John Rich Calls Country Labels “Indentured Servitude,” Blasts Executives From New York & LA For Controlling What Artists Can Say

Similar to comments another country artist made recently…

A couple weeks ago, Aaron Lewis sat down with Tucker Carlson for a wide-ranging conversation, where he discussed what he saw was the reason country music has become so pop-leaning over the past decade or so:

“It’s been infiltrated by California, just like everything else… Within my career, about halfway through it, everything changed in the industry and a lot of consolidation happened. A lot of people lost their jobs at whatever record label they were at, or they were in the top 40 side of things, and everything got condensed and… they all either went to Nashville or they went to country radio.

And I truly believe that has something to do with why country has become so popified, where it’s like the land of the misfit toys, where 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 its own thing. Like, 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. I mean, how do you even, how does that correlate? How does that fall into the same category?

Because it doesn’t in any way, to me.”

Of course there’s been a lot of talk about country music becoming more “popified” as Lewis says, even long before the current trend of actual pop artists crossing over into the genre. Starting in the early 2010s and the rise of “bro country,” influences of rap and pop became increasingly prevalent and a source of frustration for fans of traditional country music.

And John Rich recently sat down with Shawn Ryan, where he also discussed a shift in country music executives that led to a changing sound – and changing political views:

“It was in the 20-teens, probably 2010, around in that range, when Obama became president, you saw Music Row, a lot of the original guys that were running those labels from back in the day, which were actually country music fans and they were mostly all patriotic guys and really talented and they were country music to the core.

They started replacing those people with people from LA, people from New York. They would bring in a New York guy to replace the Nashville guy at, for instance, RCA Records or something. And when the new guy comes in he would start changing the culture of that label, which bled all the way down into the artist, and it bled all the way down into the publicity departments, and what kind of songs you were allowed to cut and not cut, what interviews you were allowed to do, who you were allowed to interview with.”

The Big & Rich singer says that he started to receive criticism from his label for his political views, even though

“I started getting in trouble with the label because I was doing interviews with Sean Hannity… I played a song at the first big Tea Party rally in Georgia, it was 20, 30,000 people, and my record label went absolutely insane that I did that. ‘You’re going to upset half your audience.’

And of course they’ve got their money invested in you to go sell records to everybody, and from their perspective I’m alienating people. I said, ‘Well you’ve got liberal artists that are out here saying all kinds of stuff that I don’t like, you’re not worried about them.’ They go, ‘That’s not the point.’ It WAS the point…

I guess what they mean by, ‘That’s not the point’ is, ‘We own you. We own your voice, your likeness, your music. And if we say we don’t want you to do it, that’s the point.’ It’s do as I say and not as I do…

It’s like an indentured servitude type of existence.”

Rich says artists, including himself, are forced to choose between bowing to a label’s demands to chase their dreams or being able to speak out on how they truly feel:

“I grew up my whole life wanting to be on country radio, play the Grand Ole Opry, write hit songs. Country music, man, that’s what I wanted to do. That’s my American dream. And my vehicle to do that is this big record label. So if I lose that, do I lose the American dream by losing that?

And that’s what artists are looking at. You wonder about the ones who don’t say anything, that’s literally what they’re looking at. So you really only see the bigger, established artists that are too big to cancel, they make too much money for the record label to drop them.”

He uses Jason Aldean as an example of an artist who’s able to speak out because he’s established enough of a following and attracted support due to his political views. And he also cited Carrie Underwood and the backlash she received for performing at the inauguration of President Donald Trump as an example of why artists are afraid of speaking out on politics:

“If you even dip your pinky toe into that, they’re going to come at you.”

Now, there’s a lot going on here, and he’s really speaking on a couple of different issues. There’s a big difference between getting criticism on Twitter and your record label telling you that you can’t perform for a certain group or say things because of your political views.

But his comments are eerily similar to those made by Aaron Lewis when it comes to the changing dynamic inside Nashville record labels, and the control those labels exert on their artists.

The post John Rich Calls Country Labels “Indentured Servitude,” Blasts Executives From New York & LA For Controlling What Artists Can Say first appeared on Whiskey Riff.