Singer Maren Morris said she’s quitting country music because “it’s burning itself down” thanks in part to the “Trump years.”
Morris declared that she is no longer a country music singer this week. Maren’s newest album, “The Bridge,” is her first on Columbia Records, where previously she was on the label’s Nashville division.
The Los Angeles Times noted, “Rather, she says she’s leaving because of what she views as the country music industry’s unwillingness to honestly reckon with its history of racism and misogyny and to open its gates to more women and queer people and people of color.”
However, she admitted that “as a white woman, she’s benefited from the system as it is.”
The Grammy-winning singer claimed that because she is a female country music star, she is “scrutinized more” than her male peers, “even when you’re doing well.”
Morris said that she’s “always been an asker of questions and a status quo challenger just by being a woman.”
Morris feels that the presidency of Donald Trump exposed how horrible Americans are.
“After the Trump years, people’s biases were on full display,” Morris declared. “It just revealed who people really were and that they were proud to be misogynistic and racist and homophobic and transphobic. All these things were being celebrated, and it was weirdly dovetailing with this hyper-masculine branch of country music. I call it butt rock.”
Maren said she doesn’t think of herself as a “political artist.”
“I just wrote songs about real life through a lens of deep respect for my country heroes,” she said. “But the further you get into the country music business, that’s when you start to see the cracks. And once you see it, you can’t un-see it. So you start doing everything you can with the little power you have to make things better.”
In the music video for her new song “The Tree,” homes have signs in the front yard that read: “Go Woke Go Broke” and “Don’t Treat On Me.”
Morris, 33, was asked about the popularity of Jason Aldean’s anti-riot anthem “Try That in a Small Town.”
“But I think it’s a last bastion. People are streaming these songs out of spite. It’s not out of true joy or love of the music. It’s to own the libs. And that’s so not what music is intended for,” Maren declared. “Music is supposed to be the voice of the oppressed — the actual oppressed. And now it’s being used as this really toxic weapon in culture wars.”
Last year, Morris had a feud with Jason Aldean and his wife. Brittany Aldean questioned the legitimacy of transgender surgeries and treatment for children. Morris called Brittany a “scumbag human” and “Insurrection Barbie.”
Maren said her new music exemplifies “the aftermath of walking away from something that was really important to you and the betrayal that you felt very righteously.”
The former country music singer explained that one of her new songs is “about disarming that trauma and saying, ‘I can’t bail water out of this sinking ship anymore. It’s so futile. I choose happiness.'”
Morris said when she performed at a recent Taylor Swift concert in Chicago that she had “never felt so safe at a live show before” because the crowd was “90% women and 10% gays and dads.”
“No one’s hammered or puking in the aisles or getting into a fight or anything,” she said. “It’s just so joyful.”
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