For as long as music has been a mass produced medium, there has been genres to separate one style from another. Jazz, blues, country, etc. The more similar genres tend to melt together, or the key artists in each will cross their own boundaries. This is how R&B and modern day pop music came to be. More recently, in the last five years or so there has been one blend that is particularly interesting. Country music has started to take hip-hop and rap influences and merge them with the southern drawl and hard-working, redneck flair that country music has. This accompanied the rise of the most influential country duo of today, Florida Georgia Line. How did their music gain such a massive following? Why does country succeed with hip-hop influences?
This isn't a proven fact, but I contend it's one of the main reasons these two genres came together. I have learned this through experience; coming from a small town, but being exposed to a more urban culture through sports and then eventually my college life.
Growing up playing sports, we all have our pregame hype music or the music we play while training in the gym. Very little of it is country music. Most of the time is is music that does not represent us, but rather music that embodies the persona we create for ourselves on the sport level. No guy wants to be the wholesome country boy on the football field, baseball diamond, or basketball court. No matter where you live, in a town of 500 or a city of 20 million, we all crave the masculine, hard hitting beats and ruthless lyrics that many hip hop songs bring. We picture ourselves as the tough, hip-hop mogul not afraid of anything.
To give an example, Sam Hunt was a quarterback for the UAB Blazers and he has been asked where he got his hip-hop or pop traits. He maintains that it came from the locker rooms and then entire atmosphere of sports that he was in while in college.
It is a very simple chain of dispersion in my eyes. College athletics and colleges in general are dominated by urban-raised young men and women. A small share of country people attend the same school or play sports wit those who have a different upbringing and start sharing their culture with each other. This leads the new generation or country music artists to retain some of the elements of music they were taught by their peers. It reaches the masses through sports. When we see someone like Chase Rice, who played college football only to go o and make country music with hip-hop and R&B influences (the Somo cover "Ride" is a prime example) while still maintaining his roots, young guys and girls like me are going to flock to him. For us, it creates that hip-hop mogul feeling while keeping our comfort zone easily in reach.
This also extends to when after the game is over. When we all hang out, we don't want to listen to slow country songs (unless we are fishing or something). We want to listen to an upbeat party song to either bring us out of the slump we are is from losing, or to celebrate a win. This takes us back to pop or hip-hop, but thankfully we have music to satisfy this craving.
All in all, we cannot completely attribute the urbanization of country to sports alone, but its a good place to start.
