Tom Dunne: Beyoncé's country music spat may not just be about colour
Beyoncé sports a cowboy hat with her husband Jay-Z at the recent Grammy awards. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
I know many are painting American radio’s reaction to Beyoncé’s wonderful new single 'Texas Hold ‘Em' as “racist” – can’t be country because she’s black - but I’m not sure I’m buying it. I see less dark, much more mundane forces at play: yes, good old “Format Radio”. Beyonce does not match the format.
I first encountered the truth of Format Radio many moons ago. I was an utter outlier at a format station, an exotic toy to be accommodated very, very late at night. But they were happy to explain the reasons I didn’t fit.
“We are a format station,” said the programmer, “playing music to a target audience that is mostly young mothers. If a young mother wakes in the middle of the night to feed her baby, she must recognise our station even without a station ID.” The key to this was to play highly produced, middle of the road music that had absolutely no sharp edges. It was like one continuous Lighthouse Family lump.
If said mother awoke to feed her baby and found her favourite station playing Naplam Death, her world would have ended. Her sleepless night would become nightmarish because she had awoken to find nothing was where she’d left it.
Naplam Death! How had she brought a child into this? Who knew where this would end: a panic room, a bunker on an island off Connemara, a Xanax prescription?
Those asking where is dad in all of this, and why is he not up to feed his child, fear not: he is a different demographic. If he doesn’t hear Naplam Death his world will end. He is a different target audience. He is, in fact, a different station.
Another station I knew refused to play Chumbawamba’s ‘Tubthumping’ even when it was a huge hit. DJs pulled their hair out as programmers explained that it was “the wrong type of hit”.
This is the conundrum American country music stations now face. ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ is the wrong type of number one, Beyoncé the wrong type of artist. Skin colour pales into insignificance against the format issue.
Stations define themselves as much by what they are not, as by what they are. They are not mainstream pop, R&B or hip hop, the dominant music form in America. They distinguish themselves simply by not playing those acts. They were an alternative to that.
Beyoncé is part of a music universe that is as far from the KYKC 100.1 playlist – the station that initially refused to play her – as it is possible to imagine. She is part of the Jay Z, SZA, Rihanna and Janelle Monae world. KYKC’s world is that of the Charlie Daniels Band, Toby Keith, Merle Haggard and Tyler Hubbard.
Beyoncé on KYKC 100.1 would confuse its listeners. They’d suspect she was part of an advance party for a format change. That happens in America. Stations with falling listenership change format overnight. You go to bed with AC/DC and wake up with Daniel O’Donnell. The fear is real.
In the interest of balanced reporting, I spent the morning listening to KYKC. It was quite the experience. I tuned into Chris Young who, in a song based on Bowie’s ‘Rebel Rebel’, was singing about “girls who fall for boys their daddies don’t like” and, no joke, “small towns that stay small.” It sounded like radio from a time and place that is long gone. Within minutes John Denver was serenading me with ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’. The website carried an ad declaring that it had added Beyonce and made light of and hay with the controversy.
The station competition, their version of the Cash Call, gave you a chance to “Win a Storm Shelter,” a tornado storm shelter, as long as you lived within 40 miles of Ada.
Beyoncé is too now for that station, too modern, too contemporary, too rooted in a world its listenership gave up on long, long ago.
I’d write more but 101.1 are playing Justin Moore’s ‘If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away’. He wants to visit his granddad or his brother who died in ‘Nam. He’d show his brother a photo of the daughter he never saw. He’d be so proud, she’s a doctor.
But heaven is far away. You can’t just pack up and drive there. Sad.
Incredibly, there is a tornado reference in ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’. Knows her stuff that girl. Cracking song!
