The history of popular music is filled with singers who embraced their truths. Crys Matthews, who blends Americana, the blues, bluegrass, country, folk and social justice into stirring songs, is the latest example.
“There’s a whole lot in our culture I’d cancel if I could,” she sings in the opening to “Cancel Culture,” the latest single from her upcoming album, Reclamation. Instead of banning books, she’d ban jail and remand, have the rich feed the poor (as the Bible tells them to), repeal Florida’s “don’t say gay” law, do away with “racist holidays,” and drive out the darkness with the light. She presents a litany of progressive beliefs and stances, in other words, yet she does so in such a way that you’ll be dancing in your seat—or, at the least, tapping your feet.
The press release quotes Matthews as saying, “So often when I perform, I am the only person or one of a very few people in that space who looks like me. And because of the type of music that I sing, inevitably at the end of the night, someone would come up to me and say some version of ‘You’re just so brave talking about all of this stuff—I think that I would be so scared of being canceled that I would just stay quiet.’ The audacity of that, the notion of staying quiet in the face of something that you yourself know is wrong—I had too many feelings about it especially because there is so much in this American culture of ours that we could and should be canceling.”
The Old Grey Cat 