Can HARDY Revive “Butt Rock”?

Onstage, the musician plays the role of a small-town boy who is too rock for country, and too country for rock and roll.
A colorpencil portrait of the singer HARDY.
HARDY grew up listening to turn-of-the-century rock and nu-metal bands.Illustration by Zack Rosebrugh

It is no longer unusual to encounter a song by a mainstream country star that requires an “explicit lyrics” tag. But it is unusual to encounter one that requires a spoiler alert. The song, if you would like to encounter it unspoiled, is called “the mockingbird & THE CROW,” and it appears at the midpoint of an album with the same title, which was recently released by a singer and songwriter from Philadelphia, Mississippi, named Michael Hardy, who has dropped his first name and capitalized all the letters in his last one. The song starts, as so many country songs do, by conjuring small-town life, and it culminates, at first, in a wry chorus that’s surprisingly forthright about the nature of country stardom: “I’m a mockingbird / Singin’ songs that sound like other songs you’ve heard.”

HARDY made his mark as a high-concept craftsman, finding new ways to give country listeners what they wanted. His breakthrough single, “ONE BEER,” from 2019, began with a startling evocation of kids worrying about an unexpected pregnancy (“Seventeen in a small town, weak knees in a CVS”), but it turned out to be both a drinking song and an ode to settling down: “Ain’t it funny what one beer can turn into?” And he helped write Blake Shelton’s No. 1 country hit “God’s Country,” which converted the treacly term into a truculent declaration of regional pride. “The Devil went down to Georgia, but he didn’t stick around—this is God’s country,” Shelton snarled.

Nearly halfway through the “mockingbird” song, HARDY rebels against the demands of Nashville craftsmanship. The mood shifts, and so does the key, from friendly C-major to mistrustful C-minor:

Do this, do that: that shirt, this hat
Don’t forget to smile, kiss the ring once in a while
Don’t say those words, put down your finger
Throw in a slow love song or two—well, fuck that! And fuck you!

By the time he shouts those last words, HARDY no longer sounds recognizably “country.” Much of the rest of the album is given over to minor chords, rhythmic riffs, and occasional bouts of screaming. It turns out that “the mockingbird & THE CROW” is a concept album, built around a generic divide: the first eight songs, with lowercase titles, lean country; the latter eight, with capitalized titles, lean grunge, or hard rock; the title track, in the middle, functions as a musical ampersand. HARDY was sitting in his tour bus in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I spoke to him a few weeks ago, and he explained that the album was halfway finished before he saw that it had a split personality. “Once I realized what I was accidentally doing, then I homed in on being more conscious of writing a rock song one day, a country song the next,” he said.

There is nothing novel about country singers borrowing from rock and roll: in the nineties, Garth Brooks became one of the genre’s biggest stars by putting on concerts that resembled arena-rock spectacles, and, in the two-thousands, country airwaves were full of nods to old-fashioned rock. (Bon Jovi had a No. 1 country hit with “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” in 2006.) Nowadays, in country music, references to rock and roll are so commonplace that they no longer register as cross-genre gestures. When a singer named Jackson Dean declares, “Got a screen door for a TV / The only A.C. I got is AC/DC,” he is referencing the venerable Australian hard-rock band to evoke the pleasures of rural American life.

HARDY, who is thirty-two, acknowledges that country music is sometimes thought of as being a decade or more behind the cutting edge, which might be another way of saying that country singers tend to be influenced by the non-country music they grew up with. Some of HARDY’s first favorite CDs were by turn-of-the-century rock and nu-metal bands like Puddle of Mudd, System of a Down, and Linkin Park; as a teen-ager, he gravitated toward punk and metalcore bands like August Burns Red and A Day to Remember, whose lead singer appears on “RADIO SONG,” a good-natured country sing-along that turns out to be, as the majuscular title might suggest, roaringly unsuitable for country radio. Then again, part of the genius of country music is the unpredictable way it absorbs outside influences. Listeners long ago learned to love electric guitars and even hip-hop phrasing, so maybe HARDY’s success is proof that they are now learning to love screamed choruses and heavy mosh parts, too.

HARDY arrived in New York the other night for a sold-out show at the Hammerstein Ballroom; virtually everyone in the crowd seemed to be wearing plaid flannel, which suited both the weather and the sound. “My name is HARDY, and we’re going to rock your fuckin’ face off tonight,” he said. On the title track of the new album, HARDY seems to be contrasting the unbridled authenticity of rock and roll with the calculated clichés of country music, but he’s canny enough to realize that each tradition contains plenty of both. (What phrase, or sentiment, could be more hackneyed than “Fuck you!”?) He played “BOOTS,” an older song about waking up with your boots on, hungover and newly single, right before “TRUCK BED,” a new song about waking up in the back of a pickup, hungover and newly single.

With his dark mullet, glasses, and plain stage wardrobe (typically a black T-shirt), HARDY doesn’t look much like a rock star or a country star. But he understands how the two forms of credibility can be mutually reinforcing: all night long, he played the role of the rowdy small-town boy, too country for the rock world and too rock and roll for the country world. “I’m still the same old redneck fuck, don’t give a damn / Ain’t afraid to throw a dead buck on my Instagram,” he sang. That song, “SOLD OUT,” was the theme song for the recent W.W.E. Royal Rumble, during which he performed. Afterward, Dustin Rhodes, the son of the legendary wrestler Dusty Rhodes, tweeted a message that HARDY might not have disagreed with. “That shit ain’t country,” Rhodes wrote. “Sorry, not sorry.”

Perhaps there was a time—in the eighties, say, when Alabama was singing “Dixieland Delight,” or the early two-thousands, when Toby Keith was declaring himself an “Angry American”—when country was the most uncool music in America, at least according to listeners in big coastal cities who care a lot about being cool. Nowadays, that superlative must surely belong to the kind of music at home on radio formats known as “active rock” and “mainstream rock,” and which detractors sometimes call “butt rock,” a coinage that seems to have been inspired by radio stations that promised to play “nothing but rock.” Neither New York nor Los Angeles has a major radio station that specializes in “active rock,” but the style endures at stations like KDJE, outside Little Rock (“Arkansas’s rock station”), or KQXR, in southwest Idaho (“The X rocks”).

Compared with country radio, this is a relatively small market—Greg Thompson, the president of Big Loud Management, which guides HARDY’s career, estimates that a No. 1 song on mainstream-rock radio reaches an audience about a quarter as big as the audience for a No. 1 country song. (Polls suggest that Americans still love rock more than any other genre, but the audience has splintered; there are “alternative” stations, which might also play doleful singer-songwriters like Billie Eilish, and classic-rock stations, which are devoted to the proposition that they don’t make ’em like they used to.) Sometimes it seems as if rock-radio playlists have scarcely changed since the early two-thousands. Listeners can still hear new songs by Metallica and Foo Fighters, alongside the latest from bands like Papa Roach and Disturbed, who were MTV favorites back then, and these days make little impression on mainstream popular culture.

In this context, a performer like HARDY is not a throwback but an infusion of energy; he is one of a handful of performers who have lately enlivened rock radio. When he came to Hammerstein, he was promoting “JACK,” a single that has just reached No. 6 on the mainstream-rock airplay chart; it was his first rock-radio hit. (It’s sung from the perspective of Jack Daniel’s, with a typically playful twist: the titular word is withheld until the very end.) This past year, a tattooed former rapper named Jelly Roll managed an even more impressive feat: he sent one song, a brooding complaint called “Dead Man Walking,” to the top of the mainstream-rock chart, while sending another, a ballad called “Son of a Sinner,” to the top of the country airplay chart. And a few months ago Warner Music Nashville, home to country mainstays like Shelton, announced that it had signed one of the most entertaining bands on rock radio: Giovannie and the Hired Guns, a group of self-proclaimed “Tejano punk boyz” who revive the sound of nineties rock-radio favorites like Weezer, Sublime, and blink-182. The group’s breakthrough single is named for Ramón Ayala, the legendary Norteño singer, and one of its most recent songs, “Overrated,” uses a tuba to accentuate the bass line.

The most interesting thing about HARDY’s newfound success in the world of rock and roll is how little he seems to need it. He is still a force in the bigger and more lucrative world of country: his most recent country single, a bluesy murder ballad called “wait in the truck,” recently ascended to No. 9 on the country airplay chart. He continues to work closely with his friend Morgan Wallen, the country star who is one of the most popular singers in America, of any genre. (Wallen and HARDY share a producer, Joey Moi, who also produced many of the Nickelback songs that helped define butt rock, in the early two-thousands.) Wallen’s new double album, “One Thing at a Time,” is essentially guaranteed to be a blockbuster; it includes three songs that HARDY helped write, along with a duet, “In the Bible,” a wry but heartfelt song about the two men’s quasi-religious devotion to being “country.” This summer, HARDY is going on the road with Wallen, who plays football and baseball stadiums. In “the mockingbird & THE CROW,” HARDY imagines seeing “twenty-five thousand rednecks with my dumb face on their T-shirt,” and he’s not there yet—but he’s getting closer. ♦