The audacity of woke

In a somewhat surreal moment at the Country Music Awards last week, co-host Kelsea Ballerini joined with several drag performers to belt out a campy version of her single, “If You Go Down (I’m Goin’ Down Too),” a protest anthem taking aim at Tennessee laws crafted to prevent both child mutilation and the potential arrested development and bone loss often caused by hormone therapy for “transitioning” youth considered too young to consent to such procedures. The performance was of course steeped in Queerness, both in the pretend “oppression” of performers literally center stage at a televised awards show, and in the academic sense, where drag serves as a kind of postmodern Harlequin dance to usher pre-initiates into Queer theory more broadly. Choreographed to confront its audience, the unspoken subtext of the number was that it’s time for you to pick a side — and you had better be careful which side you pick.

The whole spectacle was, in fact, an offensive. A show of power. The precise moment when the tyranny of the Elect, the permanent victim class, flexed its collective muscles and informed viewers, with a glittery hostility camouflaged as kitsch, that any march through the institutions must and will be a march through all institutions. The country music scene is not immune. Nothing is. Because for the revolution to succeed, cultural hegemony must police its framework. And cultural hegemony brooks no dissent.