2024 was always going to be a momentous year, with two separate major wars threatening to converge into a wider one, a United States presidential election that could, in fact, be a worst-case-scenario level disaster, and various and sundry other major-league portents related to the hability of the Earth being just about at an end and people generally not being able to live under all sorts of these conditions. And, more importantly for our purposes here, we have four fucking country music awards shows.
Four of them.
Four.
Now, it really is the case that there have been three country music awards1 since 1967, with the addition of the awards-granting program that is, currently, the CMT Awards2. This is, also, too many country music awards, but given that I spent all of 1967 waiting for my parents to fully enter puberty so they could eventually meet and etc., I was not particularly aware of the conditions under which the Music City News Awards, as they were then called, entered the world.
1 I’ll get to a “major” vs. “minor” distinction in a bit, but will limit this footnote to saying that the “major” status of several of these awards changed over time as various entities were in control of various version of various programming over the course of several different (one might even say “various”) media, and that I’m not going to get into a detailed history of the whole thing in the step-by-step way it would take to keep track of how seriously to take any given awards situation at any given moment, especially in this particular field.
2 addendum to FN1: since you, the reader, are aware that there were not music videos in 1967, and that CMT is itself a late-coming nineties-borne addition to the MTV family of products, you can perhaps start to see how the field of country music awards-granting presentations gets confusing and anachronistic in a dang-ol’ hurry.
But I sure was here when the People’s Choice Country Awards arrived and muddied the waters. Or, like, cluttered the field of streaming services and, ultimately (although probably not most importantly), the table of contents of this website.
On the one hand, it seems to make sense. Everything in the record-selling world is currently bending toward the waters of mainstream country music. Even several of our nation’s largest pop stars are making inroads (or, in at least one case, splashy outroads) into the field, and clearly if television broadcasting entities are interested, then there’s got to be money there. The way the industry itself is currently arranged, at least in terms of its outward-facing reporting, it is basically impossible to know what the actual revenues are, or even where they’re actually coming from, but it’s apparent that being in the country music business is, if not outright lucrative enough to keep everyone happy, apparently tempting enough for people to keep trying.
Or really just NBC to keep trying, because that’s where we really are here. It was always the case that the CMA’s and the ACM’s3 were the sort of Coke and Pepsi of the situation, with the CMTs as a sort of lagger in the field4. And now the PCCAs are sort of positioned down with CMT awards, and now we have a fun little dichotomy where there’s two of them that matter (or that someone wants us to believe matter) and two that cannot possibly matter and, frankly, that’s where things can get interesting.
3 it is worth perusing the wikipedia page for the ACM awards to see just what a shitshow they often devolve into being, and to marvel at how, in fact, this might be the one we don’t need.
4 even though the ACM Awards started one year before the program now known as the CMT awards. My first inclination is to think this is silly, but it’s worth remembering that I also actively skipped them this year, because they are stupid.
Or they could get interesting, if something were to change. it’s hard not to notice how these things, and mainstream country music in general, feature a very, very small pool of nominees, even for their own awards. So how different can they be, really? It’s all a pretty closed-in system, where the same handful of names are shuffled around back and forth in an official-seeming arrangement of publicity-sharing5. It’s all pretty boring, and it’s hard to imagine what could make any of it work as a televisual spectacle.
5 I don’t mean to imply any more conspiracy here than necessary, I just think that when you’re only coordinating a tiny number of artists and their attendant releases, as the mainstream country industry is doing, it’s a lot easier to coordinate around what everyone else is doing. Honestly, the ability to not interrupt other people’s publicity in increasingly petty ways is a favorite tactic of Taylor Swift, who provides the current template for pop country stardom, maybe they’re just trying to head copycat pettiness off at the pass.
Luckily that hidebound narrowness, about which I have little to say except disapproval most of the time, is the thing that might make this possible. What if we level the playing field, let everyone stand on the merits of their award-granting, and decide if we do, in fact, need four of these things. They6 have several categories, and lots of history (except the one that doesn’t and the one that’s always sucked), so we can get in there and really get to the bottom of just what it is, exactly, we are doing here.
6 look, also this is true for most music awards shows, and certainly I could go through anything and look for these redundancies and point out that we have too many awards shows and, in its way, it’s kind of the whole entire thing I’m doing here, but work with me here.
Entertainer of the Year
(at the People’s Choice Country Awards this category is called The People’s Artist, because that’s how the People’s Choice folks title things. The CMT awards don’t give out awards for artists, only videos, so we’ve already broken the premise, here.7)
WHO WON LAST YEAR: Lainey Wilson (CMA), Chris Stapleton (ACM), Morgan Wallen (PCCA)
WHO DID THEY BEAT: Well, all three were up for CMAs, and at least two for each of the other two. Also, everybody except Wallen had to beat Carrie Underwood, the sort of dynastic champion here. Morgan Wallen came in ahead of Zach Bryan, but I already mentioned my feelings about that at the time.
ANYTHING TO ADD?: I actually think that the CMT awards not having artist categories bolsters my belief that the reason all of this is the way it is is because someone is intentionally trying to make sure that nobody interferes with anyone else’s publicity cycle. I developed this theory a handful of paragraphs ago, and now I’m running with it.
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: In a way, the CMT awards were right, because all of this is pretty bad. That said, Laney Wilson and Chris Stapleton are better than the usual faire, but also nobody except the PCCAs nominated Zach Bryan, and then they went the wrong way with it anyway, so we’re not coming particularly close to “right”, here.
7 It’s my premise, I’ll break it if I want. So there.
Female Artist
(“Female Vocalist of the Year” at the ACMs, and I’m including “Female Video of the Year” from the CMT awards)
WHO WON: Lainey Wilson. Four times.
WHO DID SHE BEAT: She didn’t, notably, defeat Carrie Underwood at the ACM or CMA awards in this category, despite having to do so in order to be Entertainer of the Year. I’m sure that makes sense to someone.
ANYTHING TO ADD?: Genuinely, the way these lists are shuffled among the, like, twelve people total that are allowed to be on tv in this genre is insane.
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: I think that Lainey Wilson was basically the correct choice all four times, of the options presented, but there’s no way I could all any of that “right”
Male Artist
(“Male Vocalist of the Year” at the ACMs, and I’m including “Male Video of the Year” from the CMT Awards)
WHO WON: Chris Stapleton (CMA), Morgan Wallen (ACM), Jelly Roll (CMT, PCCA)
WHO DID THEY BEAT: Morgan Wallen beat Jelly Roll for People’s Overall Blah Blah, and did not do so in the gendered categories. I’ll go ahead and blame the war on woke or whatever.
ANYTHING TO ADD?: I mean honestly, nowhere are these things more transparently about trying to get people that the home audience will recognize on tv than when granting winners that goddammit are not even internally consistent8
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: Oh, the Morgan Wallen vs. Jelly Roll decision makes this one real easy to call for the CMAs, and Chris Stapleton.
8 ALL I’M SAYING is that if you’re the best of the entirety of a set, you must also, necessarily, be the best of any given subset of that set. We aren’t going to give the NBA championship to Denver, and then also give Boston the “Championship for a city I don’t ever want to drive in again” award. It’s got to be Denver for both things.
New Artist
(“New Artist of the Year” at the CMA, “The New Artist” at the PCCA, and one each for male and female at the CMT and ACM awards)
WHO WON: Jelly Roll (CMA, PCCA & CMT), Hailey Whitters (ACM), Zach Bryan (ACM), Megan Moroney (CMT)
WHO DID THEY BEAT: I mean, everyone who isn’t Zach Bryan (or a lady) up there beat Zach Bryan except for with the CMTs (obviously)
ANYTHING TO ADD? I mean, it means the only person that actually beat Zach Bryan as such is Jelly Roll, but he seems like a nice guy and I probably don’t need to keep pointing out that I don’t like his music.
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: The ACM Awards for correctly choosing Zach Bryan when given the opportunity.
Song of the Year
(the CMA and ACM awards give one each for song and single, but for both awards it’s the same song in this case, so there’s really only four winners total. Also I’m just using the “video of the year” category for the CMTs)
WHO WON: “Fast Car” (both for Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman at the CMAs), Cole Swindell’s “She Had Me at Heads Carolina” (ACM), Jelly Roll’s “Need a Favor” (PCCA), Kane Brown and Katelyn Brown’s “Thank God”
WHO DID THEY BEAT: Most of them actively beat HARDY, and you all know how much I love it when HARDY doesn’t win things, so I’m a little more buoyant about this category than I usually am.
ANYTHING TO ADD?: The song categories are also being sort of breezed past because they’re the place where all of these things shake out the worst: a half-dozen songs you’ve already heard a squillion times, that all sound identical because they’re all produced the same way by the same set of people. Well, it’s all just the worst, I tell you.
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: The CMAs. “Fast Car” sounds good when just about anyone at all sings it. It’s a genuinely all-time great song.
Album of the Year
(Called The Album of 2023 by the PCCA)
WHO WON: Lainey Wilson, except at the PCCA where it was Morgan Wallen
WHO DID THEY BEAT: Well, Morgan Wallen beat Lainey Wilson, Lainey Wilson beat Morgan Wallen, and really this is the problem. In a sea of the same names, the same people make the same decision about the same music all the same time.
ANYTHING TO ADD?: For all that, this category seems to have the most fluidity, probably owing to publicity cycles and all that. Once again. Because it is a conspiracy.
WHO WAS RIGHTEST?: Oh, any of the Lainy Wilson ones are probably closer to being right than the PCCAs, which is just about where all of this goes.
So what did we learn here? Well, not a whole lot we didn’t already know. It’s impossible to trust any of these awards-granting bodies any further than I can throw them. Examining how they grant awards really just shows you that the PCCA are staking out the part of the culture wars that still embraces Morgan Wallen, that nobody could possibly care about the CMT awards, and that whatever the ACM and CMA awards are competing with each other for, it doesn’t matter to anyone but them.
In short: there is not enough content allowed into the mainstream country world to sustain even one non-boring telecast, let alone four, and my suggestion is in fact, to shut the whole thing down and start over from scratch.
Thank you for your time.
Ohio Needs a Train 