Country Star John Rich: ‘Threat of Cancellation,’ ‘Step Deeper Than’ Cancel Culture, Silencing Conservative Country Music Artists
Hannah Bleau and Matthew Boyle 11 Jul 2021
Country music star John Rich of Big & Rich told Breitbart News this weekend that the “very liberal” majority of those in the country music industry have become “emboldened” in recent months to push woke leftist ideology publicly in contravention of the views of the majority of the country music audience. Rich said the mere “threat of cancellation” keeps conservative-leaning artists from speaking out, arguing it is actually a “step deeper than” cancel culture — ultimately creating a divide between the country music industry and the country music audience.
“The industry of country is, I would say, I can’t give you a percentage but let’s just say the majority is very liberal,” Rich said in an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday on SiriusXM 125 the Patriot Channel. “They’ve been that way for a long time. It’s interesting that the industry that puts out country music doesn’t really align with a lot of the audience. A lot of folks that listen to country, and again I can’t give you a percentage but I can tell you a majority of the audience probably leans conservative. So you’ve got this gulf, kind of, between the two. Over the years, the industry has never really come out really strongly about their liberal edge that they’ve got until recently, maybe in the past six to 12 months. They’ve started coming out more and more and the problem you get is if you’ve got artists that are conservative but their record label, their publicist, their manager, a lot of the radio stations are being overseen by liberals. We used to be able to make music and get it played and still say what we wanted to say and still get our music played but that’s not really the case now.”
“A lot of my fans will ask ‘hey John why don’t we see other country artists who we assume are probably conservative, why don’t we see them speaking out?’ The answer is they still want to get their records played and they still want to be invited to the award show and get the big tours and those kinds of things so is it cancel culture? No, because they’re not even stepping forward to be canceled. So it’s actually a step deeper than cancel–it’s the threat of cancellation that keeps them from saying anything in the first place. So I think the country music audience now, any of them that are conservative, are starting to see things in the industry and say ‘hold on a minute, that’s not how I thought it was or what they thought about our country or our culture.’ But now they’re seeing that is how they feel about it so it’s a really interesting gap between who’s promoting the music and who’s listening to the music at this point,” he said.
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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/11/country-star-john-rich-threat-cancellation-step-deeper-cancel-culture-silencing-conservative-country-music-artists/
