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Essays

How We Talk to Each Other: Queer Country and Social Media

Reconsidering Reddit

How We Talk to Each Other: Queer Country and Social Media

Keep scrolling for Rainbow Rodeo-related stuff, but I gotta get this off my chest

It's not exactly a secret that the shifting social media landscape is a pet obsession of mine. I wrote guides to joining Bluesky and Mastodon over on Adobe & Teardrops. (Incidentally, everything I wrote about Mastodon holds true for Pixelfed, if you want to check it out. The whole point of Mastodon and the fediverse is that all apps are interoperable.)

But I've been putting off writing this because everything is changing so quickly, all the time. TikTok might not be banned. Americans have flocked to Little Red Note, a Chinese TikTok competitor. Meta has declared itself to be in Trump's pocket. Bluesky is developing its own version of Instagram. Meanwhile, Mastodon has turned itself into a non-profit, and a bunch of other people are starting a non-profit to do...something, with Bluesky, which is really only creating a corporate-owned, proprietary version of the fediverse. (Cory Doctorow wrote a persuasive piece about it but I still don't buy why a successful social media corporation would allow outsiders to tinker with their shit.)

So with all the news swirling around, I think it's time we all reconsider what it is we want out of social media. Most of you reading this are artists, writers, or publicists, so the answer is simple: build an audience. You can do that anywhere – you can build an audience of five people, even.

Even if TikTok stays with us in the US, I don't think we can bank on going viral anymore. The algorithms that make posts go viral are just as quick to move on to something else. Case in point: Rainbow Rodeo gained thousands of followers on Threads when I posted about Chappell Roan, but I probably get fewer than 10 likes a week – and it's all people who I know through Twitter and Instagram, none of those new followers. (This is probably also because I think Threads suppresses anything posted with a social media scheduler.) I don't even bother checking it anymore.

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Time was, going viral was more organic: on Twitter and the old days of Facebook, things got shared by people who "knew" each other and retweeted items of interest. Because you trusted that individual's curation, you were more likely to take interest in the post, then share it yourself. Now, especially on TikTok, you are simply served what is the most popular, as well as items connected to other content you've interacted with. It lacks a human touch, if you will. Or, as this Bluesky user posted

bring back forums. bring back forums when the internet was a proper country, if you wanted to talk to strangers online you had to find the set of strangers that read the same stupid webcomic you do and then create an account on their forum. people do not belong all in the same pile like unsorted laundry

And so, I ask you to: reconsider Reddit. Improbably, Reddit is growing, with almost 100 million daily users. This is in large part due to the fact that Google, which is awful because of AI, is now indexing Reddit posts, which (for now) are reliably written by real live people. Why Google something or seek out product reviews that I know are going to be trash, when Reddit probably already has the answer?

The country and Americana subreddits are pretty small, and you can guess what the Beyonce discourse was like. But every day I see posts along the lines of "where can I find more music like Zach Top/Tyler Childers/Zach Bryan" and we know what the answer is: the majority of you reading this essay. So I'd say go check it out, but be normal – engage with posts about history, other people's songs and, when prompted, share your own. (You could also reply to those Zach Bryan threads with a playlist that just so happens to include your own music.)

But I also think we need to talk about the Meta in the room. Zuck has been successful at acquiring popular social media apps, making Meta as ubiquitous as Amazon: I could get rid of Facebook and Instagram, but I need WhatsApp to do my job because that's where my students are. Moreover, without Meta or TikTok (again – that's assuming Trump goes through with the ban), the only truly large-scale social media we've got are Reddit and Tumblr (which is downscaling.)

(Just going to insert my pitch, once again, that Mastodon/Friendica/Pixelfed, all on the fediverse, are not going to be taken over by an alt-right edgelord because no one person owns it.)

I've been on the Internet long enough to have moved across a lot of different platforms, and you all have, too. Forums, MySpace, Livejournal, AIM...but in those early days of social media, you didn't leave a platform because your data was being mined for something odious, or because the person who owned the platform turned themself into a celebrity and says with their full chest that you're not human...you just left because you found something better and you hoped you could reconnect in the new place. By contrast, leaving Meta feels like a change forced from above.

I've seen that Feminista Jones quote going around, that people need to stay and fight but...idk, cowpokes. For what? Social activism and the dialogues around them have existed long before the Internet, and they will long after. We can recreate the way we used to do things: meetings, newsletters, blogs, even (ahem) zines.

It's not as far-reaching, sure, but what if instead the experience is something even better: what if it's intimate?

Because you can stay and "fight" on a platform that literally permits people to say your identity is a mental illness, but how long will it be before Instagram and Threads are as useless as Twitter? Facebook has been a wasteland since 2016. I imagine Threads and Instagram will degrade a lot faster than it took Elon to run Twiter into the ground, because their algorithms are way more advanced than Twitter's and AI slop and ragebait will just spread faster. I'd rather spend that energy on building something elsewhere. (PS - if you want to kibbutz about music, I will happily send you an invite to the Rainbow Rodeo Discord server.)

For now, I'm keeping the Rainbow Rodeo Instagram and Threads – as long as you all are there, I want to support your work. But I'm deleting my personal Facebook and Instagram, and that does feel pretty bad to me. Guess I'll just have to, like, text my friends to see what's going on with them.

But, if you're willing to bequeath your data to the Chinese government, it looks like Little Red Note would love to hear from country singers.

感谢北美网友的关注 让我遇见来自中国的你 - 小红书
这两天我的小红书主页被北美网友霸屏了，同时也因此被更多国人所认识，感谢大家的喜爱和支持In the past two days, my Little Red Book homepage has been dominated by American netizens, and at the same time, it has been recognized by more Chinese people. Thank you for your love and support.#黄石 #西部牛仔 #cowboy #yellostone#tiktok#tiktok_refugee #荒野大镖客2#小红书涌入大量外国网友 #learn Chinese#双语字幕
小红书安祖白白的心灵牧场

This Week on Rainbow Rodeo

Rainbow Roundup

  • Why, that would be my feature about Fancy Hagood on the cover of this week's Nashville Scene. We talk about Hagood's search for a place where he can be fully himself in the music industry (hint: it wasn't LA), and how to stake our claim in country music as Music Row becomes even more openly aligned with the far right.
  • I also commented in the Country Music Almanac survey with a bunch of other of your favorite country journalists.
  • Congrats to Jake Blount on his research paper "Jail the Zombie: Black Banjoists, Biopolitics, and Archives." I'm not surprised he's thriving in his musicology PhD program.
  • Arend Lee Jessurun, Rainbow Rodeo contributor and queer country artist themself, wrote an open letter to the CEO of AI music generator app Suno, who said Suno is needed because making music is "too hard"
  • NPR posted this wild headline about Beyonce, country music, American symbols, and propaganda. Maybe the podcast is more measured.
  • Support Jen Woods' Kickstarter for I'll Be Right Here, Too. She's recovered from lymphoma, and we wrote about her No Spoons Sessions. Trust me, watch the Kickstarter video.
  • There's a new book about the history of gay rodeos called Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo!
  • If you do go to Little Red Note, just know that LGBTQ+ content is censored there. To be honest, if there's anything less appealing than giving all my data to an American corporation, it's giving it to a foreign government.
  • Cajun singer-songwriter Bruisey Peets was featured on World Cafe!
  • Max has a film short with a reinvisioning of Calamity Jane for all you lesbian horsegirls

Events

  • 1/21 (Nashville) – RNBW Collective is back with Adam Mac, Crysalis, Eitan Snyder, and more!
  • 1/21 (Albany, CA) – Mr Cindy & The Smokers (Cindy Emchy's new project) plays The Ivy Room
  • 2/1 (Philadelphia) – Sam Rise & Brittany Ann Tranbaugh are back with Baby's First Rodeo, featuring My Gay Banjo & Fist City, plus line dancing and chainstitch embroider at Johnny Brenda's. Get your tickets here!
  • 3/1 (Toronto, Canada) – Mariel Buckley hits the Horseshoe Tavern
  • 4/13 (Morgantown, WV) – Olivia Ellen Lloyd will be playing a set on Mountain Stage, along with Jeff Tweedy and Johnnyswim
  • 5/1 (New Orleans, LA) – Catch Loose Cattle at Jazzfest
  • 5/24 (Galax, VA) – Amythyst Kiah plays Blue Ridge Music Center

Artist Resources

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