Country music has the fastest-growing audience in America but it is still rather scandalous for an intellectual to admit to liking it. Contemporary cultural theory—which is to say cultural studies—has thus had practically nothing to say about it. At first glance, it may seem that everything has already been said. I know well enough that many people find country music to be dumb, reactionary, sentimental, maudlin, primitive, etc. Still others, perhaps influenced one way or another by the Frankfurt school, sneer at what they feel is the contrived, hokey, convention-bound nature of the music: they hear a commodification and cheapening of the same supposed folksy authenticity that so disgusts the first type of critic. But the issue is not just authenticity. Behind this issue lies the more sensitive and distinctly contemporary question of sophistication. Put bluntly, whether people question the authenticity of country music, or whether they feel the authenticity of it is too powerfully crude for them, they are often imagining some pitiful (but perhaps good-hearted) rube who happily sings along. And their bemused or puzzled reaction to intellectuals who actually like country music indicates that they want to preserve that image of the rural unsophisticate. The authenticity of the music, then, is seen as either impossibly degraded or impossibly innocent, but this double-binding condemnation never questions the authentic, uncultured "nature" of country music's benighted listeners. As such, they are either innocent pawns being debased or preserved by their music. Either way, "sophistication," an ironie and pleasurable confidence in, or allusion to, a high degree of cultural status, is the one thing that this double bind of authenticity excludes.