Not-So-Lone Rangers: Out In The Country All Year Long
When Orville Peck's first couple of songs popped up on streaming platforms in 2017 and 2018, he was a virtual unknown, and not just because he constantly obscured his face behind a fringed, leather mask. Eventually, the seemingly contradictory elements of his image became a calling card, so that it didn't seem unfathomable that he'd be able to land Shania Twain as a singing partner for his upcoming, major label EP. Part of what put Peck on the map was last year's Pony, his debut album for renowned indie Sub Pop, on which he crooned with alluringly broody bravado about restless detachment, lust, nostalgia and arid western landscapes framed by eerie, reverb-hazed echoes of David Lynch soundtracks and New Wave and shoegaze aesthetics. But the dashing, outlandish mystique of his persona was at least an equal source of fascination. Here was a gay, costumed, Lone Ranger type, replacing cowboy machismo with fashionable western camp, melancholy eroticism and bondage imagery, while disclosing very little autobiographical information beyond his background in the Pacific Northwest punk scene. The authors of profile after profile zeroed in on the provocative symbolism Peck seemed to offer — the notion that he was a Lone Ranger, in more than appearance, as the solitary figure staking a queer claim to country territory.
In important ways, Peck wasn't alone at all. His emergence was one of many moments that spotlighted relationships between queerness and country (or country-adjacent) music over the last year or so. The pre-pandemic, parade-friendly, public bustle of 2019 Pride, in June, brought with it a handful of happenings: Taylor Swift's clip for "You Need to Calm Down," featuring more than two dozen LGBTQIA+ celebrities inhabiting a trailer park utopia brimming with prismatic, pristinely staged kitsch, as well as the mischievous king of cowboy-rapping meme pop Lil Nas X's thoroughly casual social media disclosure of his sexuality. Jake Owens, best known for country-pop hits with breezy swagger and beachfront settings, posted a cover of Cher's "Believe" — a selection he claimed to have arrived at by Googling "gayest songs of all time" — in tribute to the LGBTQIA+ people in his inner circle and Miranda Lambert, the 21st Century's most cheekily class conscious, arena-headlining, hard country heroine, tweeted a festive photo of her husband, her brother and her at New York City Pride and hashtagged it "ally."
There was more to come in the fall: a Highwomen performed by Brandi Carlile, who rubbed a would-be barroom lothario's nose in the reality that he would never have a chance with her woman, and Lil Nas X's CMA Vocal Event of the Year trophy for the "Old Town Road" remix with his co-conspirator Billy Ray Cyrus. Both the song and the win were initially held up (inaccurately) in some quarters as firsts for openly gay performers. By the end of the year, Trixie Mattel, who'd won the third season of , had a in circulation that showed her incorporating autoharp and countrified camp on tour. The in January that Swift would be receiving the Vanguard Award from GLAAD, which she'd name-checked in her lyrics, helped keep her allyship in the spotlight, just as Lil Nas X's theatrical, star-studded romp on a GRAMMY stage that slowly whirled him from strumming in the privacy of a living room to starring in a sci-fi scene underscored, once again, the massive impact of his playful pliability. A couple of months later, while much of the U.S. went into lockdown, the true crime phenomenon got millions of viewers fixated on its central figure he'd hired writer-musicians to create and the low-budget videos he filmed to go with them, depicting misty-eyed affection for his and his alike.
