Hick-Hop Hooray? “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” Musical Genre, and the Misrecognitions of Hybridity

Abstract

This paper takes the country music song and video “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” as a case study of the deeply ambivalent potentials of hybridity in contemporary culture. “Badonkadonk” was celebrated by some as joining hip hop and country music to create a “hybrid,” a type of cultural text valorized in various intellectual and popular discourses as both embodying and advancing progressive social values such as antiracism and antiemperialism. This essay, however, uses close reading and an account of “Badonkadonk's” context within country music's generic selfconstruction to expose the conflicted nature of the text's hybridity, which includes substantial reactionary and essentialist elements. “Badonkadonk” caters to American culture's growing embrace of hybridity while continuing twentieth century efforts to downplay country music's racially hybrid roots. This instance highlights problems in concepts such as hybridity and cosmopolitanism. This includes the crucial distinction between consciously hybrid works of art or culture, and the less consciously hybrid objects that emerge “naturally” from the mixing of cultures. The rise of selfconsciously hybrid culture and the celebration of hybridity have been partially enabled by contemporary academic theories of hybridity's progressivism. The essay concludes by highlighting some of the strategic and philosophical shortcomings of such selfconscious hybridism.