Considerations on separating the art from the artist in 2025. No, I’m not going to do that, and I’m quite comfortable with that choice.
A few weeks back, longtime reader Chris S posted the following question, edited lightly here:
I’m curious how you feel or reconcile when an artist whose work you typically enjoy traffics in, shall we say, “unpleasant” politics or displays views that are diametrically opposed to what you believe. I ask because I came across a song several months back called “Hey Mr. President” by Deborah Allen (she of “Baby I Lied” fame and singer behind one of my favorite country albums of the nineties, Delta Dreamland).
As you might surmise from the title, it’s a song extolling the virtues of and praising the “hard work” done by… President Trump. I’m now torn because I was a fan of this artist’s music but the endorsement… has left me at something of a crossroads with the artist and her music, and it makes me question how to separate one from the other.
I’ve taken some time to ponder a full response to this because I think it’s an important question both in the context of the current political climate and as a philosophical matter at a time when major publications are laying off critics of all stripes. There’s a disturbing cultural trend– friend of the blog Ann Powers recently tied it to the concept of gamification in a way that I find particularly incisive– that looks at media not as having any narrative or historical value as art but as a commodity to drive engagement. I’m on record as a fan of her pop career, but I do think Taylor Swift has played a massive role in this, with the way each of her albums has been driven by the same exhausting and thought-terminating exegesis of who every line in every song is really about and the same tracking down of Easter eggs like Pokémon Go.
The idea that authorial intent and autobiography are the sole driver of meaning is one I’ve always rejected, but it’s taken root in a really ugly way for years now. Remember the comment thread about Miranda Lambert’s deeply awful single, “Over You,” and how it immediately devolved into a bunch of ad hominem attacks impugning the character of anyone who dared to dislike it? That mentality was the chest-burster that has since grown into a hulking perfect organism of a xenomorph that is unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
People generally don’t want to read any deeper analysis or context for a work of popular art. People, particularly internet Stanbases, want nothing more than approval or validation of their own tastes and beliefs: Criticism replaced by confirmation bias.
When divisive politics enter the discussion? The results are generally ugly, if not overtly threatening. The number of critics who have received literal threats against their immediate physical safety for daring to point out how the music of some country A-listers is MAGA-coded or who have attempted to contextualize COWBOY CARTER in ways that are informed by actual knowledge of Beyoncé’s specific skill set should be zero, but it numbers more than a dozen.
My view is that it is impossible to act as though any form of popular music– of anything, really, that is available to be bought or sold under Western capitalism– is truly apolitical. If a corporation spends millions of dollars on market research and product development to create something that will be marketed and sold to the general public? That is inherently political, and to pretend otherwise is to deliberately, willfully misunderstand modern civilization on a fundamental level.
So when a record label on Music Row invests its considerable capital into the hired-gun songwriters, session musicians, and currently on-trend “artists” to create a new product to push into the market? That’s political, whether the finished song is Tyler Childers’ singing about literally eating the rich or is Brian Kelley’s giving a stump speech or is something like Ella Langley’s weather report of a single that is ostensibly “apolitical.” And it’s essential to interrogate and contextualize the hows and whys of the decisions made in bringing whatever that single or album or video might be to market.
But for any particular listener and any particular critic, there are decisions to be made about what to engage with and to what extent. One of the hills I’ll die on is that there is simply more exceptional music available than any of us can ever hope to experience in a lifetime. On any given week, I add 15 – 20 new full-length albums to my queue of releases to consider for review, to say nothing of EPs and standalone singles or music from other genres that I enjoy but don’t include for review here. There’s simply no way to listen to all of it, let alone to go back and listen to “new to me” music from past eras that I haven’t had the good fortune to hear just yet.
It’s a matter of having a framework, then, for what to engage with and what to set aside. And to Chris’ question: An artist’s politics can figure into that framework, since no artist, no matter how “big” they might be, is ever entitled to any one listener’s or critic’s time or engagement.
To wit: I’ve reviewed almost 300 albums thus far in 2025. Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem is not one of them. Why not? Because there is nothing that I can point out to one of Wallen’s many, many apologists that would be persuasive about how he’s untalented– a stance I’m on record of having long before his N-word tape– or how he continues to exploit a perception of being unfairly criticized to drive his persona. Wallen’s grievance-based brand identity is fundamentally uninteresting to me, and his popularity, driven at least in part by those self-perpetuated grievances, is its own reward. Why spend a month getting screamed at by strangers on the internet for writing about that?
When it comes to artists who have perpetuated very real harm? I’m not going to give them my attention. As we’ve discussed on here several times recently, Jerry Lee Lewis is a literal child rapist, no matter the specific laws that were on the books at the time. I threw away my Ryan Adams tour tee-shirt years ago and haven’t purchased or streamed any new music he’s released, nor will I give his new music the attention of a review. But I’ll still listen to “Come Pick Me Up” and “New York, New York” when they come up on my best-of-the-aughts playlists because I’d already spent my money on that music prior to all of the stories about Adams becoming common lore. But they certainly don’t hit the same as they used to.
Others may have different calculus around such things, and that’s their prerogative.
As for the current political climate, I attempt to take a similar stance. If an artist makes an overt endorsement of political stances that are rooted in intentional harm, particularly against marginalized or vulnerable populations, I’m out. I have dear friends and family members who live in a state of constant terror these days; their lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness matter more to me than some notion that “separating the art from the artist” is a greater moral imperative than standing beside and standing up for humans I care about.
This question came up in the context of a lyric on the new Scotty McCreery EP. McCreery has always scanned as conservative in ways that many country artists often do. That he’s chosen to sing about, “Looking out on the Gulf of America,” is a dogwhistle of an endorsement to the current administration.
But it’s also one of the stupidest elements of the current administration and one that trades in negligible harm to any real live humans. A reference to the “Gulf of America” is, frankly, not something I’m going to get worked up over, and it won’t necessarily keep me from checking out future releases from McCreery. It’s obvious rage-bait and should be acknowledged as such and then ignored.
Chris’ example of Deborah Allen is an interesting one: I’d shared with Kevin on the same day of Chris’ post a link to Allen’s recent release of her demo version of “Hurt Me Bad in a Real Good Way,” which went on to be one of Patty Loveless’ best singles. But I’d missed Allen’s paean to Trump entirely, and it was disappointing to hear such a terribly-written piece of agitprop from an artist of Allen’s caliber. As another example, Shawna Thompson’s Leon On Neon was one of my favorite albums of 2024, and she followed up its release just a few weeks later with a Thompson Square collaborative single titled, “Make America Great Again.”
In cases like Allen’s or Thompson’s, when I’ve been a fan of an artist’s work and then they’ve made overt endorsements of political agendas that I cannot abide, I’ll still listen to the music they made prior to those endorsements. But my enjoyment isn’t what it was before. It’s tempered by a feeling of “We were all rooting for you!” disappointment rooted in the current political climate’s denial of the basic humanity of people who are different from them.
It’s not at all the same as, say, Jelly Roll or Jason Aldean or RaeLynn or Oliver Anthony, who never really released much music I liked in the first place. And there are center-left and left-leaning country artists whose music I don’t particularly care for: The McGraw-Hill household, for instance, or Little Big Town’s last run of albums. I’m not going to give a pass to an artist simply because I like their politics more than I like their music, and I’m also not going to seek them out to prove a point to someone who might build a straw-man argument. I am, at best, a marginal fan of Bruce Springsteen and have stated many, many times that I have little use for the last two decades’ worth of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s work.
Perhaps the most salient recent example would be the contrast between Larry Fleet’s new EP, on which he sings of things that are important to him without insisting that those things are the only correct or acceptable ways to live, and Chris Janson’s latest album, on which he sings, “The left ain’t right, and the right ain’t wrong” and doubles-down on a sense of anger at people he sees as falling on the wrong side of a binary that ignores the actual complexities of the human experience.
I don’t need to hold space for Janson’s or, say, John Rich’s brand of identity politics in the name of some nebulous “marketplace of ideas” construct because their approach to expressing their views is in no way interesting or instructive about what they believe. My own lived experiences, past and present, have made it abundantly clear what those beliefs are. Fleet’s songs, in contrast, scan as a more open conversation about what he values, and I’m always happy to have those conversations. I think our own comment threads here actually make that pretty clear.
It isn’t a matter of demanding ideological purity; in part, it’s about allocating my own resources of time and attention, knowing that no one has to separate the art from the artist when there’s already so much art available to us. Moreover, it’s about recognizing the value in art that can reflect differences in values while still being rooted in a fundamental sense of empathy– what we’ve said here for years is the foundation for the best country music.
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