Music business in 2025: country music promoting casual sex and romantics wearily conceding culture wars for escape

[journo]

If you haven't noticed, rap is gone for the billboard top 10 to an unusual extent, and for quite a while. I for one am happy about that. However, it's been replaced by country that extends the depressive, myopic musical harmonies and rhythms of the past 4 years. Despite what I'm about to comment on, I don't think the continuation of depressive musical harmonies and rhythms are for sexual reasons, as they've been consistently depressive across a wide variety of non-sexual subject matters for quite a few years now, reflecting a broader, more systemic malaise, I mean, young music consumers can't even afford housing without going 100-300k into debt (if they are lucky).

As far as lyrics, a few commentators have been suggesting today's chart toppers are a shift to a more 'traditionally Christian moral' music, but I'm skeptical, as examining the lyrics shows the same sexual libertinism of the last two decades, or even more so. Today's chart toppers are permissive country music songs that glamorize or wearily seek out casual sex. Take for example the number 2 billboard hit for this month (a country music song):,

Morgan Wallen - What I Want.

And said, "You don't want this heart, boy, it's already broke"
Told me everything she touch just goes up in smoke
Only stay a couple nights then she gon' be gone
I said, "Baby, you should know that's what I want" (What I want)

(The lyrics are all like this)

The #3 hit for this month is also Morgan Wallen

Morgan Wallen - Just in Case

Which takes a different narrative route about what he wants, but the same conclusion of a life without romance. It's him wearily refusing to consider romance in relationships because of paranoia.

Yeah, I could have three words on my tongue
But I won't ever say 'em

'Cause I never let my heart go all the way
Every time I try, I just hit the brakes
And there's always a couple tryna take your place
But I never fall in love, baby, just in case

Not all songs are like this, the #1 hit by Alex Warren is about a man declaring an obsessive, chivalrous, grandiose, excessively smothering, long-term romantic love, almost entirely from the male perspective. Notably, the love is described in the lyrics as a private escape from a (paraphrased) "mundane society that has lost its Christan morals"

https://genius.com/Alex-warren-ordinary-lyrics
Far from championing a new societal paradigm traditional Christian romance, that attempts to reaffirm religious faith and morals at a societal level, the new chart toppers are either promoting freewheeling casual sex in a country voice or, even in the most conservative case of Alex Warren's lyrics, entirely conceding their "loss of Christian morals". The most conservative among them are just using monogamous long-term romance as a self-absorbed escape, rather than a mission or triumph. They aren't trying to promote or socially engineer a new society of re-affirmed Christian morals, they've simply given up.

Today's chart toppers reiterate what it sensible, making peace with a societal structure that irrationally disincentives not only pair bonding and family formation, but any overriding structure that permits an average young man to realize a life free from feeling everything is working against him. But regardless of sexual outcomes, not having a home or an education without absurd amounts of debt will make anyone depressive before any sexual motive. And while a return to sensibility in the cost of living would encourage more some form form of pair bonding, I really don't think it would dampen hookup culture. Everyone knows that's here to stay.