Originally posted by NY Times Blogs

When the magazine profiled Kacey Musgraves in March, her record label had just decided that country radio wasn’t ready for her song “Follow Your Arrow” to be released as a single. While the mainstream country music coming out of Nashville sounds more and more like what’s on pop stations, where pretty much anything goes as long as everyone’s wearing glitter, country radio’s gatekeepers still try to enforce a moralizing wholesomeness founded on church values, patriotism and a calculated intolerance that has more to do with focus groups and corporate branding than with the lived experience of regular folks.

So Mercury Nashville, nurturing the career of a talented songwriter and performer widely expected to be the next big female star out of Nashville, decided to sit on Musgraves’s gentle singalong anthem, the chorus of which goes: “So make lots of noise, kiss lots of boys, or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into / And if the straight and narrow gets a little too straight, roll up a joint, or don’t / And follow your arrow wherever it points.”
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Apparently another seven months of cultural drift toward the acceptance of same-sex desire, to the point where it’s not much more controversial than smoking pot — the objection to the song was always primarily about kissing both boys and girls, not rolling a joint — was all it took: “Follow Your Arrow” debuts as a radio single on Oct. 7. During that time, Musgraves’s star has continued to rise. Along with Taylor Swift, she leads the field for the Country Music Association awards (on Nov. 6) with six nominations, including Female Vocalist of the Year, Album of the Year (for “Same Trailer, Different Park”) and Song of the Year, a category in which she co-wrote two of the finalists.

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