In New York and Los Angeles, 2023 was the year of the girl. Small snacks became “girl dinners,” flexible, white-collar jobs became “lazy-girl jobs,” amortization became “girl math,” and solo hikes became “hot-girl walks.” On crowded streets, pink outfits, fuchsia bandanas, and glitter eye shadow felt ubiquitous.
Meanwhile, in Southern cities such as Dallas, Tulsa, and Nashville, it was the year for country music. Small-town bars, too, blared sentimental ballads and conservative folk songs. In August, for the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the top three songs in the U.S. were all country songs.
Despite the hyper-connectivity of our Internet age, these two major trends fell within starkly different pockets of the American cultural landscape—the progressive East and West Coast urban communities, and the Southern and Midwestern conservative heartland. They were not pitted in direct competition with each other—they were simply aimed at different audiences. And the crowd doesn’t overlap.
Bringing the Heat
This summer, the Barbie movie unleashed general hysteria in cities, which continued throughout the year. Barbiecore, a fashion aesthetic inspired by the blockbuster, saw streets awash in pink as strangers greeted one another with “Hi, Barbie!”
Taylor Swift’s yearlong Eras Tour, and Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, celebrated the glitter-touting, feminine woman. Celebrity books reclaimed girlhood, from Britney Spears’s new book, The Woman in Me, to Megan Fox’s Pretty Boys Are Poisonous. The K-pop group Blackpink, who broke the world-tour record for an all-women group, sang, “We were born to be alone!” in their song, “Lovesick Girls.” It wasn’t just women—men also flocked to Swift’s concerts in full Swiftie outfits and cheered as Blackpink headlined at Coachella. Meanwhile, Swift was recently named Time’s Person of the Year.
While the media in urban centers welcomed femininity, not everyone was on board. Conservative figures such as the political commentator Matt Walsh called the Barbie movie “anti-man, feminist propaganda,” and the conservative columnist Ben Shapiro predicted the box-office returns would “fall off a cliff” (the movie would go on to gross over $1.4 billion worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo).
Meanwhile, in the conservative heartland of America, listeners were gravitating toward angry country music.
In May, the singer Jason Aldean, from Macon, Georgia, released his latest song, “Try That in a Small Town.” In the music video, Aldean used stock footage of riots that saw people looting and destroying property in cities. And the lyrics of the song challenged the vandalizers—“Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up. / Well, that shit might fly in the city / good luck / Try that in a small town.” Though many accused the video of being a racist dog whistle, Aldean himself stated that the song had nothing to do with race.
Politicians ended up weighing in. The Democratic Tennessee state representative Justin Jones accused the song of “calling for racist violence,” while Governor Ron DeSantis defended Aldean, saying, “When the media attacks you, you’re doing something right.” The song experienced the biggest sales week for a country song in the last decade.
Three months later, the country singer Oliver Anthony, from Farmville, Virginia, released “Rich Men North of Richmond,” an anthemic folk ballad that laments the working-man’s plight. Certain lyrics angered liberal observers: “Well, God, if you’re five-foot-three and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds.” After the song was played to debut a Republican presidential debate, Anthony, formerly an obscure Virginia musician, shot atop the Billboard charts and was embraced by the MAGA right. (Anthony then lamented that the song was applauded by right-wing partisans, who do little to make society fairer for working men. In a YouTube video, he said he sings about “people, not politics.”)
Morgan Wallen—the country star who was caught partying without a mask during lockdown and used a racial slur in 2021—is perhaps the most successful of this set. His party bop “Last Night” sat at No. 1 for 10 consecutive weeks over the summer.
Yet despite the overwhelming Billboard presence of these artists, most of the people based in New York and Los Angeles that I spoke to had anticipated the Barbenheimer weekend (Barbie released at the same time as Oppenheimer), but many had never listened to any of the aforementioned country songs.
“My awareness of the year of the girl was incredibly high,” Tanay Kothari, an entrepreneur who lives in New York, tells me. “I had friends shelling out unbelievable amounts of money to go to these concerts. But I had no idea this was a particularly big year for country music at all.”
“I’m aware of [Aldean] and [Wallen],” Cory Darling, a Swift fan who lives in Los Angeles, tells me. “But at this point, Taylor Swift has over 200 songs, so why would I listen to anything but her?”
“I had no idea this was a particularly big year for country music at all.”
The increasing Balkanization of our consumer habits—whether it’s in television, music, or movies—has been analyzed to death by panicking studios and executives. But despite efforts to shoot a four-quadrant movie or write a global pop hit, the chasm between progressive urbanites and largely conservative suburbanites continues to widen. This raises the question: Is there anything these days that could be considered a universal pop-culture event?
With the film industry gasping for breath after having survived twin strikes, and the Spotify “recommended” tool taking over in lieu of manual music selection, the outcome for next year is uncertain. We’ll probably entrench ourselves further into our respective “For You Page” (F.Y.P.) algorithms.
Or we could all try watching a movie or listening to a song we might otherwise not have. You might be surprised. It’s just girl logic.
Lynn Q. Yu is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL