Should we blame whoever it was who introduced a teenage Morgan Wallen to Take Care? (I just know a young Morgan got in his feelings to “Good Ones Go Interlude” after a session at the batting cages.) Or Earl Sweatshirt for making fun of “White Iverson” so hard that he scared Post Malone into ditching FKi beats and Key! features for Nashville bars and Super Bowl ads with Shane Gillis? Or maybe it was when we lowered the bar, in 2019, by letting “Old Town Road” dominate the world. Could it be when a former Goth Money Records collaborator fused 2000s radio-rap nostalgia with honky-tonk aesthetics for one of the biggest singles of the 21st century? (There’s an alternate universe where Shaboozey is hanging out backstage at Bladee shows instead of on Beyoncé albums.) Whatever it is, the algorithmic cross-pollination happening between popular rap (mostly from the South) and pop-country has been leading to a lot of shitty music lately.
Obviously, this isn’t anything new. I was kid when Nelly and Tim McGraw’s duet was on the radio and Bubba Sparxxx’s pig wrestling music video for “Ugly” was on TV. It does feel particularly inescapable now, though, to the point that when I’m walking around Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn it’s not unusual to run into a country-themed bar with knockoff 808 Mafia hi-hats rumbling into the streets whenever the bouncer opens the door to let in a couple dressed like John Travolta and Debra Winger in Urban Cowboy. There’s also a tradition of deeply Southern rap that isn’t country music but still country as hell. For example, anything associated with Pimp C and Trill Entertainment, especially Boosie on Bad Azz talking about his preacher grandfather, mustard greens, and his $40,000 Dodge Charger in his bluesy twang. Grounded stuff out of Georgia, too, like Ghetto Mafia’s “Straight From the Dec,” T.I.’s “Still Ain’t Forgave Myself,” and Field Mob’s “Project Dreamz.” And pretty much whatever was hot in Houston and Dallas before Obama first got elected.
BigXthaPlug is a Texas boy. He grew up listening to UGK in the car with his mom. As far as a New Yorker like myself can tell, he is country, but his relationship with country music itself was fairly nonexistent until he released a track called “Texas” back in 2022. It’s a hell of a song. Over a funky Shuggie Otis sample and with his molasses voice that sounds naturally screwed, he depicts his home state as the land of gun-toting, lean-sipping money-getters, shouting out Z-Ro, Devin the Dude, Pimp C, Yung Nation, and more along the way. It’s real vibrant, groovy, and kinda sweet, so much so that country music titans like the fiery Luke Combs and ol’ Morgan started showing him love. At the time, BigX wasn’t familiar with Wallen, but his team described the singer to him as a country Drake.
In the last few years, over a few decent mixtapes, BigX built a reputation as the torchbearer of Texas storytelling rap. He’s got an interesting story, one that could be in a Larry McMurtry novel if Larry McMurtry wrote about Black dudes. He’s a big guy from Dallas who earned his way onto the football team at a small Christian college in Minnesota. He started to get into trouble, got kicked out of school and banned from his apartment complex, and ended up getting an ex pregnant while he was still staying at his granny’s house. Motivated by fatherhood, he started putting it all into his music.
While BigX was building momentum, country music firmly took over the Billboard charts. And a lot of the most successful songs threaded trap production and hip-hop-style talk-singing ways into traditional mainstream country themes. As I write this, there are eight country songs in the top 25 of the Billboard Hot 100 and only one rap song. That one rap song is Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” which has writing credits by Ink, who contributed to Cowboy Carter.
Ink is also singing forgettably on Track 9 of I Hope You’re Happy, BigXThaPlug’s new country album, which was written in the midst of a breakup. For the album, BigX embedded himself into Nashville’s country music scene, doing, I guess, what you’re supposed to do when you go there: go to bars and smoke cigarettes with Post Malone. He also had to take time to adjust from the off-the-cuff recording habits popular in rap (i.e., smoke a bunch of weed and make a dozen songs in one night) to the meticulous and structured songmaking process of Big Nashville. It was probably a good time, as the scene, which has been historically hostile to Black artists, seemed to welcome him in with open arms. It’s nice that he may have had some good times, but the music isn’t any good; it’s tidy and professional to the point that none of the emotion feels real.
Surrounded by a bunch of big, hokey hooks from veterans and newcomers of the pop-country elite—Daris Rucker, Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett—and an army of songwriters, BigX goes through the ups and downs of a broken heart. “Ayy, if it’s over, it’s over, so fuck it/Just don’t act like my love wasn’t nothin’,” he raps on the album’s hit single “All the Way,” with a chorus by the scratchy-voiced Bailey Zimmerman that sounds like some god-awful Nickelback shit. (Remember when Bailey made that dog-shit song with YoungBoy for Fast X?) BigX’s wounded lyrics don’t save the song, either, trying so hard to be relatable to everyone that it’s missing the regional specificity that made “Texas” so cool. Less insufferable but still a complete misfire is “Pray Hard,” with Luke Combs, mostly because the overly extravagant trap-country production makes me feel like I’m at the happy hour of a Western-themed restaurant with a gift shop.
In fact, there are so many contributors over the 11 songs that BigX’s perspective seems drowned out and scaled back. It doesn’t help that a bunch of the choruses are a tough hang: Jelly Roll’s melodramatics come off so whiny, and Tucker Wetmore, another former college football player, has a colorless voice born to soundtrack The Summer I Turned Pretty breakups. I get any feeling from only Ella Langley on “Hell at Night,” as she has a sentimentality that makes you not even realize she’s talking revenge. That same song has one of the only BigX verses that doesn’t sound like it was workshopped to death, as he hits his ex with a bitter tirade that’s a little funny and a little messed up: “I hope you, I hope you turn your heater on and it blow cold/I hope you leave your car runnin’ at the store and it get stolen,” something he might actually say on one of his other tapes, which doesn’t happen enough.
But, for the most part, it’s pretty hard to tell what exactly interests BigX about country music other than that the scene fucks with him (“The best hip hop sound to come out of Texas in this century,” said Charley Crockett, a Texan and country traditionalist) and that he’s about the bag. BigX doesn’t try to sing even a little, too, so he’s got nothing in common with the blues of NoCap’s “Drown in My Styrofoam” or Rod Wave’s Hank Williams Jr.–sampling “Cold December” and how the little vocal imperfections maintain the rawness of melodic Southern rap. Nor does he seem to have much of an opinion on what makes good country music, so all of the feature, production, and writing decisions feel like they were made by a spreadsheet. I Hope You’re Happy is an album without any personal taste, and that’s about the most boring thing you can do.
At least Post Malone, for all his faults, went into his country era looking to pull from outlaws Waylon Jennings and Sturgill Simpson, so that even if that has yet to turn into any music I’d ever want to listen to, I can understand what he’s going for. Without that, it’s hard not to think of the music as nothing else but a way to fill tour seats and maybe even capitalize on the general masses’ fascination with the aesthetics, politics, and culture of middle America and the rural South. That goes for the rappers collaborating with any country singer with enough Instagram followers and any country singer looking to gain some street cred by collaborating with a rapper. (C’mon, no way Lil Durk ever cared that much about the girls bar-hopping on the Nashville strip.) And, anyway, there’s still plenty of good rap out there that scratches the country itch without having to do too much cosplay. You have, the mumbled gloom of Rylo Rodriguez, MexikoDro’s bible-thumping trap, Moskino’s new-age Mystikal thing, Monaleo’s stomp-stomp Houston rap-alongs, and so on. They may not come with a cowboy hat and a Morgan Wallen co-sign, but they’re there.