“‘ I dream backwards now. You won’t believe how backwards you’ll dream someday .’” (Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness ) ***
The first time I tried to use a washing machine in Champlin Hall’s fourth floor laundry room, I was oblivious to the fact that it was already broken. Fiddling with the appliance’s various knobs and fruitlessly swiping my credit card into the scanner meant for student IDs, I couldn’t help myself from thinking: “ Wow. This is really different from how it is back at home. ” Standing there in the tiny room under glaring white lights, I realized I felt lost.
It wasn’t even the first time I’d been far from
This past weekend, I celebrated the big two-one. Wahoo! You can imagine my excitement when our lovely EIC gifted me with the heavy responsibility of bestowing this week’s mood, vibe, theme, what-haveyou to our beautiful readers. Not so wahoo… just kidding, love ya Kimberly. It’s weird being a “real” adult on a college campus, simultaneously feeling so wise, yet so immature. One day I’m putting on my big boy pants to impart my not-so-wise wisdom to our newest Gendo Taiko members (welcome Gen20!) and the next I’m donning my hood in full sunlight like a rebellious pre-teen (sorry to all my high school teachers). I’m towing the eternal line between what
home. Before arriving in Providence, I had attended boarding school for several years, where I’d been away for months at a time. Yet somehow, things felt different. Perhaps I was preoccupied with the notion that starting college was greater than just a technicality, like the one that marked the step from elementary school to middle school. No, this was something infinitely more significant. Unlike at boarding school, where everything felt more relaxed, starting college marked the beginning of a brand new phase of life—of being. Starting college meant shedding the childish traits of high school and embracing adulthood. And there I was, allowing an experience as mundane as washing clothes to overcome me. Unsure of how to proceed, I did the
I know and what I don’t, out with the old and in with the new, seeking comfort and embracing discomfort—and I think I’m not alone.
Starting off in Feature, our writer compares her college experience to that of her mother, reflecting on the generational gap caused by time. In Narrative, we’ve got the age-old (actually Matrix-old) debate between blue and red: One writer is reflecting on the struggles of embracing a new world in their firstyear; the other finds herself far from home too, using a red pillow to tether her to her past. Meanwhile, A&C embraces two sides of the same musical coin. As one writer thinks about narrative versus emotion in Adrianne Lenker’s music, the other considers the political polarization behind Zach Bryan and Oliver
only thing that felt safe. I called my mom. Within 10 minutes, the machine was churning happily, and I couldn’t have felt more relieved. Back in my dorm, I folded shirts and trousers with the improved, spaceefficient method my mom had taught me a week prior.
My mother moved from the mining village of Fengfeng, Handan to Beijing in 1981 at the age of 17 to attend Peking University. Having lived in scarcity for her entire life, beginning a new chapter in a bustling city of over five million people must have been nothing short of terrifying, though exciting too. When I asked her about this, she agreed with a smile, laughing as she recollected the events of decades prior. She described how, armed with two tiny suitcases filled with all of
Anthony’s recent breakouts into the mainstream. Of course, we’ve got Lifestyle to round us out with a plan for the new month we find ourselves in and a fittingly named crossword (but you’ll get no hints from this editor).
And here you are at the crossroads between two life altering decisions: Will you slog your way through another partly cloudy Thursday; or will you rock and roll into the weekend by reading the wonderful pieces we’ve curated for you? In all my old man wisdom, I’m going to have to suggest the latter :)
Toodles, Joe Maffa A&C Managing Editorthe items she owned, she hugged my grandparents goodbye, boarded the train, and was off.
Upon arriving at her accommodations, my mother discovered that there was only one crank phone allocated to a building that housed over two hundred freshmen, all of whom were desperate to update their loved ones that they’d arrived safe and sound. Waiting in that never-ending line was time-consuming, but coming across other means of instantaneous communication, such as payphones, was virtually impossible at the time in China. My grandparents didn’t have many options, either. In fact, only an estimated 0.38% of Chinese families had access to a phone in 1978, and my grandparents, who lived in relative poverty, belonged to the 99.62%. To speak with my mother, they had to schedule trips to the community center, the only location with a public phone within a 20-mile radius. Planning these trips was also difficult: my mother had a busy schedule and infrequent access to the singular crank phone, which malfunctioned and broke after two weeks. My mother could either send her family a written letter, a process that could take anywhere from one week to three months, or she could wait until she next returned home and saw them.
My mother was forced to adapt to her new surroundings alone. There was no way to debrief her days with her father, or to cry to her mother when she felt particularly alone. Still, being as strong as she is, my mother adjusted quickly. She threw herself headfirst into her schooling of French and international relations. And while she didn’t necessarily find any overwhelming passion in these subjects, she grounded herself. She was working towards a greater goal— one that culminated in securing a career that would provide her with the means to move her parents out of their rural, impoverished village, to somewhere more comfortable. A place where they could finally relax. Yet despite finally coming to call her new environment a home away from home, and making the lifelong friends she still has today, she knew that something was missing. She missed her real home, her support system of 17 years. It was a feeling that no amount of newfound joy could wash away.
Things are vastly different now. Both my mother and I live in America, and both of us have smartphones. Communication between us is instantaneous. In fact, access to digital communication is a given for most Americans today, with about 95% of Americans owning a mobile phone in 2018. The rapid boom of technology over the past 20 years has been unprecedented, with the number of people with access to a mobile device growing exponentially. Now more than ever, it appears that digital communication has become the new status quo, with a new generation being taught to type and write simultaneously. This phenomenon is not
exclusive to the Western world, but has spread across the globe. In China, over 1.03 billion people owned a mobile phone and accessed the internet in 2022, and this number is expected to increase to 1.2 billion by 2027. The differences between the era in which my mother started college and the era we live in today are both stark and undeniable. I’m able to contact my mother whenever I want, and yet, in boarding school, my messages home were few and far between. At the time, I felt that independence was synonymous with separation. I convinced myself that I was always too busy to call my mother, whereas the real reason for my silence was that I had created a rift between my school life and my home life.
But existence is multifaceted. I don’t need to let go of my “old life” in pursuit of new horizons. I’m lucky to have a supportive parent who cares about how I’m doing. So whenever I have a chance, I message her. I send her photos of my dorm as it gradually grows more and more decorated. I send her photos of the food, and she guesses which photos were taken at which dining halls. I send her photos of the scenery, of particularly beautiful mornings where the sun gleams onto the trees in a way that makes everything look blue and gold. Through my messages, phone calls, and photos, my mother has been experiencing college all over again, albeit through a far different lens. Instead of urging me to take the most intensive classes offered, as she pressured herself to do at my age, my mother texts to tell me that I should study whatever makes me feel best about myself. I am being given the opportunity to develop my love for what I love, while receiving an amazing education that she worked her entire life to provide me with. And I know that whenever I need support, the kind of support you can only receive from your people , I know that they’re only a call away.
As Keegan writes in The Opposite of Loneliness, my mother is dreaming backwards. She is watching a lifetime of dreams manifest themselves in me, as I begin walking down the same path that she too walked down 42 years ago. The rapid advancements of technology may be unprecedented, but I can personally testify that technology has succeeded in one thing: connecting people. The world now feels a little smaller, a little more tight-knit. I can take my mother with me on every exhilarating and enchanting step forward—something that she could only dream of doing with her own mother. Everyone is constantly embarking on new journeys that are lined with millions of past dreams. And now, we can venture far away without fearing that we’ll let go of who we once were. It’s a nice sensation, knowing that home can be tucked away in your jacket pocket. It’s like having armor. Armor that feels like the warm hug of freshly washed laundry.
As I cast one final glance around my room, disappointment seeps into my heart. The unfulfilled part of me is saddened to feel nothing more than a single, temporary drop in my chest when thinking about moving away. It’s hard to miss something that has already been tainted by the notion of change, such as my floral bedding smothered with clothes, or the emerald green rug I used to lay on for hours that’s now engulfed with boxes, luggage, and mounds of trash.
I yearn for the urge to cry—for a sign of acceptance or even recognition that I will be leaving for the better half of the year. Yet nothing seems to touch me in the way that I have seen in the movies, where the graduates leaving home exchange lastminute hugs, tears, and laughs with high school best friends and precious old neighbors.
The luggage I have indecisively wrapped and unraveled and wrapped again equates to a total of five suitcases and three boxes. I wonder how much of my room and my past I intend to bring to my new home.
Peeking from the brims of one of the packing boxes is my : a Chinese pillow cover, resting lightly atop the array of mismatched dorm decorations. I smile to myself, thinking back to eighth grade, when my mother had first delicately placed this upon my pillow. My eyes had physically hurt from the exclamation of color declared by the pillow cover, so different from my floral comforter deemed trendy for the plethora of boys I thought I would bring up to my room (zero).
Now the fabric of the cover feels flattened smooth, soft, and worn-out. I recall the months of crisis the pillow cover has gone through to reach that level of texture, carrying without complaint the entirety of my stresses, cradling my worries with ease. I’ve grown accustomed to this pillow cover over the half of my life I’ve spent asleep all these years, so on those rare nights away from home, I can no longer sleep with the rough patch of non-cotton pillowcases against my cheek.
My pillow cover is a violent red, supposedly a symbol of luck in Chinese tradition. It is a constant reminder of all the superstitious beliefs my mother has instilled in me. While some measures I can’t help but feel burdened by, her act of changing my bedsheets (oblivious to her intentions) to brown ones the night before opening my acceptance letter to Brown, has softened my heart for her little gestures. That night, I watched her from a distance with the pillow cover in my hand, puzzled and comforted at the same time, watching her care for me so strongly.
My mother is a radiant red—a fierce presence in my life. For as long as I have been breathing, she has been my guiding force: from checking my homework problems step
“If it wasn’t for QuestBridge I’d be here on a D1 scholarship for instigating.”
“Unabomber? I barely even know her.”
by step through the sufferings of Kumon, to checking my temperature on nights I was so sick I couldn’t lift my head to sip her homemade chicken broth.
Like the red pillow cover, she could not stand the idea of blending in with anything or anyone, and she hopes that my presence among others is just as strong. Sometimes, the ideas of my mother and the pillow cover blend as one, overwhelming many of my true emotions and feelings:
I am a writer: I am not my brother.
I am an introvert: I cannot command a room.
I want to cut my hair short: I do not want to keep it long.
Memories of my mother’s endless obsession with finding the art of success—her constant hovering over me, waiting for me to complete the tasks she had deemed important— urge me to remove the pillow cover from the box and leave it behind.
I think about the tears the pillow cover has held, the throws and yanks, as well as the many attempts to hide it whenever friends came over because it just wasn’t “cool” enough. I think about the times I have discarded it, determined to rest peacefully without the comfort of the pillow cover, and then found myself late at night deliriously retrieving it from the depths of my closet.
Now, as I arrive on campus for the first time, I am asked an intimate question right away: “Are you going to reinvent yourself?”
Other questions that follow next:
“Will you go out to party more?”
“Who do you want to kiss?”
I shake my head to all of these existential questions of reinvention and find myself remembering all of the times I have hid the red pillow cover away from view—all of the times my mother has cried in her attempts to care for me in the best way she could.
Now, I do not keep the red pillow cover tucked away because I am ashamed. Instead, I know exactly what the pillow cover means, both as a symbol and against my cheek. She whispers and guides me to chase feverishly after my desires. She continues to carry the weight of my burdens of school, friends, and balancing this new style of life from a distance.
Now, as I am waving goodbye to my mother, tears begin to slide endlessly down my cheeks, blurring my final vision of her. Don’t be fooled: these are the good tears. The kind of overbearing, suffocating, nose-clogging tears that I can smile through, knowing that I am growing up from her and the pillow cover, but never apart.
shifting back to strangers, sliding away.
by Anonymous Illustrated by Kimberly LiuAt the beginning, it was good. It was exciting to be around so many new people, so many of them interesting, passionate, and unfailingly kind. Campus was beautiful, the sun casting its golden glow on the old brick buildings, the grass bright and wet, the ancient towering trees scattering shadows like mosaic tiles. I had uprooted myself, like so many of us do, to attend this institution, carrying with me the boundless optimism that comes with a fresh start.
To some extent, I had anticipated the difficulties—by nature, I am introverted, reserved, a little quiet. From my whole life spent in the same suburbs, I only had a few very close friends. But in the weeks prior to move-in, my family and friends told me, over and over again: Everyone is away from home and starting anew; everyone will be having a hard time; everyone is looking for new friends. It will be okay.
I tried, I really did. At the start of orientation week I participated in events with a near-vicious determination, rapid-firing introductions, sitting with strangers in the dining halls, plastering a constant expression of amiability on my face. For the first few nights, I attended the socials the university organized, hoping to meet people with whom I would really connect. But the socials turned out to be events completely without structure: We were tossed into a sea of fellow freshmen on the Main Green and left to fend for ourselves. Faces flipped before me like flashcards, their features hardly distinguishable in the dark, my mouth learning the same sequence of words— namefromdormmajor , every exchange ending as abruptly as it had begun. At the end of those nights I sat in my dorm alone, exhausted from the effort of being around so many people, troubled with the suspicion that nothing would come of all this work—the introductions and faces so easily
How did I make friends in the past? I’d grown so used to my friendships back home; they were ships with hulls worn so smooth with age that all signs of construction had been erased. We grew up together. Our parents all knew each other. Now, my muscles were atrophied; it was a Sisyphean task to start from scratch and rebuild.
Whatever dreams I had of bonding with my orientation group quickly dissolved. It became clear that the group of twenty-or-so people organized for the sole purpose of facilitating firstyear socializing was going to do no such thing. We met for sessions that felt like class. Without the mandated icebreakers through which we learned each other's names—but not much else—we would have spent the meetings in complete silence. As the week dragged on, fewer and fewer people showed up.
I was always there. Because what else did I have to do? I had nobody I could readily text to make plans with, at least nobody yet—wasn’t that the whole point of orientation? Yet it seemed like everyone else was making friends fast: Large groups congregated on the green, eating together, walking together with such purpose, charging forward to some mysterious shared destination. How did they make it look so easy? What was I doing wrong that meant I did most things alone, that when I sat outside to read or write I would be the only one by myself?
Two blocks west of my dorm lies Prospect Terrace, a park in the shape of a small rectangle perched on a hilltop, overlooking the city below. I came there nearly every day that first week, sitting on a bench behind the front railings with my arms wrapped around my knees, trembling, watching the setting sun douse the sky in vivid pinks and oranges like a blush, or a bruise. The summer before I left, my mom and I would go on evening walks around the park near our house nearly every day, setting out at golden hour and returning after dark. The chatter of her voice doling out college advice, the distant shouts of boys playing football on the grass, the soft rustling of the trees. The sweat underneath my shirt, the taste of cool water from the bottle she would
I didn’t know college would be this lonely
always uncap for me first, our looping path back to where we started. Now she was walking alone through the neighborhood. I sat on the bench and watched the darkening sky and wondered if she was doing the same, looking up, trying to find my presence in the streaks of clouds.
To others, it must have looked as if I was gliding through the week. I tagged along with groups to events. I almost always ate with others. Multiple times as I walked to a dining hall with somebody else, I would recognize and greet familiar faces, and the person next to me would remark, “You know so many people!” How could I explain that these connections were all surfacelevel, that most of them I had never held a single real conversation with, hardly even knew? And these people I recognized: There was a persistent feeling that they already had their own groups, their own plans, and I did not want to intrude. Was I going to be stuck here, always on the periphery of social circles, never truly “in”?
Now and then I would be struck by a spasm of anxiety seizing my head and my stomach and my hands when I remembered: I had nobody here. Campus was an ocean in which I could disappear, and no one would notice. Everyday I was fighting to keep my head above the water. University events, planned dates, shared meals— inevitably those brief moments of reprieve would end, and I would find myself close to drowning again. I longed for home, not so much physically as emotionally. I longed for a place where I could feel comfort and belonging, where I could be alone and not feel lonely, where I could feel the warmth of the knowledge that I was wanted; I was sick with longing.
Those slow afternoons where I would bike to my friend’s house carrying a slice of cake I had baked that morning. We would lie on her queensized bed, striped with sun streaming in from between the window slats, basking in each other’s company. Maybe we would watch a movie. Maybe
we would do dance workouts in her living room, get carpet burns on our knees. It didn’t matter— just having each other near was enough. And all those hours spent in bed with my cats pressed underneath my arm, warm and purring. Car rides to and from school with my brother driving while I watched the power lines race by through halflidded eyes. I thought it would last forever; now the longing was a constant ache.
Who could I confide in? In conversations with other first-years, I would make some feeble attempt, asking casually how everyone was feeling about orientation, how were they doing? Do you feel the same despair I do, are you lonely too, isn’t this all just so difficult? But the answers I got were always vaguely positive, some variation of “tiring but fun!” Anyways, maybe I was alone, maybe I was the only one struggling. Around me it looked like everyone had already found “their people.”
But I suppose this is a great paradox of beginning college: I never talked to anyone else about my isolation, my pain—I did not want to appear weak or unstable or “ruin the mood”— but I wanted so badly for someone, anyone, to do exactly that. I was miserable because everyone else seemed so happy, but to other people I must have seemed happy, I know so many people! Is this what freshman year is, just a terrible Catch-22? Sometimes I want to be alone, because only then can I finally drop the act of pretending I am having a good time; but here I am never, never alone. Dorms and communal showers and dining halls and greens and libraries: in none of these spaces can I exist by myself. In none of these spaces do I find home.
But home isn’t a place you find, is it? It’s a place you build. On this strange and beautiful campus, I still feel fragile and leaky. I cry so often.
But I feel it sometimes, eating with somebody outside on a sunny day, learning to dance in Sayles, going on walks by the river—little glimmers of hope.
In August, it rained for two weeks straight. I had only packed one sweater for a two-month internship, and the threads were thinning out at the cuffs. It was 1:30 a.m.—the latest I had stayed up all summer—and I sat in the corner of my host family’s guest bedroom. I held the fading knit fabric between my fingers, telling myself I was looking for holes, not using it as a security blanket. I had headphones on, and “forwards beckon rebound” by Adrianne Lenker played for the twelfth time that night. My muscles clenched at the refrain. I didn’t have anything to cry about, but I cried anyway. Despite the looks of the scene, I was the happiest I’d been since being at Brown.
I deemed it an Adrianne Lenker summer.
Like other indie folk artists—Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, The Lumineers—Adrianne Lenker’s return to the pastoral provides an escape from a productivitycentered reality. She doesn’t shy away from the grub and grim of life and love; she speaks with as much nonchalance about bleeding and birth as she does about sleeping in the car. There’s a natural shamelessness to her lyricism and a coarse understated warmth to her voice.
Understatement itself is the core of her music. In “Mythological Beauty,” a song she wrote for her band Big Thief, she tells the story of a young mother through domestic, everyday activities instead of overly verbalizing emotions. Her description of “shrapnel and oil cans, rhubarb in the yard” provides a more whole, unromanticized view of the scene than the previous line, “Rented a house in Nisswa,
Minnesota.” Her specificity breeds intimacy, and along with frontal vocals and fingerstyle acoustic guitar, it seems as though Lenker is letting you in on a secret, almost whispering in the room with you. The highpitched vocals at the climax of the song don’t choke me up like the low and slow “Do you leave your light on?” I may not be or have a young mother, but I know what it feels like to live so on edge that you don’t want to turn off the lights.
Big Thief’s “Velvet Ring” follows a similar structure. Although the story of a couple trying to make ends meet through prostitution carries plenty of weight, the more understated elements of their interactions are the main emotional charge. The song slows down as Lenker sings, “And I just wanna take you home / I just wanna take you home”—two lines that hurl me directly into the fetal position. Small displays of fear or hopelessness or childlike wonder with the backdrop of a more eventful, even chaotic, scene easily catch the ear. They guide the scenes from far-removed impersonal events to familiar feelings.
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Lenker’s solo music, on the other hand, tends to abandon clear storylines and demand a complete reliance on emotion. The summer after I graduated high school, I started reading poetry. I had spent the last year searching for symbolism and enjambment whenever I read, but after a few poetryfoundation.org deep dives, I decided to stop treating my interests like assignments. I started reading poems and sitting with feelings, not dwelling on concrete meaning and evidence.
When a friend introduced me to Adrianne Lenker in the second month of my first year at Brown, I took the same approach. I didn’t need to know exactly what she meant. I didn’t need to know what story she was telling. I would cry either way. I subconsciously picked out small words (wind…lack…pray…cradle…) that drenched me in feelings I couldn’t name. Even without a definitive narrative, small words crafted an entire scene.
That’s the beauty in her songwriting: There’s a sense of irrationality to the intense emotions of her songs. It’s not as simple as relating to a breakup song. There’s little reason why a line about standing in the yard conjures strong feelings, but small descriptions, in or out of context, become the essence of her songs. Emotion takes precedence over rationale.
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Some of Lenker’s most impactful lines are close to nonsense, only deriving meaning from their context. The first verse of “ingydar” seems more like a clump of words than lyrics to a song at first glance:
Fragilely, gradually and surrounding
The horse lies naked in the shed
Evergreen anodyne decompounding
Flies draw sugar from his head
In an interview with GQ, Adrianne Lenker says about the song, “Everything is constantly being born and decaying simultaneously. We're both growing and becoming, and also unbecoming and decaying simultaneously.” I don’t fully understand the lyrics as they’re written—I don’t know what anodyne is, if evergreen refers to the tree or the color, what the flies are really doing, or why she specifies that the horse is naked—but there is a certain biological element to the lyrics that guides me to feel a push and a pull. The push of a lush evergreen forest and the pull of the clinicalsounding “anodyne.” The push of a sweet sugar and the pull of feeling flies swarm around you. It isn’t the specific idea of birth and death that evokes a sense of optimistic hopelessness. It’s the more general idea of being surrounded by conflicting natural forces.
Lenker’s word choice extends beyond objects that match the energy of the scene. In many cases, the very shape of the word booms or snaps like a shovel in soil or corrugated iron shifting. The melody of the verse of “ingydar” bounces back and forth, echoing the lyrical push and pull. The round, open sounds in “anodyne decompounding” and “the spherical marigold terrain” fit together with the refrain: “Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.” Cycles fall not necessarily within the semantics of the lyrics but within the phonetics of the words.
Such stark specificity and deliberate care given to the lyricism somehow leaves more room for interpretation. Where one person hears birth and death, another hears pressure from work and school. Although she may include a small foothold, a root like the refrain or the title that establishes the theme, her music doesn’t require the acceptance of her intentions. As verses branch off from the root, their malleability personalizes listening experiences. Even in sadness, her music is cozy because it feels personal. It meets you where you are. On the bedroom floor, “forwards beckon rebound” met me at a time when I needed to unbutton the stress I had stowed away. The next morning, it met me on its thirteenth play as I biked to work. A month later, it met me as I played with my roommate’s cat in our triple.
The last time it rained, I listened to Adrianne Lenker’s 2014 album Hours Were the Birds. As the title track played, I found myself everywhere I’d been while listening to the song: in my first-year dorm after
my friend texted the title to me, walking to class in the spring, and in my brother’s apartment over the summer. The familiarity I felt the first time I listened to it carried into the last. I listened to the rain hit the trees outside my window as she sang the last line: “Isn’t this dandy? / I’ve got you, and you’ve got me.”
Ask anyone about the summer of 2023 and they will tell you it was the summer of Barbenheimer. What they won’t tell you, however, is that it was just as much the summer of country music.
Country music, while often maligned as a genre, owned the top three spots on Billboard’s Hot 100 in July, claimed number one in August, and started September in the top spot yet again.
Nonetheless, many in the media have been reluctant to label 2023 a genuine country music renaissance, possibly because of July’s number-one hit: “Try That in a Small Town.” The Jason Aldean song was completely unremarkable. While the song dropped in May, it wasn’t until the music video, released July 14, that the song began to climb the charts.
This newfound popularity was largely due to the onslaught of outrage at the music video, which features a compilation of clips of violent protests and Aldean strumming his guitar in front of a courthouse where a lynching once took place, crying out lyrics like:
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face / Stomp on the flag and light it up / Yeah, ya think you're tough / Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won't take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don't / Try that in a small town
The song faced near-immediate left-wing pushback: Tennessee state legislator Justin Jones labeled the song a “vile racist song” and a “lynching anthem.”
The right-wing responded: People began purchasing the song, an archaic form of consumption in the streaming age, reserved only to drive a song up the charts to make a principled stand. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called out
to his supporters on X, formerly Twitter, to explicitly request that they join in this act of conservative rebellion:
Jason Aldean writes a song defending the values that ALL Americans used to share - faith, family, hard work, patriotism - only to be immediately sacrificed at the altar of censorship & cancellation. These are the same people who cheer songs like “Cop Killer” & the glorification of sex and violence in hip-hop. Stand strong against these hypocrites and opportunist frauds, @Jason_Aldean. It’d be a real shame if the song hits #1. We’ll do our part & play it at our rallies.
With America still in the heat of the Aldean saga, a new release from the upstart Oliver Anthony in August plunged the cultural commentators right back into round two of the country music culture wars. Anthony’s song took over the country music scene when he released a video playing his original song “Rich Men North of Richmond” with a microphone and a steel guitar in the middle of the woods. This emotional ballad of the working class man went viral, hitting number one on the charts, but quickly turned partisan when it received passionate social media endorsements from conservative influencers like Matt Walsh and Dan Bongino. Several weeks later, “Rich Men North of Richmond” even played at the beginning of the first Republican primary debate as the moderators posed the opening question: “Why is this song striking such a nerve?”
The left-wing backlash was quick to follow. The Daily Beast accused Anthony of promoting a “racist, Reaganite image of ‘welfare queens,” and Vox described the song as one long piece of “embedded racism."
This clean-cut political narrative of Anthony as the new right wing’s rising star faced one problem: the beliefs of Oliver Anthony himself.
In response to his newfound infamy, Anthony posted a video to X, insisting that it was “aggravating” to be used as a pawn by politicians who “act like we’re buddies and… fighting the same struggle here.” He even took direct aim at the Republican debate, saying, “It’s like, I wrote that song about those people, you know?”
When Fox News brought their new right-wing star Anthony onto Fox and Friends, he deviated sharply from their typical talking points, declaring that diversity is “what makes us strong.”
Fast forward a month later, and the country scene is dominated by someone else: a mustachioed man from Oologah, Oklahoma named Zach Bryan. Bryan is a different kind of country star. He presents not as a wellgroomed industry pro (like Aldean) or a fire-bearded man fresh out of his deer stand (Anthony); instead, Bryan is a clean-cut former Navy man and outspoken
against transphobia.
A country star who fights national foes abroad and transphobes at home is a rare commodity in country music; so, unsurprisingly, the progressive country music stans jumped on Zach Bryan as their hero. Popcast, the New York Times’s culture podcast, declared that Bryan had gone viral on “progressive southern internet,” and an article in The Atlantic praised Bryan’s ability to “somewhat fit the mold of ‘alt country’ singers who capture the NPR crowd.”
Perhaps at no point was the progressive-king-ZachBryan discourse stronger than when he was arrested three weeks ago in Oklahoma. Naturally, his public arrest for obstruction of a law enforcement officer during a traffic stop ignited endless discourse about Zach Bryan’s views on law enforcement. After Bryan posted a video about his arrest, one X user responded, “Zach Bryan really said ACAB without actually saying ACAB as many times as possible in his story and that is so slay of him.”
But Bryan, much like Anthony, is not the political icon his fans may think he is. In his written statement about the arrest, he apologized for his disobedience and insisted that he “support[s] law enforcement as much as anyone can.”
He even clarified his initial remarks about transphobia in a now-deleted Tweet saying, “yo I don’t support transgender people attacking swimmers I just have family transitioning and have blood to defend here. No one threaten me pls.” For Zach Bryan, opposing transphobia means protecting the family unit—a longstanding theme of country music and conservatism— more than it means advancing any progressive agenda.
And his new, self-titled album is coursing with sentiments that are distinctly anti-progress: The first track of the album is a spoken word poem titled “Fear and Fridays,” in which he says that he has “learned that every waking moment is enough and excess never leads to better things / it only piles and piles atop the things that are already abundantly in front of you.”
The drive for more change, for always moving faster, and for a solution that lies just around the bend is not a universal fix for Bryan; instead, it is a cause for great fear. He sings about how what we already have is enough, and how moving ever forward does not signal “progress” but redundancy: It “piles and piles” until the life we once knew becomes obscured.
Bryan’s political valence is not the only area in which he differs from his peers in today’s industry. While many mainstream country artists like Morgan Wallen seem to be turning to big pop sounds with roaring choruses, Bryan’s are more like the hushed
confessions of a man scribbling away at his notepad in a cabin somewhere. Bryan’s raspy and whispered breakout hit “Something in the Orange” sounds more like a Noah Kahan or Passenger song than a country and western anthem. So it was no surprise when, this past weekend, he released his first collaboration with Noah Kahan and the two voices flowed together perfectly.
These two men are indie artists at their core— their nature-filled aesthetics and subtle whines of loneliness portray them as men of the outdoors who, like Oliver Anthony, are fundamentally independent. These are artists who defy both easy vocal and social categorization alike.
When Zach Bryan’s mug shot goes viral, then, it seems less likely that he is an ACAB radical leftist, and more likely that he is reigniting a long tradition of the outlaw country artists of the past who refused to conform: men like Merle Haggard, who sang “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” or Willie Nelson, who sang “Hard to be an Outlaw.” While the polarized politics of a modern landscape defined by tribal loyalties to the left or the right may be new to the 21st century, the story of the lonesome cowboy who doesn’t fit in and will never want to can be traced back through centuries of country and western music.
As country music critic Grady Smith said about Zach Bryan’s brand of country music, these songs fall not on “the spectrum between right and left,” but on something that transcends politics: the divide between “establishment versus independent.”
Neither Bryan nor Anthony has found their team—politically, or socially—but perhaps this is what country music has always been about. Historian Bill C. Malone explains in Ken Burns’s Country Music, country music “spoke for a lot of people who were being forgotten, or felt they were being forgotten.” Neither man feels like he belongs in the current iteration of America, and maybe that’s a radical political message. Or maybe, as Anthony sings, it is simply a feeling that resonates deeply with “people like me, and people like you.”
Beyond the cooked-up controversies, perhaps country music’s latest boom could be a reflection of a large portion of Americans who feel that they, too, no longer belong. Maybe Zach Bryan was the number one album not because of chart-rigging stans like Aldean’s, but because more and more Americans are feeling socially and politically homeless, a feeling that resonates deeply when Bryan croons, “Hey driver, you can drop me off anywhere.”
SUN
1 visit a pumpkin patch everyone talks about the charlie brown christmas tree, but what about the charlie brown pumpkin? buy a disfigured, unwanted one and give it a loving home <3
8 cook some chili …and instantly burn the roof of your mouth on it
2 paint pumpkins doll up the ugly, bruised one you brought home yesterday
9 drink hot apple cider duh!
3 go leaf-hunting then leave the pretty ones on your desk to rot because you’re too sentimental to throw them away
4 have a fall picnic a lil’ wednesday evening main green charcuterie board?
5 take the midnight train goin' anywhere (except go during the day so you can look at the pretty changing leaves!)
6 play checkers what’s more fall than checkers?! the board is literally plaid!
7 make caramel apples so beautiful yet so difficult to eat
10 make a fall playlist the smiths own the month of october. i don't make the rules.
11 go to a haunted house whoever walks in the front of the group is the alpha friend
12 make a leaf garland hey, here’s something to do with those crumbling, week-old leaves in your room: make festive fall artwork!
13 make a campfire on the beach ok, so this one may not be 100% legal, but i won't tell if you bring the s'mores
14 go on a bike ride go out and enjoy the peak of leaf-changing season according to the farmer's almanac (the more you know!)
15 go to a fall festival get lost in the corn maze
16 reemerge from the corn maze still you, but. . . different
17 make pumpkin bread if only for the heavenly smell
18 have a solo fall photoshoot run into your crush and wish you were never born
19 light a pumpkinscented candle literally all you have to do all day
20 have an apple pie bake-off what's better than baking? making a competition out of it!
21 do some holiday shopping in advance i'll bet you a snow globe that christmas decorations will already be on the shelves
22 make a fall cocktail (or mocktail) it's friday night somewhere, am i right. . .?
23
watch a scary movie whoever decided coraline's other parents should have buttons for eyes needs professional help 29 run a 5k beat the sunday scaries and lace
30 make hot cocoa and read a book sit back & recover from artwork!
24 jump into a pile of leaves it's not as fun as it used to be, but you have to do it once a year for the nostalgia
31 do your homework.
25 go on a horseback ride classes? never heard of them.
26
tour a winery you may have missed your mwf classes yesterday, but you haven't missed any t/th ones yet. . .
27 put spooky decorations on your door let the trick-or-treaters know you're open for business
28 make pumpkin soup and burn the roof of your mouth…again
Crossroads post- mini crossword 13
by Will Hassett2 3 4 5
6 7 8
5
7 8
1 9 9
Sweet & salty sandwich staples
Nickname for Brown's northernmost dining hall
Lesser-known alley, intersects 2D near Le Creperie
Underwater detection system With Kit-, chocolate & wafer favorites
“Somehow, we collide at these exact moments, in these exact ways. Whether or not we’ve met before, somehow we spark an iteration of love. Isn’t that a beautiful idea, that we’re all in love with little bits of each other?”
—Kaitlan Bui, “Head Over Heels” 10.01.21
“I am home, perched in a rusted wooden chair with scars of use across it. Tomorrow’s homework is sprawled on my floor. I am home, yet the isolation strengthens. The house I’ve grown in — Laura Tamayo, “Exile” 09.30.22
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Common file format for Canvas submissions
Better-known street, crosses 7A near Citizen's Bank Ortega or Fischer
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Acronym for 15 Soviet-era states
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