The Juno de Josh Ross nominations could be a sign that Canadian country music is preparing to dominate the awards. This year, multiple acts of the country have incurred many of the categories, highlighting the growing popularity of country music in Canada and the resurgence of gender in pop culture in general.
Ross’s five noddings put him neck with Tate McRAe, the pop singer who has often competed with The Weeknd’s tastes for most nominations in the awards. For its main competition to be a country star, it says something about the return of the genre to the most main popularity.
“You are looking back on the day in Shania Twain,” said Music and Entertainment Rudy Blair reporter, pointing out in the early 2000s as the last time a country singer led nominations in Junos. “So that tells you how [long] This has been coming, not only with what is happening with the Juno awards, but also what has been happening in all of Canada. “
Ross is far from being the only country musician among this year’s Juno nominees. In the choice of fans with a vote of the audience, it has three compatriots of country music (Jade Eagleson, Dean Brody and the fakes of Les Cowboys inspired by the country), while the nomination of Shawn Mendes there is largely based on the force of his country single, Why.
Look | CBC’s shock on the album inspired by the country of Shawn Mendes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fyd-_rhh-u
Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s Grammy winner Cowboy He catapulted three musicians to the Canadian awards this year. Both Jack Rochon and Shawn Everett are nominated for Jack Richardson’s producer for his work on the album, while Lowell de Alberta is ready for the opening composer of the year, a prize did not play for Beyoncé’s slopes Bodyguard and Texas keeps them.
Together with a litany of other musicians inspired by the country and the country, from newcomers such as Owen Rieglying to relative veterans such as Mackenzie Porter and Brett Kissel, it reflects an increase in the music industry in general.
Spotify reported a Global 20 percent increase In the monthly transmissions of Country Music in its report wrapped in 2024. Shaboozey’s A bar song (TIPSY) It was the number one song of the longest last year- tie Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’s Smash Country Hit Old city road For the longest career in history.
Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s I had some help recently became the Second consecutive country song – After 2023 Last night – To head Billboard’s “Songs of Songs”. Noah Khan’s Country-Pop’s blow Stick season It was the 2024 bigger song in the United Kingdom – Where the country has 67 percent shot. And Teddy Swim’s Country/Soul/R & B Track that fold gender Lose control became Billboard’s End of the year Hit Top When 2024 came to an end.
The moment of this success has proven to be a blessing to artists from the country north of the border.
“The artists of the Canadian country have always been this bubble that will explode, and it has been so for years,” said Blair. “Maybe some people are finally realizing.”
There is also evidence that people are taking the same type of notification on country music south of the border. Beyoncé’s Cowboy It was largely accredited with both driving and significantly a wave of renewed interest in gender.
Highlighting the historical contribution of black people, Beyoncé and artists such as Reyna Roberts, Allison Russell, Kane Brown and Rissi Palmer have participated in what some have called a rebirth for the artists of black countries.
Genres fusion, eroded stereotypes
Boardly with its merger of genres, bringing elements of hip-hop and pop to the country and vice versa, other artists such as Shaboozey, Lil Nas X and Blanco Brown have been able to produce giant successes and raise audience.
Everett says that the tendency to borrow elements of several other musical schools has contributed to the main charm of the country, eroding the stereotype of Country rock sand obsessed with traditionalism and the past.
“The best country music always managed to tell a story about how he felt live in our current days and age,” he said. “The best versions of the same 1742898135 Manage to use that story narration technique and, modernly, you can twist the words so that you feel like 2025. “
He pointed to modern country musicians like Sturgill Simpson that they have borrowed pop sensibilities in their lyrics, such as their track Turtles all the way downthat the singer has confirmed It is about psychedelic drug use.
Others do not even need confirmation to dig up their meanings: “I used to wake up and bake / get out of bed, hit the gravity bong that I did and start the day,” he sings to the artist Kacey Musgraves in her main song of 2024 Rather.
“For a while, he shake hands / everything I did seemed better when I was drugged.”
Although they are lyrics that sound directly from a pop album, Musgrave’s song is definitely country, although, she likes many names mentioned in this piece, she has had her country in good faith questioned by a pointed effort to modernize and combine her music with pop.
Together with his work in the country of Maggie Rogers Don’t forget meMusgrave’s Rather He also helped Everett win his second nomination of the year of Juno for engineering. And together with irreverent and aggressively contemporary songs like Trey Lewis’s Dicked in Dallas and the X Dixon Dallas classification Well looking Burning the lists, country musicians have intentionally breaking the stereotypes of countries to achieve viral fame.
If you grew up in Canada with friends outside the country, there is a strange experience that you have probably lived: to mention a famous song or musician, just to realize that no one knows what you are talking about.
“That is not necessarily something that happened in country music before,” Everett said. “What makes you feel like a really modern version of the genre.”
“You are listening to less and less songs about drinking in trucks,” confirmed the nominated fellow Mackenzie Porter. “That is a bit out, where I feel that stories are only real life stories or things that everyone can identify.”
Country music policy change
That does not mean that the country has left its conservative sensitivity behind. In 2023, the topper of the Jason Aldean list Try that in a small town Establish a record, with Aldean in NO. 1, was the first time the three best tracks in Billboard’s Hot 100 They were all the songs country. But the song also became what the New York Times called A “Cultural War battle” on its implicit opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
And before the second inauguration of US President Donald Trump, Country Carrie Underwood singer caused controversy to accept singing at the event, partly because Underwood and her music had Be publicly tied to LGBTQ+ Right problems. In the end, the ceremony was full of country stars, with Jason Aldean, Billy Ray Cyrus, Gavin Degraw, Kid Rock, The Rascall Flatts and others.
Many of those artists in the country expressed their support, or played in events that promote Trump’s electoral career, a clear difference between pop and hip-hop artists, Billboard noted at that timethat tended to express support for candidate Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump’s association with the genre was strong enough for writers in The rolling stone and USA today To theorize their respective returns were united.
To be fair, other stars in the country, including Garth Brooks and Tim McGraw, played at the opening of Biden. And in a 2024 article, Rolling Stone said the National Democratic Convention had included several stars in the country at its ceremony, after having such musicians zero in 2016.
The exclusion of the Democratic Party, wrote the journalist Marissa R. Moss, spoke about the assumption that the country had become a significant alienating subgenit only for a political group: a tacit and generalized belief based on decades of obsolete music and an obsolete understanding of him.
His hug in 2024, he said, seemed to be an admission that the genre had returned to the mainstream.
“It’s hard not feeling that this is a new understanding of DNC,” Moss wrote. “That the liberals not only listen to the pop transmission and that the southern people, the residents of the Apalaches and the people of the small city in general who listen to country music and roots often believe in things like basic human rights too.”
Whatever the reason for the country’s apparent popularity among all demographic data, says Everett, desire is undeniable and only grows. He says he currently has 40 country songs to mix next month and a half. Not only is an extraordinary number of country songs, but an extraordinary number of songs in total: it has never mixed so many songs at that time, total.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I barely worked in any country music in my life, but suddenly now I am flooded with country music.”
