American country music exists as a kind of running textual commentary on our culture, whether wholesome or outlaw. As a subculture it is immensely strong and stable, able to cycle through times of adventurous genre-bending, then back toward its traditional roots in Western swing, bluegrass, and even mariachi music. It would be easy to construct a comprehensive social history of modern America through modern country music.

And I’ve been slightly haunted by this power of country music to serve as a kind of national documentary, and to speak out and prophesy about us, as I listen to the music of country’s arguably hottest act, HARDY, the all-caps stage name for Mississippi-born songwriter and performer Michael Hardy. For the past six years, he has been perhaps the most successful and influential country artist in America.

He ranges freely but purposely into nu-metal sounds but then swings back to gospel. Like a hip-hop artist, he will use entire songs to comment on the state of the genre of music to which he contributes, or try to explain his own artistic choices, usually through boasting. He’s not afraid to be silly, self-deprecating, vulgar, or pious. He’s deeply religious but not wholesome. You get the sense that a full HARDY weekend includes getting smashed in the back of a pickup on Friday and repenting over a fishing pole while seeing a vision of heaven on Saturday, all before going to church and having a backyard rifle shoot on Sunday. He has written or co-written 16 No. 1 hits in the genre, three of them his own. His collaborators include Florida Georgia Line and Morgan Wallen. He wrote Blake Shelton’s hit “God’s Country,” which went platinum in 2019 and has been quietly inserted as a country concert staple, becoming a kind of alternative national anthem for what you might now call the moral minority.

His latest album is called Country! Country! It’s a title that announces his two-fistfuls-of-Jack-and-Coke return to his home genre after exploring hard rock and metal more thoroughly on his previous album. It seems like half the songs have “country” in the title somewhere. The title song seems like a songwriting challenge: Can you make a chorus where you repeat the word “country” twice while still making sense? And he does. It takes classic resentment about urban encroachment and turns it into a fantasy:

I’d take a wreckin’ ball and knock it all down
Turn every too big city to a small town
Put all them slicks in the sticks, yeah, it might sound kinda funny
What if everybody got a dog and a truck and some farmland?
Rifle by the bed and a Bible on the nightstand?
If it was up to me, I’d make the whole damn country country.

It speaks to HARDY’s gonzo inclusive vision of country music as a genre and country life’s place in the nation. He revels in genre clichés, doubling and tripling down on boots, hard work, beer trucks, Granddad, Mawmaw, and the trophy buck, trying to prove there are smarter, funnier, more affecting ways of invoking these totems.

But the song that stands out to me is his collaboration with Stephen Wilson Jr., another born troubadour who broke onto the scene in the past few years bearing a nylon-string guitar, Our Lady of Guadalupe on his hat, and gorgeous, grunge-influenced country ballads mourning his father’s death. Together with HARDY, he penned “Bedrooms in the Sky.”

It’s the second song in HARDY’s catalogue that I would call “country apocalypse.” The singers take turns telling developers that they can continue building “bedrooms in the sky” that “swallow up my small town.” Then comes an ominous bridge:

One of these days, a bomb’s gonna drop, a rock’s gonna hit, the grid’ll go down
One of these days, we’re all gonna crawl from a hole in the ground.

And the chorus, which preaches civilizational redemption through country living:

And somebody’s gonna learn how to hunt, somebody’s gonna learn how to fish
Somebody’s gonna turn some dirt, then pray for rain to feed a couple barefoot kids.
You can build your bedrooms in the sky, you can swallow up my little town
When the sh** hits the fan and the world’s just land, country’s gonna come back around.

“Bedrooms in the Sky” is partly wistful and stoical, built on the idea that civilization moves in cycles. But it’s tinged with a sense of revenge on the clueless “slicks.” For now they are the first, but soon they shall be the last to adapt.

This isn’t the first time HARDY has veered in this direction. On a previous album, in the baldly metal song “KILL SH!T TILL I DIE,” HARDY narrates a childhood filled with warnings to stock up on ammo.

If ain’t loaded, better rack one
Get a bloodhound that’ll track one
Every buck could be your last one.
When there’s bombs up in the sky
You won’t find me strapped for backstrap
Crying at the crashing Nasdaq
You can bet your country ass that
I’ma kill sh** till I die, die.

The vulgarity is deliberate, trying to give the whole the effect of provocation. I won’t claim omniscience over the genre. But I think there is something novel at work here. Folk music, from which even modern country inherits its imaginative instincts, is fundamentally preservationist in outlook. The renewal it posits is peaceful recollection, not apocalyptic upheaval. It has a traditionalist’s faith that we’ll come to our senses soon, or finally listen to the better angels of our nature.

Not so with HARDY. In another of his new songs, he claims to reject fame for a patch of dirt. It’s as if he is aware that a self-destructive and suicidal impulse runs through his country and civilization and that it will have its say. He bids himself and his audience to stand apart and be ready for a rescue mission. Sure, party with the rhythms of life and success. But get ready.

The clichés of this genre — the big hemi engines, light beer, and drippy invocations of the divine — are supposed to comfort and console us. But in HARDY’s Country! Country!, the rural way of life is simultaneously eternal and yet under perilous threat. The effect is to unsettle. Suddenly the hemi isn’t just a lifestyle choice but a chariot of salvation, and the encroaching city isn’t an annoyance but the advance of a hostile enemy.