Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite

pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon. This is your host, DJ Louis

the 14th, and this is a B-Side episode.

Before we get into that, please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to Pop Pantheon,

wherever you're listening to it right now. We're on social media at Pop Pantheon Pod, and I'm at

DJ, L-O-U-I-E-X-I-V on Twitter and Instagram.

We also have merch available at poppanpod.com and our Patreon channel, PopPantheon,

All Access, where we publish at least three bonus episodes of the show per month is available at patreon.com slash Poppantheon or by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode.

Live events coming up, we have gorgeous, gorgeous happening in New York City for Halloween

on October 27th at the Sultan Room in Bushwick.

Tickets for that will be available in the show notes of this episode.

So I hope to see you guys at Spooky Gorgeous.

And then, of course, a few days later on November 2nd in Los Angeles, we have Pop Pantheon's first live show,

Pop Pantheon Live, Britney's memoir, music, and legacy at the Crawford in Pasadena, plus a Brittany

installment of gorgeous, gorgeous afterwards. So tickets for that will also be available in the show

notes of this episode. That is November 2nd again at the Crawford in Pasadena.

All right. So for this week's B-side, we are talking about country music. Now, that might

seem slightly outside of Pop Pantheon's normal purview, but there's been a recent trend where

a series of country songs have scaled to the Billboard Hot 100 in record-breaking fashion.

And it's not just any country songs. It is country songs by cis-white men, many of whom are

using identity politics either explicitly or implicitly in their rise. So I asked the Atlantic's

Spencer Cornhaber, who's written about this numerous times,

...