Hardy, Eric Church, Morgan Wallen & Tim McGraw – McArthur

Four generations make up a family…

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[5.83]Alfred Soto: Strange bedfellows — or, rather, strange dirt farmers. Going for a Highwayman approach, this multigenerational tale of developer perfidy benefits from the charisma of its vocalists, even Morgan Wallen, who rasps, “when you’ve passed on, whatcha gonna pass down?” like a reformed hellion realizing he’s burned through his savings. Betcha Tim McGraw’s here so that radio programmers can look at the outspoken Democrat on the credits and go, “Ain’t that a corker?!”
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Al Varela: There could have been something really interesting in having these artists play characters who influence their children and the ways they pass down the McArthur family name and land, but each one gets only a fraction of their story told before moving on to the next name. I wish there was more time to learn about what John McArthur did for his community and what this land meant to him. I wish we learned anything about Junior other than his dad was killed in Vietnam and his son went to college and was blinded by greed. (Which in itself is weird because why did Hunter going to college cause him to start seeing the land as future inheritance money instead of a monument to his family? What did he learn? What was his motivation for putting money over family?) “He came home from college seeing dollar signs”: that can mean a number of things! A lot of these questions could have been resolved if Hardy and his team simply sat down and really fleshed out this idea. Despite my nitpicks, the song is decent. The harmonies on the hook are really moving, the production is well-arranged and performed, and the idea has a lot of potential that can go beyond the “buy dirt” message. But they couldn’t bring themselves to go beyond the surface. Because that would require challenging the audience and themselves over where parenting could go wrong and how important traditions could be lost to the temptations of greed and capitalist gain. Maybe even making these ancestors more flawed to level out the impulsive greediness of Hunter. That way, when he hears that whisper in the pines, that ambiguity of the ending could be even more powerful and up to audience interpretation on what they would do for their family and the land they grew up in. But they didn’t, and so much was left on the table for an otherwise safe reassurance to their listeners that being humble and keeping to tradition is good. Maybe I shouldn’t be expecting this much from Hardy, but if he has the ambition and ideas to make a song like this, I believe he also has the capacity to dig deeper and make something genuinely subversive.
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Andrew Karpan: I am, perhaps unfamiliar, with how deep the Hardy lineage goes (I’m seeing there’s a Hixtape: Vol. 3, which says I have a lot of homework ahead of me) but I do know a fat slice of corny nothing when I see one.
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Nortey Dowuona: One of the miserable realities of leaving your 20s is realizing you are going to spend the rest of your life becoming weaker, flimsier and more easy to dismiss. A father can impart every good thing in his son, then his son can fail to pass it on to his own son, even the younger men who can look him in the eye and tell he doesn’t have what his grandfather did. We can spend so much trying to improve or simply leave anything in the future when we are gone, cast away with one weak choice or one selfish desire satisfied. Many Ga fathers have not been able to pass on land to their sons, including my own. My father, when I finally lose him for good to this rapidly overturned topsoil we stride upon, can only leave me, my two brothers and my sister money, maybe a few personal possessions that mean the world to him but make little sense to us, possibly a house somewhere. My own mother has been struggling to sell off a house where all four of us are not interested nor able to live since her own father died, maybe more once she is too gone, but what will we be able to do with it all? We as a people have rarely been able to leave anything before it is stolen or possessed by the lazy, indolent Hunter McArthurs of the world who have given up their own fathers’ land and tools to steal from many yet use it for absolutely nothing at all. The world is not infinite, nor are the soil and water and sunlight we need to survive, yet we act and live as if it is. I hope that you, reader, are gifted anything rooted in the actual world which cannot be shut off, burned or broken, take good care of it. Make sure the younger cats around you who show an interest in it you teach them how to use it. That, as you exit your 20s and enter your 80s, is your task.
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Julian Axelrod: I love the concept of a country posse cut following a family through multiple generations; it’s like “DUCKWORTH.” for dudes who religiously follow the Yellowstone extended universe. Tim McGraw is in top form, and Hardy unexpectedly emerges victorious. But if I was a ghost and found out my great-grandson was Morgan Wallen, I’d go full Final Destination and end my bloodline right then and there.
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Taylor Alatorre: On the day in 2026 when the United States and Israel launched a coordinated joint attack against Iran, the most left-wing song on the Billboard Hot 100 was the one written by the Mississippi-born Kid Rock revivalist and Morgan Wallen accomplice who has previously crooned about extrajudicial homicide, forced rural resettlement, and, with regard to all creatures great and small, “kill[ing] shit till I die.” Hardy’s lust for selling out, and then getting to righteously fire back against complaints that he has sold out, bears some resemblance to the U.S.-Israeli modus itself, but that’s beside the point here. He just wants this song to be an inter-generational country Event, and its lyrics and line-up are an immediate product of that secular ambition rather than any rigorous political program. But when telling the story of an Irish-American hillbilly dynasty that tenaciously clings to the soil in the face of market pressures and urban pull factors, what else can emerge but an anthem which fits squarely in the rural populist tradition? Eric Church wrote “Springsteen,” but there’s little in his catalog as nakedly Springsteenian as this; “Vietnam” leaves his lips here but not in the song that name-checks “Born in the U.S.A.” This is territory represented by the Trump-era GOP in the realm of signs more than reality, and this has never been more true than in his second term. The barn-burning tribune from a decade ago who famously eviscerated Jeb and Rubio and even the Adelsons on the debate stage is now dutifully carrying out the foreign policy of all three. It’s increasingly fruitful for Democratic hopefuls to point out this disconnect wherever they can, which explains why their centrist senators are now brushing up against dual loyalty tropes, and their think tank leaders are now trollishly retweeting anti-Trump white nationalists. Three years after “Rich Men North of Richmond,” it’s the liberals who are mocking the IHRA definition by liberally evoking the “Epstein class,” not conservatives. Whether this helter skelter re-re-alignment can last is anyone’s guess. But even when domestic issues return to the forefront, “McArthur” may be an indicator, more than anything on Cowboy Carter, that mainstream country’s political valence is more up for grabs than many recognize. I’m still waiting on the first hit country song to be written in protest of AI data centers rather than luxury housing developments. Seems only a matter of time.
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