Why Gen Z Is Abandoning Hip-Hop Radio for Country Music
Thomas: There’s a massive vibe shift among kids. They’re listening less to hip-hop and more to country music.
Jonathan: According to Billboard, for the first time in the 68-year history of the Hot 100, country songs hold all five of the top spots. Ella Langley’s “Choosing Texas” is sitting at number one for a 16th week. Morgan Wallen’s “Been By Now” debuts at number two. Taylor Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” holds number three. Langley and Wallen’s duet, “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” is number four, and Stella Lefty’s “Boston” rounds out the top five.
Thomas: You know country music is hot again when Taylor Swift has rediscovered that she’s a country artist.
Younger streaming listeners, especially Gen Z and younger millennials, turned country into the dominant commercial force on the all-genre chart. The songs that reached the summit feature clear narrative, specific place, acoustic textures, and direct emotional language. Listeners are rewarding music that feels rooted and story-driven, and the same young audience is showing appetite for sounds and stories that are coded as more traditional.
What is “Black fatigue”?
Jonathan: There’s a term that’s been circulating a lot on social media, and it’s now bleeding into music and what kind of things are being consumed. It’s called “Black fatigue.”
Coverage in Rolling Stone and Know Your Meme documents the phrase appearing frequently on X, TikTok, and Reddit as an expression of exhaustion with certain Black cultural products or media focus.
Thomas: We’re not advocating for anything, we’re describing what’s happening. We’re covering this in music right now because music often hits these trends earlier than other media, and you can see it quickly because Billboard now tracks streaming, which means a song that didn’t exist two weeks ago can start trending fast. Charlie Kirk died on a Tuesday, and by that Friday, Tom MacDonald had a song about him on the Billboard 100 the next week.
It’s a very fast barometer, and it picks up early signs of big cultural movements coming down the road.
Jonathan: If you’ve seen videos of fights in Waffle House or in airports, it’s normally tied to this idea of Black fatigue.
As an intel professional I know that you have to understand that many of those clips are placed. Use the X feature that lets you see a poster’s country of origin. If you see the person is posting from Malaysia or Serbia, what you’re looking at is an attempt to adjust the culture of the United States and poison it with toxicity to further divide it and reduce the strength of unity.
It’s now affecting the music charts, because R&B and hip-hop, which are primarily Black-artist-dominated, still lead absolute on-demand audio volume, accounting for roughly one in every four streams. It just so happens that listeners are shifting to more traditional forms of entertainment like country.
Thomas: This is a movement among young people. If you’re over 30, you’ve probably never heard the term Black fatigue before. In general, generations change together. I come more from the four-turnings perspective, where cultural change is like the weather, and it affects everyone the same.
But there is a generational element on some topics, and the biggest one is race. Younger people are far more likely to be racist than their parents, on both the left and the right, and who they’re racist against differs based on which side they’re on.
There’s a much stronger racially charged energy to Gen Z, partly because they were brought up in school to look at everything through a racial lens. They came up through the anti-racist movement and the DEI movement. Whereas older people were taught to be colorblind, younger people were taught that colorblindness itself is racism. So you have to always be cognizant of race.
Jonathan: When you’re taught that something is more valuable because it’s created by a person with a different skin color, students recognize that as logically incoherent. When these kids grew up, they rejected it, and now it’s swung way too extreme in the other direction. Because it all happened at the same time for a lot of people, it created a momentum that’s now self-propagating. People are seeing it and imitating it.
How does that phenomenon affect your book?
Thomas: Today, diversity for diversity’s sake can actually be negatively impactful for your book in a way that wasn’t the case ten years ago.
Jonathan: The pendulum is swinging back to the other side.
Thomas: It used to be very common for a book cover featuring five faces to make one of those faces diverse simply for the sake of diversity, because diversity was seen as a potential benefit to sales. Depending on who you’re targeting, that may still be the case.
For older people who aren’t interacting with younger people, this is going to come as a complete shock. Whey they were growing up, the younger generation was always less racist than the older one. You’re embarrassed by how racist your parents were, and they’re embarrassed by how racist their parents are. Those same people are now embarrassed by how racist their children are.
This has an impact on what characters you pick for your stories and what covers you pick. It’s hard to know exactly what that impact is, so we’re covering this as a heads-up.
There’s a racial storm brewing. It’s like looking at the forecast and seeing that a big storm is coming. It’s not here yet, this is the calm before it, but we can see the indicators.
The temperature is rising, the barometric pressure is falling, the wind has changed direction, and you’re like, “But it’s not raining yet.” There’s every indication that Gen Alpha is even more so, and it’s not something they’ll grow out of. There’s an increasing longing for tribalism, to be in a tribe, because there’s a sense that if you’re not in a tribe of some kind, you’re not safe. The tribe doesn’t have to be racial. It could be a gang, a motorcycle club, a church.
Jonathan: Race is just the easiest one, because the lowest form of visual recognition is skin color. It accounts for most of what you see.
Thomas: There’s a lot of body cam footage driving this too. It used to be there’d be a shooting, and everyone would pile on the cop, saying, “How dare you shoot this person?” Then the footage would come out, and it turns out the woman who was shot was charging at the officer with a knife. He was backing away, and she was coming at him, and then he shot her. That was a justified shooting, and the press that said “cop shoots unarmed Black woman,” but that was factually inaccurate.
As more of those stories start hitting the feed, this term picks up steam. There’s a lot of it on X, but it’s also on TikTok. I think “Black fatigue” may have started as a TikTok term.
Jonathan: It’s definitely mostly a foreign-agent term from what we can see, because it’s so trigger-happy. As soon as you hear it, you have a reaction, because there are white people out there who have trouble saying the word Black with a capital B, because of the way we’ve been programmed through decades of media treatment. Much of it came during the Obama era, given how race was treated then. We’ve been programmed to react to certain triggers.
This is something I used to track when I was tracking Muslims. The guy in that Oxford discussion about Islam in the UK triggered everyone in the room by saying he had a drawing of Muhammad, but he didn’t. He was just displaying the triggers that had already been implanted culturally.
Now foreign actors are constantly hitting this trigger on social media by using the term Black fatigue, either recycling footage that’s already been used or out of context, or generating it with AI.
Thomas: When you see a clip from body cam footage that makes you angry, realize that somebody had to watch hours of very boring footage to find that one minute. They had to be motivated or compensated enough to find it. But you can’t just say “this is foreign interference, therefore it’s not real.” It is absolutely real.
Somebody’s anti-data-center view might be influenced by the CCP, which doesn’t want us to build data centers here. They want the data centers in China. Coal-powered data centers in China are better for China than natural gas or nuclear data centers in the United States. Is that better for the air? No. Better for the environment? No. Better for America? Absolutely not. Better for China? Yes. So there’s a lot of that. But that doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t genuinely believe in their heart of hearts that a data center in their county will be a force for bad. The same is true with the racial animus being spurred.
A lot of the anti-Jewish sentiment I’m seeing online seems to be coming out of the Middle East. I saw this with the invasion into Spain by Moroccans, at Ceuta, and people were blaming Jews for it. There are no Jews in Spain. There are no Jews in Morocco. How is this Israel’s fault? It’s misdirection, it has nothing to do with them.
As an author, you’re writing for a culture that’s having foreign influence pushed on it from all these different directions. How do you navigate that?
How do writers navigate writing for readers who are being impacted by foreign influence?
Jonathan: There’s a fault line or a seam between what the truth is and how people interpret the truth.
I taught this concept in children’s church using the resurrection of Lazarus. No one in that story knew the truth, even though Jesus was flat out saying it, “I am the resurrection and the life.” They said, “Oh, you mean later on, in the future.” Then he raised Lazarus from the dead, and no one actually understood what he was doing.
There’s a gap between the truth, such as that a data center uses a thousand liters of water and not a thousand cubic meters, and the understanding and amplification of the misunderstanding, which preys on a person’s good intentions. This person’s good intention is that we should preserve our water. I live in Tucson, water is a big deal for us. So when we hear that a data center is going to use millions of gallons and pollute it beyond use, that matters to us. The confusion would never have happened if they’d used American units. There are people rightfully angry about a fact that was misrepresented to them.
That’s how you have to understand a lot of these people. Somebody may be turned into your enemy through a misunderstanding of a truth.
When I was hunting ISIS, I worked with a lot of Muslims, super religious ones, and I learned Arabic from them. I got along better with them than with the atheistic and agnostic military professionals I was with, because we shared more of a cultural background, including the same sexual ethic and the same idea of protecting people.
There are a lot of people who disagree with us here, and see that in the YouTube comments all the time. But we don’t go after you because we believe you want good things too. We disagree on how to get there and on the truth or the understanding of it.
The issue you want to deal with in your books is that you don’t want to attack someone who has a misunderstanding of the truth. You want to expose the truth, manifest it, bring it into the light, and let people have the opportunity to make the correct judgment. If you attack and come out swinging, they’re going to raise their arms and probably swing back. That’s how people with survival instincts are wired.
Thomas: It can cause people to grab onto the lie even tighter.
Jonathan: Correct, because now they’re being attacked, which means what they have is a value.
Thomas: This is very risky. Let’s say you have kids who are starting to get more racist, and you’re hearing racist things from their perspective. I think the first step is to understand why. It’s not all just CCP programming. They may have had experiences they haven’t told you about that are driving those views. But some of it may be straight-up lies they’re believing, or a distorted view of the world.
There’s a saying that goes, “The media isn’t very good at telling you what to think, but it’s really good at telling you what to think about.” People really did believe there was an epidemic of policemen killing Black people, when the reality is that eight or nine out of ten Black men who get shot are shot by other Black men. Fact-check me on the exact number, but it’s the vast majority. The actual number of police shootings is really low. It doesn’t feel low because of a cognitive heuristic called recency bias, where we judge how common something is by when we last heard a story about it.
A classic example is shark attacks. People have a much higher perception of their frequency because shark attacks make the news, and the movie Jaws made it stick. You’re far more likely to be killed by a deer while driving than by a shark. We’re now living out in the country after losing our house to a flood, and if I stay on the road and hit a deer, I live. If I swerve to avoid it and hit a tree at 40 or 50 miles an hour, I could kill myself and my kids, because the tree isn’t going to move.
That’s the recency heuristic. In 2020, five or six officer-involved shootings got replayed over and over all year, and it gave the impression these were happening constantly, like there was another one every week. Mostly it was just those. But the fear people had was genuine because corporate media and foreign actors were directing people’s attention.
If the media wants to cover a story and you can help them cover it, they’re more likely to put you on screen to talk about your book. Are you being a force for good if you’re helping a media misinformation campaign? No. Will it help you sell your book? Yes.
Jonathan: Is that good for your career?
Thomas: Maybe not. We’re trying to give you a couple of different threads here to guide you. I don’t think you should write a book to take advantage of this phenomenon, but you need to be aware of it.
If you’re writing for younger people, realize they didn’t grow up with Martin Luther King. For a lot of them, the version of Cesar Chavez and MLK they’re hearing is the “rapist” version, not the civil rights hero version. Their whole interpretation of everything that happened is completely different from the one you got. That’s going to affect how they interpret your narrative beats.
The best guidance I can give is to know your Timothy. You may be writing for an anti-racist who has a “Free Palestine” bumper sticker and views the whole world through an oppressor-oppressed lens, and they’re going to read your book through that same lens. Get to know your Timothy in real life. Don’t invent an imaginary version, and don’t write for yourself at their age, because the world you lived in isn’t the world they live in.
Jonathan: When I was watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day yesterday, there was a trailer at the beginning for an all-Black fantasy film about magic, called Children of Blood and Bone. I don’t know how well it’s going to do because of this phenomenon, even though it looked interesting.
When you put something out there, be aware of the chatter on social media, because right or wrong, it’s going to influence your real-world sales.
Viewer question: will a diverse cast sink a middle-grade book?
Thomas: Doats is asking if her book is killed because she’s got a Mexican American girl and a Jewish girl as her sidekicks.
Jonathan: Middle grade’s probably fine.
Thomas: I’d be careful, though. Your framing of the story is a very 2011-or-2016 framing, where their primary identification is their race. You didn’t tell us how tall they were, how old they were, anything about their personality or character, whether they’re virtuous or not. They are their races, and that’s their identity. We’ve reached peak of that kind of framing around 2023, 2024. We’re still close to it, so the water is still really high, this is like 20 minutes after high tide, but you’re chasing a diminishing tide where people are fatigued of that kind of racial identity driving everything.
Jonathan: This is a marketing question. If we were in a zeitgeist where race mattered more, you’d emphasize it for practical results. You don’t have to change the book, just the marketing. It’s not necessarily the book itself that’s the issue; it’s the perspective through which it’s viewed.
Thomas: Also, writing for men and women is very different. Women want to see themselves represented in your story. Men don’t care about that.
Jonathan: Men want to be Batman.
Thomas: Girls want Batman to have a tea party with them.
Find your Timothy and make sure she’s in your book as clearly as possible. What used to happen is people would write books for little white girls featuring non-white characters, to sell to those girls’ moms, who wanted to feel virtuous for buying a diverse book. That marketing strategy isn’t working as well as it used to. The tide’s going out on it. The mom isn’t feeling as virtuous anymore, and she’s getting pushback she doesn’t understand from her daughter, who’s more resistant to reading the book. The daughter has a hard time articulating why she doesn’t want it.
Jonathan: If you follow that general principle, and I know the comments are going to be filled with anecdotes, please discard anecdotes when you’re looking at data. I already saw someone in the thread say, “I live with a nice Black man.” Great, I’m glad you do, but that doesn’t inform statistics in any way. It contributes nothing to the interpretation of statistics.
Thomas: And how you feel doesn’t tell you anything about how readers feel.
This is why these cultural analyses matter. As the wind changes and the flock floats from one idea to another, you could be writing a kind of book that’s really popular, and suddenly it’s not. I’ve coached authors who had this happen, books that were popular with an excited readership, and then suddenly falling off despite the writer getting better, not worse.
This is part of what inspired this Zeitgeist segment. These authors were experiencing a culture change where the flock was flying away from what they were writing, and they had to choose: close the series and end it well, then start writing something more in keeping with where the flock has flown or take the series and move it to where the flock is going.
There’s no universal right answer. A lot depends on how established the series is and how much things have changed.
For one author I’m thinking of, the right decision was to end the series well, take the skills she’d developed over ten years of writing bestsellers, and go write in a new flavor.
Why is country music landing the way it is right now?
Jonathan: Getting back to country music: why is it landing this way? Is it the traditional messaging, the return to a community-focused format, singing about your boyfriend and your dog and how you feel about your state?
Thomas: Have you heard “Choosing Texas”?
It’s had the longest run of any female song on the Hot 100, maybe ever, or at least this century. Some songs last century did better. It sounds like something you’d have heard 30 years ago.
There’s nothing innovative about it. The music video is low-key, a woman in a modest dress at a bar table with a glass of Jack Daniels she’s not drinking, though she sings about drinking it alone. In the background, indistinct in a smoky haze, a couple two-steps. It’s a girl from Tennessee singing about the guy she likes choosing a girl from Texas.
It’s been so long since there’s been middle-of-the-road country without the four-on-the-floor beat and the pop sound and poppy lyrics, that this old-sounding song is hitting a generation that’s never heard anything like it. An old joke is a new joke to a new audience. Granddad’s cracked that joke a million times, and your kids laugh genuinely because they’ve never heard it.
Jonathan: If you pay attention to when certain characters come on screen in a movie or show, the music that plays for their introduction says something. Characters introduced with Western or country music are more likely to be hospitable and nice to the main character. There’s a perception of country music as the hospitality music of America. Everyone wants to go to Cracker Barrel, or what we remember it being fifteen years ago, and get that North Carolina or Georgia accent from someone who calls you sugar and treats you like they love you even though they’ve never met you. Europeans experience this when they visit the Deep South and ask why people like them just for existing. It’s called hospitality.
We’ve already talked about the rise of tribalism, but tribalism isn’t a negative phenomenon, even though we tend to treat it that way. It’s about belonging to a community and a family again.
Thomas: Country music is actually very similar to hip-hop in that it’s music from a tribe for a tribe. It’s not trying to be generally popular, it’s being specifically popular.
Malcolm Gladwell did a fascinating analysis on this, citing research that country and hip-hop are much more lyrically deep than pop music because of that specific focus. They have a broader emotional range and more meaningful, narrative lyrics. Pop music, trying to appeal to everyone, gives you lyrics like “Tutti frutti oh rooty” repeated three times, and that’s the whole song. It’s meaningless vapor because it’s from everyone to everyone.
You’d never see that in hip-hop, which is unbelievably lyrically dense.
That’s the takeaway for you as an author.
If you’re willing to write for a specific audience, to the exclusion of everyone else, you can write a deeper, more meaningful book, and dominate the charts, because nobody is a generic person. Even Californians, the supposed home of generic pop culture, want stuff made specifically for them. Everybody wants something specifically for them.
Write books specifically for your reader.
Jonathan: One of the great successes of the new Spider-Man movie is that they brought back New York City culture by making Spider-Man very Queens-esque. He argues with the Punisher, and they’re yelling at each other in that classic New York style. It’s great to watch. You feel like you’re part of it even if you’ve never set foot in Queens. That’s one of the best parts of New York, everyone yelling at each other while secretly liking each other.
Thomas: There’s the friendly-and-nice versus unfriendly-and-not-nice matrix. You get a flat tire, and people will pull over, make fun of you for having a flat tire, call you an idiot, while they’re getting out the jack and changing your tire.
Jonathan: Yeah, “Such a loser, how could you be so stupid as to run over a nail,” but then, “Now, get out of the way, I’m gonna do this for you.”
Thomas: Dotes points out that country music’s heritage is Irish and Anglo-Saxon poetry, particularly Celtic music. I used to go to the Celtic Music Festival here in Austin, and I’m a big fan of the genre. My grandfather used to sing old cowboy songs, we called them country and western, but they have no resemblance to what comes out of Nashville today. They were often cattle songs, meant to work by. I still sing one to call the cattle on this ranch, and it includes yodeling, so it’s Celtic but also German. A lot of old country music had yodeling in it, and it actually works, you can train cows to come when you yodel. I will not, however, yodel for you.
I remember listening to Celtic music and finding a song I was sure was a Western cowboy song, since my grandfather sang it about a cowboy, but it turned out to be a much older song about a guy in Aberdeen. About 90% of it was identical, just the locations and a few details changed. The same people moved and brought their music with them. It’s like Fiddler on the Roof, the fiddler travels with the Jews as they leave Russia.
Jonathan: Thomas has been listening to Marine Corps cadence music at the gym.
Thomas: It’s produced by the Marine Corps itself, not some guy who used to be a Marine trading on the name to sell books. When you’re working out, you’re doing something you associate with the Marines doing, and it motivates you.
Jonathan: He’s listening to music the Marines put out for doing the thing they’re known for doing best. He said he should’ve made different life choices, because it’s convincing him to join the Marine Corps.
What’s the marketing lesson in all of this?
Thomas: There’s a powerful marketing principle here. How does the Marine Corps advertise itself? We have intense physical training. We are going to make you suffer.
You take what’s distasteful to most people and make it the most tasteful thing for your specific audience. It’s the famous example of the ski resort that features its one-star reviews about how difficult the trails are, on a t-shirt.
All the AI labs are doing a version of this too. The current way to prove your AI is the best is to show how many felonies it’s committed. There’s an ongoing benchmark chart for it.
You can do this with your book. Take whatever feature is most distasteful to your non-audience and lean all the way into it for your audience. The mushy-gushiest romance. The bloodiest zombie book. Cozy horror. Jonathan really plays up how violent his books are, which is a genuinely useful marketing technique.
Jonathan: It keeps all my negative reviews away, because the people who’d leave them never read the book.
Thomas: If there’s nothing offensive about your book to anyone, you might be making generic pop music, and that can work, but the song itself has to be so good you can’t get the tune out of your head. “Tutti Frutti oh rooty” isn’t going to sell on lyrics alone.
Some of you have that tune stuck in your head right now, and that’s a 60-year-old song, because the tune is just that good. But the same musician wrote dozens of other songs where the tunes weren’t as good, and those didn’t stick. Thousands of other musicians tried and failed around him. What you see is the one survivor with the one catchy tune.
Jonathan: There are songs I know by heart that you’d never expect, because I’m a dad of silly little girls. You know the song I sing most in my house? “I’m a Goofy Goober, yeah,” From the SpongeBob movie.
That applies to the generation I’m talking to, because they’ve watched the movie with me and we’ve both enjoyed it, me out of nostalgia, them because they enjoy sharing things with me. Now we sing it to each other. Looking at what I produce, you’d never assume that about me. But if you put that same dynamic into your novel, you’re going to reach people in a way they’re not used to, having someone understand them like that.
Thomas: We have now talked about country music for an hour. I’d encourage you all to give country music a chance. Listen to the top songs on Spotify, for free, just to get a sense of it.
