What Binds AI Slop and Country Music Harper Howze

“Slop” has become a ubiquitous word of late, and it’s a good word. It succinctly encapsulates the mixture of laziness and meaninglessness that characterizes the products of generative AI. There is something missing in the things it produces: the strangely monotone consistency, the eager willingness to agree with whatever you say, no matter how you say it. Slop is shallow, its phrasing repetitive, its ideas endlessly recycled. Yet for something so dull, it is a terrifying concept, which seems set to swallow so much of our creative lives into a sea of six-fingered hands. Thankfully, though, I feel at least a tad bit prepared for a world of bland and empty art: I’m a country music fan, and I’ve seen this before. 

Now, I am sure that as soon as you read country music, a particular sort of melody and imagery appeared in your mind. If you let out a grimace of distaste at that mental picture, I don’t blame you. In fact, I’m with you all the way. So much of modern “country” music, especially that which manages to escape across the Atlantic, is abysmal. The sort of faux-country garbage spewing from Nashville’s biggest labels these days is as bad as anything ChatGPT could spit out; some of the chart-toppers actually have been AI-generated. I say “faux” because, standing on my dignified hill of Real Country, I refuse to actually bestow the title of Country on the drinking-a-beer-with-Jesus-while-shootin’-my-gun-on-a-truck crowd. 

I have a vicious distaste for that sort of music. Its crime is not simply being bad music, but far worse: it takes something meaningful and strips it bare. Varied instrumentalism and thoughtful lyricism give way to mass-produced guitar strumming and a nationalistic image of rural life. Like slop, which often so closely imitates reality, it lies within the uncanny valley: near enough to its source material, but so denuded of soulfulness that it becomes a mockery. Country has not always been like this; Real Country music was genuinely what it claimed to be: music, from the countryside. It began in the hills of southern Appalachia when poor Scots-Irish folk musicians were taught by Black freedmen how to play the banjo, and found a wider audience as those two groups moved west and as the radio began to project their voices far afield. From there, it spawned a thousand different children, each with a distinct flair. Above all else, it was a method of storytelling. Those first country songs were oral histories, stories of love, loss and adventure. Many took Biblical stories and put them to the lilt of a fiddle, or gave frustrated workers a tune to sing. It formed the backdrop for political movements, from miners' uprisings in the 1920s to women’s liberation activism in the 70s. Famously, when Nixon invited Johnny Cash to perform at the White House to shore up support amongst rural voters, the “godfather of country music” refused to sing what Nixon wanted and instead made the president listen to him play an anti-war anthem.

So, where did it go so wrong? Well, the audience changed. The big hits of country music today aren’t singers from the country: they’re suburbanites, and so are their listeners: the music has become disconnected from the places it seeks to describe. The American suburbs are a truly extraordinary lesson in placelessness: a neighborhood outside Philadelphia can be functionally indistinguishable from one in Missouri or one on the edge of San Diego. Endless rows of vinyl siding and wide garages, winding along wide streets, nary a sidewalk to be seen. They are far from cities and far from the countryside, a parade of liminal rings where a majority of Americans dwell. These places blend together in their emptiness, and leave one longing for something anchoring. 

In much of the country, particularly the South and Midwest, that anchor comes in the form of rural cosplay, wherein symbols of a country lifestyle become adopted by white-collar office workers who are convinced that not living in an apartment tower makes them country folk. There is a reason actual American farmers have started buying vintage pickup trucks: the shiny modern versions are meant for commuters taking the interstate to downtown, and don’t have the space or durability for genuine farm work. These trucks, some cowboy boots, and the sound of a guitar are a potent means of claiming your cushy cul-de-sac as an extension of the limitless frontier. 

The impulse is understandable; rural life has been idealized as the “real” American existence since Jefferson’s time, to the detriment of many a city dweller. Nonetheless, as affirmingly patriotic as those artifacts of a different lifestyle may be, the side effect has been the creation of a class of Americans who are convinced that they are country, without any of the actual, often difficult circumstances which gave rise to the genre. That is why so much of country music today is so uncompelling. It is a paper-thin attempt to capture something musically which its writers have not actually experienced, stretched even thinner by the drive to top the charts. 

And therein lies the relationship between bad country music and AI slop. What makes the products of generative AIs so unappealing is the disconnect between their subject matter and lived experience. AI cannot produce good art because it lacks the human experience to draw upon; country music composed by Nashville suburbanites is so shallow because they try to write a pastiche of something they have not experienced, rather than seeking to express something new. 

The precedent of country music seems a rather depressing one as we look towards an AI future, but in truth, I see it as a lesson in the ways out. The rise of faux-country and the sterilization of the genre’s mainstream have not killed off the sort of experiential storytelling that once defined it; they have merely pushed it into new places. Nowadays, the continuation of Dolly Parton or Johnny Cash’s legacies can be reliably found under the label of ‘folk’ or ‘americana,’ songs firmly anchored in places and experiences. It is impossible to listen to a Jason Isbell song and not recognize Alabama, nor hear Gregory Alan Isakov and not think of the Rocky Mountains. Rhiannon Giddens is evidently Appalachian, just as Caamp are often far too clearly from midwestern corn fields. These artists are not signed under major corporate labels, and they don’t earn the same chart time as the biggest country stars, but they are far from unsuccessful. 

As AI becomes more omnipresent, we are already beginning to see similar kinds of adaptation and resistance, with renewed interest in authentically human creations and a backlash to AI-generated ‘art’. Nor are we doomed to a perpetual resistance on the edges of society: mainstream country music is seeing the re-emergence of stars who produced unique work, without the limited, nationalistic themes that have dominated thus far in the 21st century. We are not doomed to an endless void of placeless, sterile AI. Humanity’s ability to produce moving and soulful art will persist despite the pressure, so long as we choose to pay attention to the artists whom we each appreciate. In the meantime, you should try listening to some country: as many of my friends who have been subjected to it for three years have eventually admitted, including the editor-in-chief of this very newspaper, there’s more to it than the stereotype would have you believe.