Zach Bryan found himself in the crosshairs of the culture wars this week. From his latest statement about the reaction to his new song “Bad News,” it sounds like he’d really like to deescalate the situation.
Unfortunately for him, that’s not likely to happen very quickly.
It all began when the country music star previewed his new song late last week, which seems to critique the recent raid activity by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Lyrics include references to ICE coming to “bust down your door, try to build a house no one builds no more.”
Amid mounting furor, Bryan wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram Stories on Tuesday that the song, written months ago, is about “how much I love this country and everyone in it more than anything” and “all of us coming out of this divided space.”
“I wasn’t speaking as a politician or some greater-than-thou a*****e, just a 29 year old man who is just as confused as everyone else,” he wrote.
He hoped that when people hear the rest of the song, “you will understand the full context that hits on both sides of the aisle.”
Regarding the reaction the song lyrics have stirred up, he said that “everyone using this now as a weapon is only proving how devastatingly divided we all are. We need to find our way back.”
“To see how much s**t it stirred up makes me not only embarrassed but kind of scared,” he wrote toward the end of his message. “Left wing or right wing we’re all one bird and American. To be clear, I’m on neither of these radical sides.”
A representative for Bryan said he was unavailable for an interview when contacted by celebrity.land.
Unfortunately for Bryan, whose flame-snuffing attempt seems both straightforward and earnest, the ire from more right-leaning sides has been swift and severe.
On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote on X, “Stick to Pink Skies, dude” – in reference to Bryan’s 2024 song. One day later, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem also sounded off.
“I hope Zach Bryan understands how completely disrespectful that song is, not just to law enforcement but to this country, to every single individual that has ever stood up and fought for our freedoms,” Noem said.
Bryan is a U.S. Navy veteran.
This isn’t the first time a country star has gotten all mashed up in the middle of a major political divide. Just ask Bryan’s country cohorts The Chicks, who previously carried “Dixie” in their name.
How well do you really remember this story?
In 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, while post-9/11 patriotism was still thick in the air, Natalie Maines, the then-named Dixie Chicks’ lead singer, said at a concert that the Texas-based group was not in support of the war, adding that they were “ashamed” that then-President George W. Bush was from Texas.
Country radio boycotted, causing their music to tank on the Billboard charts. CDs of the bands’ music were destroyed by protestors. In one case, an Entertainment Weekly cover story later revealed, some copies were crushed by a tractor. And, as Maines later sang in their hit “Not Ready to Make Nice,” they received death threats.
The message being sent to The Chicks by the overwhelmingly conservative country music fanbase was clear: You’re not allowed to ruffle feathers.
At first, the band tried to calm the furor, with Maines apologizing to Bush in a statement “because my remark was disrespectful” and “I feel that whoever holds that office should be treated with the utmost respect.” (Note: She appears to now feel quite differently.)
Two months later, if the controversy had begun to cool, the band offered up fresh fuel, appearing nude on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, where band member Martie Maguire admitted they felt “let down by our industry.” Country music, specifically. But also their peers, like the late Toby Keith, who projected a doctored image of Maines and Saddam Hussein during one of his concerts after the controversy.
“Everyone has the right to say something, and he does,” Maines told Entertainment Weekly. “I respect that more than people who say nothing.”
And The Chicks had no plans to become those people, nor have they. In the time since, they’ve aligned themselves with movements like Black Lives Matter and voiced their support for LGBTQ rights and gun control.
In 2020, they dropped “Dixie” from their name because the term holds “a lot of negative connotations and harkens back to a time in our country that brought pain to so many people,” Maines explained.
Hot-button issues have only grown exponentially hotter, more polarized and toxic in the decades since The Chicks two-stepped out of country music’s good graces and became an example for others – but perhaps not in the way their detractors were intending.
In 2018, Taylor Swift famously broke her political silence and endorsed Tennessee Democrats ahead of the midterm elections. The 2020 Netflix documentary “Miss Americana” showed a tearful Swift explaining her decision to her father, who was concerned about her safety and the potential for backlash.
Cut to 2024, when Swift, in the midst of a record-breaking tour run, endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Days later, she was the target of one of now-President Donald Trump’s Truth Social posts when he wrote simply, “I hate Taylor Swift.”
As anyone vaguely aware of music on this planet has seen, that sentiment has not adversely affected Swift’s appeal or marketability in the time since, at all.
Maren Morris is another musician who got her start firmly in the country world, but was ostracized for getting into a public argument with fellow country stars Jason Aldean over gender-affirming healthcare and with Morgan Wallen over his use of a racial slur.
In late 2023, Morris released an EP titled “The Bridge” that heralded her departure from the country genre.
“I couldn’t do this circus anymore – feeling like l have to absorb and explain people’s bad behaviors and laugh it off,” she said on the podcast “Popcast (Deluxe)” at the time.
“I just couldn’t do that after 2020 particularly,” Morris added. “I’ve changed. A lot of things changed about me that year.”
Her outspoken stance caused widespread dissent among country music listeners, and she later walked back on her complete departure from the genre.
It’s worth noting that around the time of Morris’ feud with Aldean, the country genre as a whole was facing a bit of an identity crisis, with Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” – which many took to be a bit too close to glorifying lynching or racial violence due to its lyrics and music video setting – taking center stage. Much in the same way Bryan did this week, Aldean was moved to pen a defense for his song after he faced backlash.
Since “The Bridge,” Morris has released another EP and her fourth album.
She and The Chicks performed at the Democratic National Convention last year.
Though the temperature of the discourse has heated up in the last decade, the effects of being a target of backlash have seemingly cooled. People are angry about so much these days, has selective outrage become just another drop in the bucket of simmering dissatisfaction?
Back in 2003, Chicks band member Emily Strayer predicted to Entertainment Weekly that their controversy would “go down in history as a sign of the times.”
Would they bounce back? She wasn’t sure. (They did.) “But I do think it’s a sign of everyone’s just being scared right now – scared to speak up, scared to question. But our country’s based on asking questions.”
So long as that’s still true more than 20 years later, maybe that’s one bit of good news.
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