After another Thanksgiving with my parents I am more and more convinced that a white dude with a southern accent could record a rap song and get it marketed as "country".
This may already have happened.
(I might assert that the present-day operative definition of "country music" is "vocals performed in a Southern accent".)
@wollman After the Old Town Road controversy of 2018 it seems the operative definition is whatever self-described country music stations decide to play.
@volkris You could fit the set of people making those decisions in a not-very-large room. Since consolidation, there are probably only a hundred with actual influence and authority, and you could get a majority of listenership with maybe a dozen. So the real question is "what do they think constitutes 'country'?" And I think the answer is "southern accents, trucks, and beer", probably in that order.
@wollman I don't disagree about the small room.
I would just say that with the controversy we have apparently left it up to those few people, who in theory are serving the market for listeners. And in practice, who knows what's really pushing their decisions.
So maybe they do focus on southern accents, trucks, and beer. Or maybe they are taking bribes to get music on the air.
But either way, I think that's the answer as far as I can see.
After the controversy we have decided that country music is whatever gets played on country music stations, for whatever reason it gets played.
@wollman Oh well the reason I keep talking about the controversy around Old Town Road is to highlight that the definition was handed over to broadcasters because other potential authorities just wanted to avoid the drama, wanted to avoid the controversy.
It doesn't have anything particularly rational beyond that. Regardless of what the listenership actually did, those authorities just ducked the question because they didn't want to face the flack again, they just found someone else--anyone else--to make the definition for them.
@volkris I suspect but lack the data to prove that broadcast radio listenership has held up better for "country" than for other musical genres, however defined, which may account for the outsized influence of broadcasters' curation. Compare "alternative" in the 1980s.