“Maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets,” sang co-hosts Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood during their opening banter at the 51st annual Country Music Association awards. In terms of political provocation or controversy, the minute-long Trump-baiting parody of Underwood’s hit single, Before He Cheats, was as notable a political statement as anyone made during this year’s ceremony.
Paisley and Underwood have developed a repartee in their decade-long stint as the show’s co-hosts, yet their shtick has always been grounded in an affable, aw-shucks flavor of humor designed not to offend. As such things go, they’re consummate professionals, able to effectively deliver one-liners and to keep the performances and award presentations moving at a brisk pace. But provocateurs they are not.
Underwood referred to several mass shootings and a couple of hurricanes in her first remarks. Then she and Paisley spoke briefly about the problematic media policy regarding political topics that the CMA issued and then retracted last week, which threatened to ban journalists who mentioned last month’s mass shooting at Route 91 Harvest, the Las Vegas country festival . A few puns on notable politicians’ names and that quick song about Trump’s Twitter use later, and the show largely went on about its business.
Throughout, performers including Miranda Lambert (winner of female vocalist of the year), Little Big Town (vocal group of the year), and Garth Brooks (entertainer of the year) made passing references to “unity” and “family” and “healing” in their acceptance speeches. But the show lacked any sense of purpose – last year’s broadcast celebrated the CMA’s 50th anniversary and focused on the genre’s storied history – and failed to seize the opportunity to present a unified statement about how the country music industry has dealt with tragedies that have directly affected many within its community.
That said, the show’s most moving moment came during the in-memoriam segment, when Underwood delivered a stirring, note-perfect rendition of the hymn, Softly and Tenderly. As her voice broke with emotion in the final bars, the slideshow of country music artists and insiders who had died during the last year was replaced with photos of the victims of the Las Vegas shooting. A moment that could easily have appeared cloying or manipulative was handled with grace.
Still, that moment was relatively fleeting. After the commercial break, the lackluster performances resumed without further political comment – a tepid duet by Dan + Shay and Lauren Alaina on a cover of the Youngbloods’ Get Together was followed by a horrific pairing between Paisley and upstart Kane Brown on Paisley’s Heaven South.
Keith Urban aimed for topicality when he debuted his new single, Female, purportedly inspired by the ongoing investigation into the sexual abuse allegedly committed by Harvey Weinstein, but the song’s poor construction undercut whatever its greater message may have been. With a chorus that is simply a list of words and phrases (“mother”, “sinner”, “baby girl”, “scarlet letter”, “holy water”), Urban’s performance hardly lit up social media with discussions of country music’s entrenched misogyny.
Indeed, it’s worth noting that four of the five nominees for male vocalist of the year (Urban, Eric Church, Thomas Rhett and Chris Stapleton) were given solo slots on the show, while only two of the female vocalist of the year nominees (Lambert and Underwood) were accorded the same status. Moreover, that Urban premiered a single that was partially a reaction to Weinstein’s crimes felt questionable, given that the CMA still has not commented on the allegations of sexual abuse made against prominent Nashville publicist and CMA member Kirt Webster.
Again, the CMAs seemed to be far more concerned with not being about anything at all. It wasn’t about anointing a new star in the way that Stapleton announced himself at the 2015 show. It wasn’t about celebrating any particular artist: Stapleton, Brothers Osborne and Little Big Town were the only acts to win two awards (the latter’s Taylor Swift-penned single Better Man earned the pop star a song of the year prize). It wasn’t about honoring country music either – the opening number was an enthusiastic but stultifying all-star cover of Hootie and the Blowfish’s Hold My Hand; Rhett performed a song built around a reference to Coldplay; Pink sang her track Barbies for reasons that went entirely unexplained; and Maren Morris performed a duet with Niall Horan that consisted primarily of one of his songs rather than hers.
By focusing on what they didn’t want to talk about, the CMAs ended up with a show that lacked any discernible identity. Perhaps, in that way, it perfectly reflected the year in country music.
