By Tzipporah Shapiro

Garth Brooks is a man with an astronomically successful career. He’s the biggest selling Country artist in history, and he’s also been saddled with “that’s not Country” quips since his debut in 1989. He’s Schroedinger’s Country singer, if you will—simultaneously the saviour and downfall of the entire genre, living or dead with the turn of a dial. But that label never really hurt him, it couldn’t; instead it catalyzed “that’s not Country” against all those who came after, allowing the genre to regress culturally and setting a precedent that if an artist’s politics don’t align with industry mandates, they don’t belong. To be clear, “that’s not Country” was always about gatekeeping. It was always meant to draw a line in the sand between who gets to have a career and who doesn’t. But it wasn’t always a weapon.

So, to understand how we got here, how I got here, really, we have to go back to the beginning, or my beginning. I was born a fully formed yenta. My greatest joy in life is, and has always been, digging up personal information that doesn't involve me; in my heart of hearts, I think if I had been alive in the ‘70s I could have figured out who ‘Deep Throat’ was in, like, a month tops. I live for scandal and gossip and intrigue and a poorly orchestrated cover up—if you can't keep a secret, come sit next to me. There is nothing I love as much as other people's business.

Which brings us back to Garth Brooks, a man with no poker face and several very public scandals. As you can imagine, I was hooked immediately. I did not grow up a Garth Brooks fan, not assigned Country music at birth. I was aware that Garth Brooks existed because I lived in the world, but I’m a Jewish lesbian from New York, so I never stood in the Country music crosshairs. I don’t think I can accurately explain how I went from a casual Google to an Encylopedic knowledge of this man’s musical and personal oeuvres, the weird and wonderful alchemy that brough about this hyperfixation. The best that I can offer is that he represents a way for me to feel connected to a world I have long been excluded from, a world I adored but didn’t seem to adore me back. What I learned during those early days was that Garth Brooks is both the platonic ideal of a Country singer, and also “not Country” at all. This is important.

Depending on the day, Garth Brooks could easily be described as a love sick simp, a gunslinging cowboy, a mama’s boy, an egomaniac, a country hick, a rock groupie, a regular guy, a millionaire superstar, a liberal dad, an old school Republican, a philanderer, a slavish devotee, a cry baby or a jock—and they would all be completely accurate. He is, in a sense, always the bride and never the bridesmaid—a man who can’t miss even when he misses. He’s the only man I would ever even consider being straight for, which is mortifying both in its accuracy and in its scope.

At his peak, he was the American music industry lingua franca—no matter what you normally listened to, you also listened to Garth. That’s not hyperbole; Garth Brooks’ career by the numbers is absolutely incomprehensible: the most commercially successful solo artist of all time with more than 170 million records sold, 9 Diamond certified albums, a truly breathtaking number of industry awards (including artist of the decade, twice), RIAA award for artist of the century, The Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, induction into the Grand Ole Opry, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Kennedy Center Honors...the list goes on. He once had the number one song on three different Billboard genre charts at the same time, and even his worst-selling album had two number one singles and went platinum. In 1993, he personally delayed the Super Bowl. To say he was once-in-a-generation Big Deal is an understatement.

So why, with that kind of legacy and unprecedented superstardom, was Garth Brooks “not Country”?

Because Country artists were, and are still, expected to adhere to a sort of unspoken morality code that involves public displays of Christianity, a picturesque family, staid performances, no politics or only bedrock conservatism, whiteness, heterosexuality, and a reverence for The Way Things Were. Garth Brooks though, had no gods and no masters—he created the mold in his own image and then broke it.

“That’s not Country” was never about his music, which is as Country as anything Trace Adkins or Travis Tritt ever did. It was about him. He was liberal, he was loud, he was messy, and he opened Country’s door to the outside world. He put on shows like he was auditioning for KISS, cried in public all the time, and was so aggressively ambitious and monomaniacal that he held his entire record label captive until he got the deal he wanted. He released pro-gay marriage and anti-racism songs as early as 1992, and he publicly discussed his support of the rioters in Los Angeles. Years before he sang at Joe Biden’s inauguration, he wrote his loyalties in major chords.

But the worst thing he did, the thing he’ll never be forgiven for, is make Country music accessible to everyone. Suddenly people who didn’t fit the straight, white, conserative criteria were interested in Country, and what they saw was an industry dominated by intentional iniquity.

Country music wasn’t always as close-minded as it came to be. It wriggled away from its history of pro labor/anti cop sentiment, Latinx and Black music and musicians, women with opinions, and early Rock and Roll, and turned instead towards good ol’ boys fetish and untrammeled self-mythology. By the time Garth Brooks came along, the Country music industry already had its entrance closed to anyone that resembled the genre’s roots.

In the years since the Garth Brooks explosion, things have actually gotten worse. Women make up only 10% of Country airplay, and less than 3% of those women are women of color. Even more damning is that men like Morgan Wallen, who was caught on camera saying the N-word in February and had his album sky rocket to the top of the charts within a few days of the video going viral, staying in the number one spot for eleven weeks as a direct result, can continue to thrive in the industry. The implicit “you don’t belong here” aimed at Black artists and other artists of color is now an explicit “you don’t belong here”. The genre’s viler fans regularly harass and attempt to intimidate the few artists of color that do manage to have some success. LGBTQ artists don’t fare much better; it was recently breathless front page news for several days that Trisha Yearwood stood on the stage at the Grand Ole Opry and changed the pronouns in her biggest hit to be about two women, saying “love is love”.

Throughout all of this, “that’s not Country” has been used as a way to silence those who don’t fit the criteria, be that politically, racially, or otherwise. It’s often a racist dog whistle meant to say “I know you’re singing a Country song, but you’re Black so that doesn’t belong to you”, or a sexist refrain of “this would be a Country song, but I don’t like this woman’s opinions, so no it isn't”. “Country” has come to mean a very specific way of life represented in music that prioritizes the false authenticity of white men over all else. So the music itself belongs, in their own minds, to people who don’t see different perspectives as a good thing, only an attack on something that they truly feel has only ever been theirs. But what exactly does the music of Hank Williams have in common with the music of George Strait that it doesn’t have in common with the music of Mickey Guyton? Hank Jr. famously said “I’m proud of my daddy’s name but his music and mine ain’t exactly the same '' so why is he real country but Orville Peck isn’t? Why is Brantley Gilbert’s latest synth heavy ode to Nickelback Country but Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” not? These questions aren’t rhetorical so much as they are already answered: the conservatism in the Country music industry is intentional. There are three Black members of the Country Music Hall of Fame, out of 159—none of them women. There are currently four Black executives in Country music.

32 years after his debut, Garth Brooks is still a man with an astronomically successful career. He’s still the biggest selling Country artist in history, and he’s still taunted with “that’s not Country” by purists and executives alike. That label never did hurt him though, it couldn’t. He was too big, too immediately successful, and he checked enough of the boxes to get through the door in the first place. But once it became clear that “that’s not Country” was aimed at him because of his politics rather than his music, the floodgates were opened and a once toothless gatekeeping phrase was weaponized to curtail the careers of artists of color, artists with left leaning politics, LGBTQ artists, and most women.

Garth Brooks seems like a nice guy; he cries a lot, but he loves his wife and he’s good to his fans. And there is no way to know what the industry would look like if he hadn’t come along and blown the doors wide open, but he did and he did it as a liberal, so “that’s not Country” became a weapon.