The post The CMAs Picked Two Mediocre White Guys and You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next appeared first on Consequence.

In the year that pop hit the country, the 2024 CMA Awards served as arbiters of which of the country’s recent converts would be welcome and which would not. They placed Beyoncé outside the gate, her COWBOY CARTER snubbed with zero nominations, while embracing former rappers Post Malone and Jelly Roll with multiple nods each.

The Country Music Association even invited Mr. Malone and Mr. Roll to perform at its annual awards extravaganza on Wednesday night. In doing so, they accidentally told everyone the truth, the same way a toddler insisted he did not poop could prove it by pulling down his pants and smearing shit everywhere.

It’s not that Posty and Jelly were divine, but neither could be defended as great. Malone kicked off the awards ceremony with “California Sober” alongside Chris Stapleton, and while he was perfectly visible, it was harder to hear. Some online observers blamed the audio mix, and maybe there’s something to it, though I don’t think it’s entirely the sound engineers’ fault that Malone’s thin streams were out of balance with Stapleton’s fire hose. Throughout the performance, he gives up almost every long note that Stapleton plays through to the end; Stapleton literally outshines him.

Jelly Roll put himself in an even more awkward situation when he stood next to Kix Brooks’ piano and pompously recited Ronnie Dunn’s monologue from “Believe” on “Old Man Wrigley.” it suggested that while he would like to spend more time on Hollywood lots in the future, he wasn’t sure which camera to look at right now. When Dunn himself took the stage, Roll seemed to join the crowd and breathe a sigh of relief. The monologue sounded warm, wrapped in Dunn’s 71-year-old velvet voice, and the audience whose Jelly Roll failed to sing along suddenly remembered the words.

Post Malone shines in some settings – he can sing great on a grunge cover – but his solo rendition of ‘Yours’ was perhaps the low point of an uninspiring evening. Posty’s “Yours” received an avalanche of online hate, and as of this writing, neither Malone nor the CMAs have bothered to load it onto YouTube. Cell phone footage captured some pitchy runs, although this wasn’t the worst of it.

Maybe Post Malone was having a bad night, and maybe Jelly Roll has been rehearsing the “Believe” monologue since he sold Gambling on the white boy mixtapes from his car. Maybe these genre-hopping artists really believe in the power of country, instead of what they looked like as opportunists cashing in on a trend. They may not be fraudsters, but the Country Music Association certainly is.

In a more than sixty-year history of mediocrity, the CMAs have enforced a narrow definition of the country. They shielded it from Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and too many talented women to count, long before they snubbed Beyoncé. And what have they kept after all these years of gatekeeping? What have they saved for country, while Jelly Roll and Post Malone scan the horizon for the next trend from Nashville?

The answer, as loud as a Stapleton solo, is nothing. Every faux-emotional twitch in Jelly Roll’s monologue, and every note that Post Malone couldn’t quite pinpoint, can be thrown onto the piles of evidence that the gatekeepers don’t care about quality, or tradition, or even on-key singing; they never had any purpose other than to continue working on the gates.

Because of the CMAs, country music’s tent is a little smaller and the pitch is a little further away. They purposely made their awards ceremony worse and deserved exactly what they got.

The CMAs picked two mediocre white guys and you’ll never guess what happened next
Wren Graves

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