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Kacey Musgraves and Other ‘Tomatoes’ Give Country Its Bite

Kacey Musgraves, whose songs’ subject matter has sometimes skewed liberal.Credit...Christopher Polk/Getty Images for Stagecoach

When Kacey Musgraves had her Nashville breakthrough two years ago, she was, depending on the angle you viewed her from, an outsider hero or a savvy infiltrator. Her musical tastes skewed toward the 1950s and the ’70s, and her subject matter skewed liberal — even when she was singing about marijuana or same-sex love, she did it under a traditionalist cloak.

She sold about half a million albums, was played perhaps not as frequently as she should have been by country radio, and became a token country favorite for non-aficionados. And she won two Grammys and, less expectedly, awards from the Country Music Association and the Academy of Country Music, organizations that typically push the sort of mainstream country music Ms. Musgraves in theory served as a rejoinder to.

On Tuesday Ms. Musgraves will release her second major label album, “Pageant Material” (Mercury Nashville), and again she’ll be pegged as an agent of change, a palliative for this genre’s many ills.

But that will have less to do with the merits of her album than with the climate into which it arrives. Country’s long-familiar war on women has reached fever pitch in recent weeks, following some shortsighted comments by Keith Hill, a country radio consultant, in the trade publication Country Aircheck. “If you want to make ratings in country radio, take females out,” he said, citing data that suggested that female listeners — country radio’s bread-and-butter demographic — preferred to hear male artists.

“Trust me, I play great female records and we’ve got some right now; they’re just not the lettuce in our salad,” he added, concluding with metaphorical flourish, “The tomatoes of our salad are the females.”

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Taylor Dye, left, and Madison Marlow, who perform as Maddie & Tae and have criticized the conventions of male country music.Credit...Christopher Polk/Getty Images for General Mills

Wouldn’t you know it, the tomatoes got even redder after these remarks. Within days, the tomato was a rallying cry. Martina McBride made “tomato” and “tomato lover” T-shirts and sold them for charity; on Instagram, Miranda Lambert posed in the “tomato” version with a sour expression on her face. At the CMT Music Awards this month, the tomato made its way into the show-opening banter between the two female hosts. Maggie Rose, a well-regarded singer, began promoting new songs under a #tomatotuesday umbrella. One record label sent out a news release referring to its subject as a “rising country tomato.”

Turnabout is fair play, naturally, but this righteous backlash obscures something much more potent: how strong modern female country music has been lately. Pound for pound, the quality of country music made by women is much higher than that of their male counterparts. Viewed cynically, that’s partly a function of volume — there are simply far more men in the field, with far more opportunity for dullness. But the conventions of male country have also hardened in recent years: ball caps, tailgates, flip-flops, hip-hop, women as decorative objects. They are so predictable that last year a new female duo, Maddie & Tae, had a hit with “Girl in a Country Song,” a point-by-point takedown of them: “I hate the way this bikini top chafes/Do I really have to wear it all day?”

Female artists, unburdened by these gestures — apart from being on the receiving end — have other options, and despite what Mr. Hill and his data say, are thriving creatively. Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Ms. Musgraves, Kelsea Ballerini, Ashley Monroe, Angaleena Presley, Laura Bell Bundy, Mickey Guyton, Jana Kramer, Cam, Maddie & Tae, the women of Lady Antebellum and Little Big Town: There is no shortage of promising female voices.

All of which means that Ms. Musgraves’s album doesn’t have to shoulder the burden of representation on its own, which must come as a relief. Ms. Musgraves is, at best, a reluctant agitator. “Pageant Material” is an elegant, wistful, sometimes beautiful record that’s almost completely bereft of punch. It moves at an expertly played gallop that suggests classic country without adding a wink. (Like Ms. Lambert, she was a “Nashville Star” contestant in a previous life.) Country music needs disrupters, but it will have to seek them elsewhere.

Thematically, “Pageant Material” is a direct extension of the armchair progressivism Ms. Musgraves displayed on her major-label debut, “Same Trailer Different Park.” She is an advocate of uncomplicated, untrammeled living, more libertarian than liberal. “Cup of Tea” is one of a few songs on this album that are clear inheritors of the open-mindedness mantle she claimed on her first single, “Follow Your Arrow.” To each their own, Ms. Musgraves says: “Maybe you slept with half of your hometown”; “Maybe you married the wrong person first”; “Maybe your hair’s way too long.” The deliberate tempo and cadence are familiar from children’s folk. “In a world of squares, maybe you’re just round,” the lesson concludes.

Ms. Musgraves presents slightly left-leaning values as matters of common sense. “Pouring salt in my sugar won’t make yours any sweeter,” she scolds on “Biscuits,” in language that speaks to and speaks down to small town living. Ms. Musgraves takes pains to underscore her humbleness throughout the album. “I still call my hometown home,” she sings on “Dime Store Cowgirl.”

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The country artists Cam, left, and Kelsea Ballerini, middle, have recently broken through in Nashville, as has Mickey Guyton, right.Credit...From left: Rick Diamond/Getty Images for CMHOF; Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Black River Entertainment; Terry Wyatt/Getty Images

But Ms. Musgraves has made a conscious choice to live in a universe where double entendres still seem naughty and cheeky turns of phrase lead to arched eyebrows. She is inspired by country music from a time when those approaches were the only way to sneak in a message. Many of her songs double as extended metaphors about her seemingly brittle relationship with the country music industry (and in the case of “Good Ol’ Boys Club,” she doesn’t even bother with metaphor, and takes a barely veiled shot at Big Machine, Taylor Swift’s label).

All of this doesn’t necessarily make Ms. Musgraves a false prophet, but it underscores the limits of her resistance. Being country music’s female savior is a thankless role, and it has a high rate of turnover. After Ms. Swift spent the better part of a decade upending country music’s relationship with young women, she departed for the differently hostile landscape of pure pop. Ms. Lambert, once a reliable firebrand, has eased into her role as half of country’s first couple (with Blake Shelton).

Despite the advertising, Ms. Musgraves is less transformative than either of those performers. Country music’s next great female crusader is more liable to come from the current groundswell of talents who use conventional approaches as covers for shorthand feminism: They are committedly girl-positive in a girl-hostile world.

Of those, the most promising is Ms. Ballerini, who just released her impressive debut album, “The First Time” (Black River). In part, it’s an amalgam of the world around her — “Sirens” has the brio of Ms. Lambert (“Well your reputation beat you to/This little town like breaking news/Of the devastation that you left behind”); “Square Pegs” is a dim Musgraves rip.

But Ms. Ballerini’s versatility extends beyond that. She has a writing credit on every song on this album, including “Peter Pan,” which needles feckless men; “Stilettos,” about masking vulnerability — “I talk the talk like I’m a tough girl/’Cause there ain’t room for weakness in a rough world/That keeps saying ‘You were never enough, girl’ ”; and the excellent “Secondhand Smoke,” about her parents’ rocky relationship and divorce: “Am I the product of a problem that I couldn’t change?/Got his eyes, got her hair/So do I get their mistakes?”

In many places the brightness of her music helps smooth a cutting sentiment. This is a trick perfected lately by Ms. Underwood, who, when she’s not making glass-shattering ballads, is slyly tough. Ms. Ballerini doesn’t have her vocal power, but she uses softness carefully — don’t mistake her kindness for weakness.

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The country singer Jana Kramer.Credit...Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Ms. Ballerini is one of several young female singers who have begun to break through in Nashville in the last year, and also the most pop-aware. Ms. Guyton, by contrast, has a sturdy, sinewy country voice, and she sings over arrangements that forgo the pop gestures of post-Swift country and hark back to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her new self-titled EP (on Capitol Nashville) includes the defiant “Better Than You Left Me” and the anxious “Why Baby Why.”

Even if Ms. Ballerini and Ms. Guyton have experienced some initial success, especially Ms. Ballerini, the overall state of affairs for women in country remains horrid. The climate is so toxic that Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush,” a song about envying the woman who has stolen your man’s heart, can be denied rotation on some country radio stations because it is perceived as advocating same-sex attraction.

That is, of course, absurd, but it is an unsurprising policing of the range of acceptable female expression in a genre that has little room for dissent. Or more accurately: makes little room. In Mr. Hill’s mind, his piles of data validated his statement. But in truth he made the lazy mistake of believing his data was pure rather than seeing it as a representation of how entrenched sexism is endlessly reproducible if the petri dish never changes.

Attempts to change it are continuing, including measures taken by the industry’s leading gatekeepers to promote female performers, from CMT’s Next Women of Country tour, which featured Ms. Ballerini and Ms. Kramer, to the recent #ILoveWomen in Country week orchestrated by the influential radio personality Bobby Bones.

As part of that effort, he gave a boost to the young singer Cam, whose debut single had stalled. She performed another song, “Burning House,” on his show — both are from her “Welcome to Cam Country” EP (Arista Nashville) — and suddenly her fledgling career had new spark.

But it didn’t come without a cost. “Burning House” is beautiful but conservative, echoing the 2003 Brad Paisley-Alison Krauss duet “Whiskey Lullaby.” But her previous song — the feisty, sex-positive “My Mistake,” a bold number about one-night stands — was far more intriguing.

That situation is not unlike what happened with Maddie & Tae in the wake of their genre-protest hit. Rather than stick with their guns, they instead followed up with “Fly,” a blandly inspirational number that leans on cliché. Whether that’s a byproduct of timidity or oversight, it’s a missed opportunity. It’s not enough for the genre to merely create space for female performers. It also has to accept that disruptions to the status quo are healthy and, as they work their magic over time, become the stuff of the genre’s tomorrow.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Tomatoes’ Giving Country Its Bite . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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