By Cindy Watts and Nate Rau
The Tennessean
October 27, 2013
Contemporary country music artists and the content of their songs have a history of protecting and empowering women. But one of the genre’s most recent chart toppers prompts the question: Is country music at a crossroads in the portrayal of the sex that comprises 60 percent of its radio audience?
On one hand, stars including Tim McGraw andChris Young have kicked fans out of concerts in recent years for acting aggressively toward women. On the other, a recent No. 1 country song by Tyler Farr depicts a jilted ex-boyfriend going “Redneck Crazy” on a woman’s front lawn.
Domestic violence against women has been present in country music to some extent since the genre’s first breakout star, Fiddlin’ John Carson, crooned “it’s a shame to whip your wife on Sunday” in the 1920s. And such portrayals are certainly not unique to country, sociologists, historians and researchers say, with similar depictions found in hip-hop, heavy metal, rock and virtually every other popular genre.
While domestic violence in songs has not been conclusively linked to an uptick in abuse, experts say, such depictions desensitize and normalize society.
In “Redneck Crazy,” Farr sings about getting angry in his girlfriend’s yard because he thinks she is cheating on him.
“I’m gonna aim my headlights into your bedroom windows, throw empty beer cans at both of your shadows,” Farr sings in the song, co-written by established songwriters Chris Tompkins, Josh Kear and Mark Irwin. “I didn’t come here to start a fight, but I’m up for anything tonight. You know you broke the wrong heart, baby, and drove me redneck crazy.”
The problem with such a depiction, according to Washington D.C.-based George Mason University sociology professor Nancy Hanrahan, is that it combines with similar images from other songs, movies and television shows, to desensitize society into thinking violent portrayals are normal.
“The thing that is interesting about this is it’s been so normalized in our society that something like (‘Redneck Crazy’) that doesn’t actually say, ‘I’m going to break your neck,’ or, ‘I’m going to rape you,’ you almost don’t notice it.” Hanrahan said. “When I first read it I thought, ‘He’s pissed off but he’s not threatening to violate the woman’s bodily integrity.’
“On the one hand, the tone is very much like it is a domestic violence scenario.”
Tompkins said that he thinks the song is popular with men because they heard the lyrics and thought “that’s what I should have done” when faced with losing a love interest. Women like it, he said, because “they are the victim in it.”
“Part of me thinks the listener would kind of like for the guy to do that, like it makes them feel special,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong ... (The scenario in the song) feels kind of harmless to me. I don’t know that the song shows what’s going on in my mind, but the way that I feel is he just shows up and does this thing (and leaves). We were going for something fun and tongue-in-cheek but it sounds dark.”
Tompkins and Farr agree that the song was intended to be edgy but neither condone what experts call the stalker-like behavior.
Tompkins, who is happily married and the father of a young son and daughter, said he would call the police if a similar situation happened in the future with his daughter.
Farr — who was unavailable for comment for this story — told ABC News Radio that although “he’s always for the outlaw” the actions in the song exceed his limits.
“It’s actually in my favor that I didn’t write it because people think I’ve actually done it,” Farr told WQYK in Tampa, Fla. “I’m like, ‘No, I don’t enjoy jail time, y’all.’ I’ve felt the experience. I’ve went through a cheating ex and had the whole break-up and heartbreak thing, but I’ve never hurled beer cans or shined lights in any windows.”
Hanrahan theorized that the song’s popularity could be tied to the fact that, like Farr, listeners actually relate.
“My intuition is this depicts people’s real experience in some ways or it depicts some fantasy of their real experience,” she said. “It’s not popular because it’s violence or because women are being objectified.”
John Hart is president and CEO of Bullseye Marketing Research, a Nashville-based company that polls the public for opinions on songs. Hart thinks “Redneck Crazy” got so much airplay on country radio, which made it a hit, because of the record label’s heavy promotion. Most of those radio programmers, Hart said, are male.
“I asked (the head of promotion), ‘How in the hell did you get this on the radio in the first place?’” Hart said. “I programmed radio for 30 years and I probably would not have played this song.”
Beginning Oct. 6, “Redneck Crazy” spent a week at No. 1 on Mediabase, an outlet that the music industry uses to monitor radio airplay.
The week the song went No. 1, Hart’s work revealed that it ranked No. 28 out of 40 songs with females and No. 12 with males in his “call-out” research, which reflects mainstream country music listeners. It fared substantially better with females in the online polls — ranking No. 7 in popularity — where respondents tend to be staunch supporters of traditional country music.
“I can tell you that 60 percent of the mainstream country audience is females and they don’t like the song at all,” said Hart, who started his company in Nashville 16 years ago.
“Why does radio not listen to 60 percent of their audience? I’ve been surprised quite a few times in my career, but never with a song like this. I thought the song would last about 10 minutes.”
Country music historian Robert Oermann said Farr is by no means the first artist to sing a song that could be received as depicting domestic violence. But he believes it is touted less frequently in country music than in other genres, notably hip-hop.
“Country radio wants everything to be happy,” he said. “There’s a very strong strain in female country music of resisting oppression.”
Oermann explained that when relationships end violently in country music songs, it’s more often a battered woman standing up to her abusive husband or boyfriend. Examples are the Dixie Chicks’ controversial 2000 hit “Goodbye Earl” and Martina McBride’s “Independence Day,” which turned the singer into an advocate for battered women and children.
“I have always believed what she did (in ‘Independence Day’) was an act of self-defense and a matter of life or death,” McBride said. The song tells a story of domestic abuse from a child’s perspective and in the verses the battered mother waits for her child to leave and then burns down their house.
“And yes, when I sing it it’s a victory cry for so many women and children who have been abused and hurt,” McBride said. “The man in ‘Redneck Crazy’ is acting out in an immature and threatening manner, and not defending himself against any physical harm whatsoever. At the very least, the man in the song is a bully who is exhibiting a stalking-type behavior. I can’t imagine any of us would want our sons acting this way.”
Florida Gulf Coast University sociology professor Jan-Martijn Meij in Fort Myers, Fla., theorized that listeners may be willing to forgive the subject in “Redneck Crazy” because he seems to be wronged by a cheating love interest — just as in Carrie Underwood’s smash hit “Before He Cheats,” also written by Tompkins and Kear.
“Perhaps we dismiss the lyrics because it seems to deal with a specific (person) rather than aimed at women in general,” Meij said. “I think if he would express a sentiment that all women should be treated with this approach that people would be upset. But because it seems to deal with a particular individual, we may dismiss it.”
Tompkins said that was the hope when they wrote “Redneck Crazy” — that if they depicted the female doing something wrong that the actions of the male wouldn’t be judged as harshly.
The perceived infidelity is a detail that resonated with listeners.
“It’s nice that guys in country music have a break-up anthem because Miranda Lambert has like ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and Carrie Underwood is slashing tires and taking her Louisville slugger to your car (in ‘Before He Cheats’) and (Farr’s) just throwing some empty beer cans and getting his ‘pissed off on,’” said Josh Hollibush, 24, a recording industry student at Middle Tennessee State University.
Beth Muenzer, 22, also a student at MTSU, said she thinks that if the girl is cheating the guy’s actions still aren’t acceptable, but are more justified.
“I refer to the song as the restraining order song,” she said. “I still sing along to it and I love Tyler Farr’s voice, but I don’t like the song at all. Just putting myself in the girl’s position, he’s throwing beer cans and that’s a little much.”
Tolerance for the song and nearly any song with violence or the threat of violence in it changes when you have kids, said Murfreesboro mom of three Holly Yasui.
Yasui, 30, was in the car with her 7-year-old daughter when “Redneck Crazy” came on the radio. After her daughter heard it for the first time, she asked why the singer acted that way.
“I explained that he’s upset but that just because he is upset doesn’t mean that we can go and do things to other people,” she said. “(I understand) that if someone wrote a song about sitting home cooking dinner that it wouldn’t sell and so the industry does push them to create extreme songs. Do I wish that they would think about stuff, like the morning drive to school? Yeah, I really wish they wouldn’t play it because my kids are obviously in the car.”
Yasui said she struggles to find any radio station that she’s comfortable playing for her children. She said her family listens to all styles of music and that they listen to a station until a song comes on that she feels would have a negative influence and then she changes the channel or turns it off.
“It’s really hard to find anything for them to listen other than Mozart or Beethoven that won’t have some kind of negative influence,” she said. “You have to communicate with your kids that you can’t do this. If parents don’t, then you really are up crap’s creek without a paddle. These are their role models and the people they want to be, and kids think that behavior is acceptable because they sang it in a song.”
Ultimately Tompkins said the song accomplished what he hoped it would, which is standing out on country radio.
“Somebody told me about a Steven Spielberg speech where he said that if he doesn’t ask himself the question, ‘Can he get away with it?’ when he’s making a movie, then he won’t do the movie,” Tompkins said. “He wants to live on that edge. I’m not throwing myself in that court, but we want songs to be attention getters.”
Hart said it’s often the most polarizing songs that sell the most copies. Farr’s “Redneck Crazy” was certified gold in August after reaching more than 500,000 in sales. The single now has sold more than 900,000 copies, and the video has more than 6 million views.
YWCA president and CEO Pat Shea just wishes that someone along the way would have asked, “What does this say about how we treat women? Or, this isn’t how I would want someone to treat my daughter or my sister or my mother.”
“You can’t blame him for putting something out there that’s going to make a lot of money because that system is huge,” she said. “For me, it’s an example of what I’m fighting every day. It’s about stalking and stalking is a crime and a part of domestic violence. There’s this culture that is unaware of how big the problem is of violence against women and there are these things that happen in our cultural that make it OK. I believe music impacts us. What does music say about what we believe?”
Country music is no stranger to songs that depict domestic violence. In some cases a wife kills her husband for physically abusing her, and other times she goes after him for cheating on her, often with the same deadly result. Tyler Farr’s “Redneck Crazy” is the first country song in recent memory that implies violence against a woman with no consequences. But country is by no means the only genre with such works. Here is a sample of successful songs with themes of domestic violence.
October 28, 2013
