Wren Graves, November 21, 2024
In the year that pop went country, the 2024 CMA Awards set themselves up as arbiters of which recent country converts would be welcomed and which would not. Beyoncé they placed outside the gate, her COWBOY CARTER snubbed with zero nominations, while embracing former rappers Post Malone and Jelly Roll with multiple nods each.Across a more-than 60-year-legacy of mediocrity, the CMAs have enforced a narrow definition of country. They walled it off from Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, and too many talented women to count, long before they snubbed Beyoncé. And after all those years of gatekeeping, what have they preserved? What have they saved for country, as Jelly Roll and Post Malone scan the horizon for the next trend out of Nashville?The answer, as loud as a Stapleton solo, is nothing. Every fake emotional quiver in Jelly Roll’s monologue, and every note that Post Malone couldn’t quite locate, can be thrown onto the piles of evidence that the gatekeepers don’t care about quality, or tradition, or even singing on-key; they never had any goal except continuing to work the gates.
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