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North Carolina band Sarah Shook and the Disarmers have set country music's bucket with a hole in it on fire and kicked it with Shook's queer backspin all the way up the charts. The newly released Years reached #1 on Amazon's Alt-Country and Americana Bestsellers List, while last year's debut Sidelong reclines at #32. Country, country rock, alt-country, Americana, insurgent country, outlaw country, honky tonk, rockabilly, roots music -- that they've been tagged so variously by Amazon, Bandcamp, Spotify, etc., may say more about online commodification than the band's intentions. Genre is telling, nonetheless, not only as a way to suggest a music's style but also as a cultural frame for it, even as a mode of cultural affiliation.
More and more people who grew up hating -- or at least feeling alienated by -- country music at large, myself included, later come to be non-mainstream country loyalists, whether we choose to call it alt-country or Americana, etc. One outdated yet abiding genre category that's haunting references to Shook's band is country-punk or "cowpunk". As if toeing a fault line, the stagger from DIY cowpunk of the early-'80s to Shook's recent success shows the vitality that may quake the ground where certain genres overlap.
Chapel Hill-based culture magazine Indy Week, back in 2015, deemed Shook "equal parts country outlaw and street punk". Her sound is "a sneering fusion of punk-rock autonomy and say-it-like-it-is country from the classic era," according to Rolling Stone in 2016. In 2018, PopMatters says she "brings a pissed-punk attitude to her honky-tonk songs" and a Country Standard Time review calls it "blend[ing] classic country with a contemporary cowpunk swagger". It gets almost embarrassing in No Depression, beloved journal of roots music, opening its gushy article on Shook: "If the essence of punk is freedom of spirit then Shook is perhaps the greatest punk of our age." Shook herself claims John Lydon of the Sex Pistols to be her "spirit animal"; other primary influences include Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Wanda Jackson.
This is hardly new, however, so declaring Shook and the Disarmers "breakout" for cross-pollinating country and punk, or more broadly for rawness, realness, and being antiestablishment, is to dismiss the authenticity-redefining cowpunk legacy. An article in Noisey...