Country music industry follows business, entertainment in fixation on ‘wokeness'

Big business, the media, showbiz and sport have all fallen to woke madness – and now country music stars and fans are undermined by their own woke industry, writes Tim Blair.

The gap between rich and poor was once a particular concern of progressive ­social justice types.

Our friends at the ABC were especially worried about the social divisions and class tensions that may occur due to a widening split between our wealthiest and our less ­fortunate.

The ABC doesn’t talk much these days about the wealth gap, however.

Maybe that’s because they realised the most efficient way to increase the gap between rich and poor is to take money from average wage-earners and give it to socialist millionaires.

ABC staffers were crying about the wage gap while they were ­creating it.

Picture: Saeed Khan/AFP

Anyway, there is another gap that is far more likely than any financial differences to create turmoil and conflict.

Forget the wealth gap. Consider instead the woke gap.

Governments, big business, elite media, sports stars and the entertainment industry have gone all-in on woke causes. The gulf in attitude between these groups and their various citizens, customers and audiences is already enormous and still growing.

NRL and AFL players, and Australian cricketers, follow the example of athletes in the US by taking a knee.

They’ve imported the ruinous Black Lives Matter cause to Australia – a cause that in the US is run by Marxist race hustlers who buy million-dollar properties while ignoring the destruction of black-owned businesses during BLM riots.

The NBA is finding out the hard way how audiences respond to woke messaging, including the NBA’s creepy, dollar-driven grovelling to China.

Total television viewership of the first three NBA games in 2019, the last pre-pandemic season, was 40.8 million.

Country music, the last bastion for common sense, has now followed other sectors of the entertainment industry with it's new fixation on 'wokeness'. Illustration: Terry Pontikos

This year the three NBA games played so far have attracted just 26.9 million viewers.

Even country music has become infected by liberal-leftist enforcers and their cancel-culture ways.

“You’ve got artists that are conservative but their record label, their publicist, their manager, a lot of the radio stations are being overseen by liberals,” country star John Rich said in a recent Breitbart News interview.

“We used to be able to make music and get it played and still say what we wanted to say and still get our music played but that’s not really the case now … Where the industry sits and where a lot of the artists and audience sits are in two different places.”

Right there, John Rich has defined the woke gap.

And Rich has a remedy for it: “Everybody’s got to stand up on their own two feet and not be afraid to express their opinions about what they see in the country.”

Such as, for example, purveyors of simple sugary drinks posing as social justice warriors.

Coca-Cola went woke earlier this year, running diversity training courses that urged employees to “try to be less white”, “be less oppressive,” “listen,” “believe” and “break with white solidarity”.

Following a predictable consumer backlash, Coke turned down the volume on its new-found wokeness. Other companies have done the same.

It may be too late for Hollywood, which has driven much of the woke agenda. Ratings for this year’s Oscars broadcast were down 58 per cent compared to 2020.

An Oscars statue displayed at the 92nd Annual Academy Awards Governors Ball press preview. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP

It seems viewers don’t care to be instructed on issues of gender, race, the environment and inequality by preening millionaires who travel by private jet.

A few weeks ago, women at a Los Angeles spa were apparently distressed by someone claiming to be a transgender woman walking around naked, displaying male genitalia.

A video of the alleged incident – some believe it was faked – shows a female customer complaining to unhelpful staff: “So Wi Spa is in agreement with men that just say they are a woman and they can go down there with their penis and get into the women’s section?”

Fake or not, the super-woke Los Angeles Times declared the women were wrong.

“It is clear where the rights in this matter land,” an LA Times editorial decided.

“Everyone – transgender customers, members of every faith and women who are upset by the sight of penises – has the right to use the spa and other public ­accommodations …

“No one has an absolute right to feel comfortable all the time.

“People have a right to use the spa, but that doesn’t include with it a guarantee that they all will feel at ease with everything they see.”

There’s a naked bloke in a women’s spa, and the LA Times is on the man’s side.

This is where woke madness leads.

Still, there are occasional unanticipated benefits. Back in 2018, enlightened former Liberal failure John Hewson wrote a column for the Sydney Morning Herald that bore this headline: “Adopt quotas for female MPs or face extinction.”

Three years later, someone at the SMH finally got around to reading Hewson’s piece. And agreeing with it.

So the paper fired him.

“We are committed to refreshing and diversifying our rotation of columnists,” SMH editor Lisa Davies wrote in an online message to Hewson, “especially in line with our pledge for 50/50 gender balance”.

Having called for female workplace quotas, Hewson got his wish. And now he doesn’t have a column.

Maybe he can reinvent himself as a singer-songwriter in Nashville.

In its current state, the country music scene might really go for a yodellin’ wokel’s heartfelt laments about the slow take-up of renewable energy.