Country star Zach Bryan is saying that an excerpt from a forthcoming song has been misunderstood, resulting in backlash that has been described as a “MAGA meltdown.”
The clip from Bryan’s song “Bad News” was posted on Instagram Oct. 3, just days after the NFL set off a cultural maelstrom with the announcement that the performer who goes by the name Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl halftime show.
So it should have surprised exactly no one that a social media post captioned “the fading of the red white and blue” — and a song that uses an expletive to describe police officers — was not going to land well with people who support law enforcement and believe that America is currently in a period of renaissance and revival.
Throw in the line “ICE is going to come bust down your door” and it’s pretty much guaranteed these people will talk about you being “Bud Lighted.”
But country music has been here before.
While rock music is known for its bad boys, country music is known for its rebels. Bryan, a 29-year-old Navy veteran who enlisted at age 17, stands just outside the perimeter of what would be considered mainstream country, artists like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, George Strait and Randy Travis.
His songs are about more than Dwight Yoakam’s “guitars, Cadillacs and hillbilly music.” Three years ago, for example, Bryan addressed the issue of high ticket prices with the release of an album called “All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.”
Taking on Ticketmaster and going after ICE are two different things, however, as Bryan learned this week. For one thing, ICE commentary gets the attention of the White House.
“While Zach Bryan wants to Open The Gates to criminal illegal aliens and has Condemned heroic ICE officers, Something in the Orange tells me a majority of Americans disagree with him and support President Trump’s great American Revival. Godspeed, Zach!” a White House spokesperson said in a statement, per Newsweek.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has also weighed in, saying that the song is “completely disrespectful” to law enforcement and that she is glad she hadn’t spent any money on Bryan’s music.
It’s hard to see how Bryan and his team didn’t see this reaction coming, especially after the fallout from the Bad Bunny announcement.
But in comments this week, Bryan seemed surprised and dismayed by the backlash and blamed social media. He also said that people were misinterpreting an excerpt of the song, which has yet to be released.
“This song is about how much I love this country and everyone in it more than anything. When you hear the rest of the song, you will understand the full context that hits on both sides of the aisle. Everyone using this now as a weapon is only proving how devastatingly divided we all are. We need to find our way back,” he wrote on Instagram.
He added the reaction “makes me not only embarrassed but kind of scared. Left wing or right wing we’re all one bird and American. To be clear I’m on neither of these radical sides.”
Why the Dixie Chicks dropped ‘Dixie’
It’s unclear why Bryan wouldn’t just release the song now if it would clarify matters, given that he’s suffering the same kind of backlash that the Dixie Chicks (now The Chicks) did when Natalie Maines said on a London stage in 2003, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.”
Maines later said that the remark was “made in frustration” and apologized to President George W. Bush, but the damage was done: fans were burning CDs and concert tickets and radio stations were pulling the group from their playlists. Other country artists piled on: Toby Keith paired a photo of Maines next to one of Saddam Hussein at a concert. Taylor Swift later told The Guardian, “No. 1 thing they drill into you as a country artist is …‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’”
The trio dropped the “Dixie” from their name in 2020 and performed the National Anthem at the Democratic National Convention that year and in 2024. Maines has said that she is glad that the controversy allowed them to escape the “box of country music, which we never wanted to be in and never felt like that’s who we were.”
“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, country music, please take us back.’ It was middle fingers: ‘Bye!’” she told the Los Angeles Times.
Garth Brooks and Hank Williams Jr.
Controversy has not been limited to Democrats. Country superstar Hank Williams Jr. talked politics on “Fox and Friends” and saw his song “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight” pulled from NFL broadcasts — twice.
Garth Brooks has flirted with alienating his base multiple times, including with his 1992 song “We Shall Be Free,” which was described as too “socially conscious” for many country music stations. Brooks also performed at Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, but said the appearance was “not a political statement, (but) a statement of unity.”
In fact, after the performance, people laughed as he rushed around greeting both Republican and Democrats on the stage.
For the most part, though, country artists have been able to stay on good terms with their base by leaving politics out of their songs even if they are baldly political in their private lives. Taylor Swift, who started out as a country singer, is one example; Willie Nelson, another.
As Santi Elijah Holley wrote for NPR, Nelson “represents an ideal of country music and America that is less exclusionary or obstinate and more welcoming, curious and compassionate, where sometimes the most radical act of resistance is to sing some sad love songs, to look out for each other, and to take a second to appreciate the beauty we take for granted.”
For now, fans just have to hope that Bryan’s assessment of his new song — that it’s about “how much I love this country and everyone in it” — holds true after the full song is released. Otherwise it’s “Bad News” in more ways than one.
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