus.

That’s where half the damn songs came from.

Not hatred.

Human nature.

But somewhere along the road, criticism became uneven territory.

A woman giving a man hell can be empowerment.

A man giving a woman hell can become evidence for the prosecution.

That’s where songwriting gets ridiculous.

Equality shouldn’t mean putting women on a different pedestal.

It should mean everybody gets to be human.

Women can be wonderful.

Women can also be selfish, unreasonable, dishonest, hilarious, loving, complicated, impossible, generous, stubborn, and occasionally completely full of shit.

Guess what?

So can men.

That’s equality.

If country music is supposed to tell stories about real life, then let everybody be flawed.

I don’t want to write about perfect women any more than I want to write about perfect men.

Perfect people are terrible characters anyway.

Imagine that country song:

Verse One:
We met.

Verse Two:
Everything went perfectly.

Chorus:
We communicate extremely well.

Bridge:
We attended couples counseling proactively even though there were no significant problems.

That song ain’t making the jukebox.

Give me some trouble.

Give me jealousy.

Give me somebody sleeping on the couch.

Give me somebody saying something stupid at two in the morning and spending the next three days trying to explain what they “really meant.”

That’s country music.

So yes, I’ll occasionally write a song giving women a hard time.

I’ll give men a hard time too.

Hell, I’ll give myself a hard time.

Nobody gets diplomatic immunity around here.

Maybe that’s the real equality country music needs:

Take women off the pedestal. Take men out of the doghouse. Put everybody in the same bar and start writing songs about what actually happens.

Half joking.

Half not.

— Elvis Nash