We’ve Squeezed this Charley Crockett / Twin Temple Turnip Enough

Yeah, I saw all the back and forths between Charley Crockett and Jack White last week. I also found the entire exchange and aftermath to be aggressively, aggressively boring. Here it was one of the most action packed release weeks in country and roots music all year, and Rolling Stone is posting three dedicated articles on Jack White vs. Charley Crockett in two days. What the hell are we doing here? Don’t you think we’ve squeezed that turnip enough?

And it’s not just the media, but everyone who’s vying for their ounce from the attention economy were jumping on board. And what was lost in the shuffle was the sort of mea culpa Crockett issued circling back to the whole kerfuffle with the “Satanic” duo Twin Temple in the first place, saying,

“It’s my fault, I let ‘em slip through and being that this here’s my outfit, I’m the responsible party. I reacted. I might respond differently now but everybody’s got perfect vision in hindsight. I think the most difficult part of the whole deal was the way the media, save for one outlet, cared nothing for the truth. They sanitized these folks image for their own uses in the click bait traffic game that is America’s left-right culture war.”

Who knows what outlet Crockett is referring to there. Maybe it’s Saving Country Music. Maybe it’s another. But the sleeping dogs weren’t allowed to lie when he made a swipe at Jack White later in the missive, saying “he used it to sell tickets too and I lost a lot of respect for him. I wonder why he wasn’t so outspoken back when he was in the white stripes 20 something years ago. They purposely avoided political issues.”

As many have pointed out, that’s probably not a fair characterization of Jack White or The White Stripes, and Crockett heard about it, and loudly. And the cycle of rage carried on for another 48-72 hours, while discussions about all the great music coming out last week got depreciated in the algorithm.

Social media these days is like hell, and even more so than it’s been in the past. That’s the reason more and more people are tapping out on it these days altogether, or spending significantly less time on it. The amount of rage bait makes the era of TikTok dance challenges and sadboi songwriters braying out-of-tune from their bedrooms going viral seem envious and innocent. At least they were sharing emotions and connecting with people from something more than sheer, unmitigated anger.

That doesn’t mean that anger and rage can still be useful tools, especially with how they interface with music. Where so many companies, celebrities, politicians, and other public figures let the public down last week by exercising their right to remain silent around the destruction of swaths of Big Bend National Park, musicians stepped up, and actually helped move the needle on what became not just a bipartisan issue, but a darn near universal one. It proved how the power of music can be important, and impactful.

But when otherwise like-minded people and fans bases are at each other’s throats—whether it’s Charley Crockett vs. Jack White or whatever other drama is the rage of the day—it erodes music’s ability to make meaningful change on the planet. Charley Crockett and Jack White probably see eye-to-eye on 90% of stuff. But it’s that 10% that both the algorithm and the leering public harp on, and exploit. But in many respects, we’re all to blame for this outcome.

Artists and songwriters can’t just be artists and songwriters anymore. They have to be content creators. They have to feed the algorithmic beast. Charley Crockett needs a better filter, and a better manager or publicist. But every artist these days is tasked with making “content” on a daily basis, and since all the algorithms are tooled to encourage hate and rage, that’s what gets leaned into the most because it’s what’s effective.

And the media isn’t just complicit, they are perhaps the worst actor in this entire process since they play a 3rd party role in it, and are supposed to be impartial and dispassionate. When Jack White responded to Charley Crockett, he didn’t respond with a screenshot of Crockett’s social media post. He responded with a a screenshot from a Rolling Stone article written about it.

Jack White needed “content” too, just like Rolling Stone, and just like Charley Crockett. Hell, San Antonio Current needed content so bad, they made up a fictitious story about Charley, and then stuck by it. Everyone must keep the public engaged, and the next thing you know, the music itself gets depreciated or outright ignored.

The Charley Crockett vs. Twin Temple saga will likely go down as the most covered story in country music in 2026. Ella Langley who? Charley’s album Clovis still might be his best, and that’s what everyone is missing: the music itself. But you can’t post about boring ol’ “music” on social media anymore. That’s not going to engage anybody. You have to pull out a dagger and stab someone in the back. You have to play a victim. You have to rage.

Is this really the reality we want for ourselves and our music community? Is it okay to like the music of Charley Crockett and Jack White, and to identify that as weird as it might be, Twin Temple can even be kind of cool in the right context, even if that context is not a Charley Crockett concert? Or is everyone convinced they must choose a side, and paint the other as everything that is wrong in the world?

Charley Crockett isn’t going anywhere, and neither is Jack White, or Twin Temple. But the cool, alternative universe we’ve created around non-mainstream music certainly can and will evaporate before our very eyes if we can’t at times show each other some grace, be forgiving, pause before we speak, and be willing to speak up, but with informed and intentional efforts as opposed to seething, hyperventilating hysteria, or feed the beast with our popcorn munching high school-level drama gazing.

Go listen to the great new albums by Tony Hannah, Kimmi Bitter, Brandon Flowers, and more, and get your nose out of the drama. And trust this isn’t just advice being shared with the public at large with a pointy, judgemental finger. It’s also the instructions that were taken to heart here at Saving Country Music. Sometimes these back and forts are newsworthy and important. At other times they’re just noise drowning out the music.

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