Gentleman is the New Thing in Country

For most of the 2010s, country music has been undergoing a gender crisis in plain sight: most of the prominent male singers were bros, with unimaginative perspectives on the dynamic between men and women, and female singers were shunted to the margins.

Nashville’s compromise solution? Gentler men. Make that: gentlemen. Singers like Thomas Rhett, Brett Young, Michael Ray, Brett Eldredge, Chris Lane and more have been softening and sweetening country music’s bruising masculinity into something a little more polished, in which women are placed on a pedestal, and men place their emotional needs second.

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