Who to Blame for All This Bad Country-Rap Music

While BigX was building momentum, country music firmly took over the Billboard charts. And a lot of the most successful songs threaded trap production and hip-hop-style talk-singing ways into traditional mainstream country themes. As I write this, there are eight country songs in the top 25 of the Billboard Hot 100 and only one rap song. That one rap song is Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” which has writing credits by Ink, who contributed to Cowboy Carter.

Ink is also singing forgettably on Track 9 of I Hope You’re Happy, BigXThaPlug’s new country album, which was written in the midst of a breakup. For the album, BigX embedded himself into Nashville’s country music scene, doing, I guess, what you’re supposed to do when you go there: go to bars and smoke cigarettes with Post Malone. He also had to take time to adjust from the off-the-cuff recording habits popular in rap (i.e., smoke a bunch of weed and make a dozen songs in one night) to the meticulous and structured songmaking process of Big Nashville. It was probably a good time, as the scene, which has been historically hostile to Black artists, seemed to welcome him in with open arms. It’s nice that he may have had some good times, but the music isn’t any good; it’s tidy and professional to the point that none of the emotion feels real.

Surrounded by a bunch of big, hokey hooks from veterans and newcomers of the pop-country elite—Daris Rucker, Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett—and an army of songwriters, BigX goes through the ups and downs of a broken heart. “Ayy, if it’s over, it’s over, so fuck it/Just don’t act like my love wasn’t nothin’,” he raps on the album’s hit single “All the Way,” with a chorus by the scratchy-voiced Bailey Zimmerman that sounds like some god-awful Nickelback shit. (Remember when Bailey made that dog-shit song with YoungBoy for Fast X?) BigX’s wounded lyrics don’t save the song, either, trying so hard to be relatable to everyone that it’s missing the regional specificity that made “Texas” so cool. Less insufferable but still a complete misfire is “Pray Hard,” with Luke Combs, mostly because the overly extravagant trap-country production makes me feel like I’m at the happy hour of a Western-themed restaurant with a gift shop.

In fact, there are so many contributors over the 11 songs that BigX’s perspective seems drowned out and scaled back. It doesn’t help that a bunch of the choruses are a tough hang: Jelly Roll’s melodramatics come off so whiny, and Tucker Wetmore, another former college football player, has a colorless voice born to soundtrack The Summer I Turned Pretty breakups. I get any feeling from only Ella Langley on “Hell at Night,” as she has a sentimentality that makes you not even realize she’s talking revenge. That same song has one of the only BigX verses that doesn’t sound like it was workshopped to death, as he hits his ex with a bitter tirade that’s a little funny and a little messed up: “I hope you, I hope you turn your heater on and it blow cold/I hope you leave your car runnin’ at the store and it get stolen,” something he might actually say on one of his other tapes, which doesn’t happen enough.