Jason Isbell Is Tired Of Country’s Love Affair With White Nostalgia

[Berkut]

This is an excellent piece. It's long, but worth the read.


https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elaminabdelmahmoud/jason-isbell-ryman-country-music-mickey-guyton

It's about what happens when white men attempt to unhook themselves from the tentacles of nostalgia and engage with the world as it is, not as they've been told it is. For the next week at the Ryman, it's about cultivating a different vision of roots music in all its iterations. The only thing you have to kill is something that never existed in the first place.

That is a great statement.

"But I think it's possible to acknowledge that you have benefited from a system that's unequal without feeling shame or even guilt from it."

In fact, Isbell wants to go further than just acknowledging. "I think it's possible to change your ways without feeling guilty or ashamed," he said.

Too often, living in certain parts of the South, or owning certain guns, is used as shorthand for conservatism. Isbell complicates this story. He stands as an inconvenient challenge to what he calls a "con," the trick of using nostalgia and white resentment to keep rural white Americans believing that they are victims, that something has been taken away from them. You know the coded rhetoric. It's the one that says America has to be made great again. It's the kind of narrative that explicitly tries to use nostalgia against you, in Isbell's parlance.



It's also a narrative that has many champions. "They got their [Hillbilly Elegy author and Ohio Senate seat candidate] J.D. Vances, people who can cover a large group of people, for example in Appalachia, and convince them to fall for the grift," Isbell said. He knows it's a grift because he's had the opportunity to see the truth.

"I didn't realize until I got in my 20s and started touring around the country what poor in America really was," Isbell said. "We got out into some of the Indigenous territories, and I was shocked that this existed in America because that looked like a country that I had read about and not the one that I had lived in." It didn't cohere with the story he had been told about his own poverty. "When I was a little kid, we were all the same. So I didn't think we were poor. And then I got a little older and I thought, Oh, I grew up poor, and then I got out there and I thought, No, I was just fine."