What?
Darius Rucker has released seven solo albums? Really?!?
I cannot name a single tune from any of those albums.
In disbelief of my ignorance about this talented musician, I continued to read Darius Rucker and the Perplexing Whiteness of Country Music and am happy I did. The final two paragraphs are an example of writing that is riveting:
Maybe even posing that question is foolish. Rucker, for his part, seems largely disinterested in reflecting on his legacy as a black pioneer. Music is music, he repeats; he doesn’t seem to believe in (or, at least, wish to dwell on) his own striking exceptionalism. He has expressed his feelings about racism before, in song: in 1994, Hootie and the Blowfish released “Drowning,” an indictment of American bigotry that specifically references the Confederate flag hanging above the South Carolina statehouse (“Why is there a rebel flag hanging from the statehouse walls?”).
Country, as a genre, is obsessed with notions of patriotism, of purity, of some nondescript American-ness. Rucker has faced vitriol for his views, and for his work. “Hate mail has been a part of my life. That’s just the way it is,” Rucker said, in a 2014 interview with the Wall Street Journal. “People don’t want me singing country music. But I’ve never wanted to let anybody tell me what I can do.” It is in this way that Rucker is most essentially American: he has insisted on a path of his own, on breaching a frontier.
Well done.