No, Aaron Lewis, “California” is Not The Problem with Country Music

Random Notes 159 Comments


Staind frontman and sometimes country music artist Aaron Lewis stopped by Tucker Carlson’s YouTube channel for a wide ranging interview that has some pumping their fists, others shaking them, and pull quotes offering a confused, slightly incomplete, and at times completely wrong perspective on the current state of country music and the problems it faces.

Not dissimilar to a recent interview in GQ with Tyler Childers where he explained why he no longer performs “Feathered Indians,” there’s one major quote making the rounds from Aaron Lewis that has all of social media agog. And frankly, it’s probably the dumbest thing Lewis said in the entire interview, especially in the first 30 minutes when the primary topic was country music. When pressed by Tucker Carlson about what’s happened to country the country genre, Aaron Lewis states,

“It’s been infiltrated by California, just like everything else.”

This answer is simply a stock, reactionary, culture war-inspired, flinging of red meat to a right wing constituency that is not rooted in truth whatsoever. Beyoncé, Post Malone, and BigXthaPlug are all from Texas. Morgan Wallen is from Sneedville, Tennessee. Jelly Roll is the rare Nashville native. Nothing about “California” has anything to do with the reasons mainstream country music sucks these days. If anything, it’s the current California throwback country scene that’s offering a counterbalance to all the crap coming out of the deep corporate South.

And yes, a lot of Californians physically moved to Tennessee during the pandemic. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with the country music industry, aside from on the margins. And sure, maybe Aaron Lewis is speaking more about “California” as a generalized cultural boogeyman, but don’t let the cretins on Music Row originally from the deep South off the hook for selling their own culture down the river just because bashing California makes for a good applause line and goes viral on Facebook.

But once again, context is everything. Early on in the interview as Aaron Lewis is talking about growing up in rural Vermont and listening to classic country played on the radio at his grandparents house, he rightly points to the virtues of Merle Haggard—a native Californian—and how when you go into the rural areas of just about anywhere in America, and you’re in the “country.”

New Englander and native rocker Aaron Lewis is the last person who should be making blanket statements about who is ruining country music, and where they came from. The country music of Aaron Lewis is certainly country, and a lot more country than whatever is on the radio. But nonetheless, he’s still a late career import to the genre.

A moment in the interview where Aaron Lewis is spot on is when he talks about how radio country really has nothing to do with actual country music.

“It’s like the land of the misfit toys. It’s not really country. It’s not really pop. It kind of rides right down the middle of it, and becomes its own thing. And they should call it it’s own thing. It should have its own genre and classification. And instead they call it country. And I don’t know how you can put George Jones and Merle Haggard in the same sentence as Morgan Wallen or Rascal Flatts. How does that correlate?”

It doesn’t. And that is the whole reason this new “Best Traditional Country Album” category at the Grammy Awards is such a critical puzzle piece to perhaps finally finding a way to cleave these two completely separate worlds of music currently being placed under the “country” banner apart. If we can get the CMA Awards, radio, and the Billboard charts (who are changing their country chart manager) to finally recognize these two entirely different genres, it would be much better for both.


But if you continue listening to the pronouncements about the country industry from Aaron Lewis in the interview, you could be misled about certain things. Even complaining about how country music has become “so popified” as Aaron Lewis says feels like a stale argument. It’s very 2014, just like his assessment of the country music industry.

“First you sell your soul to the record label. Then you sell everything else you’ve got to the machine which is the radio that drives music,” Aaron Lewis says. “We are the indentured servant. I think that indentured servitude laws are literally still on the books in California so they can get away with what they do with us.”

Yes, back in the aughts and 2010s, artists were getting screwed left and right with bad label deals, and radio ruled the roost. This was one of the reasons for the founding of Saving Country Music. But that’s not really the case anymore. Nor is it really the case that “radio drives the music.” Now it’s TikTok, while an entirely new avenue has opened up for independent artists who own their own publishing and labels, and sign distribution deal with the majors at handsome percentages.

For example, Zach Bryan is selling out stadiums, and doesn’t even play lip service to radio. Tyler Childers is selling out arenas. The world has changed dramatically.

“Business management takes their percentage, lawyer takes their percentage, management takes their percentage, business manager takes their percentage…” Aaron Lewis says at one point. Well maybe when you have two business managers and a manager, that’s your problem.

Lewis also claims he’s had a billion streams on Spotify, but made virtually no money off of it, before trying to walk it back a bit. Sure, Spotify is an economy of scale, and if you’re a small time artist, your Spotify money is going to be incremental. That’s not the case if you’re Aaron Lewis, unless you’re stuck in a bad deal still, which he might be. After all, he signed to Big Machine Records in the mid 2010s.

Lewis even goes on to cite “360 deals,” which are a relic of 2008-2012 Nashville where a labels took percentages of merch sales and touring as well. But they became so bemoaned, they were generally phased out about a decade ago.

It’s not that Aaron Lewis isn’t right about how bad radio country is today, or how screwed so many artists who signed deals a decade ago were when the industry was still trying to figure out Spotify, and TikTok didn’t even exist. But as the mainstream world has stagnated and lost market share, the independent world has opened up. You might not be able to hear Merle Haggard on the radio. But you can hear Zach Top, while Charley Crockett, Sierra Ferrell, and Tyler Childers are now legitimate stars without radio.

The real issue now is trying to draw a distinction between these two distinct and separate worlds of country music. As opposed to continuing to kvetch about why pop country sucks, it’s time to start enacting solutions, solving country music’s problems, and separating the traditional from the contemporary so we can finally stop complaining all the time about what’s wrong with the genre, and get back to simply enjoying the music.

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