What’s with all these country songs about drugs?

Kid Rock started it.

“We were trying different things. And we were smoking funny things.” You know that song, right? “All Summer Long” got so much crossover radio airplay in 2008 that it reached #4 on the country charts. Since then, country radio has awakened to the idea that listeners really like songs about pot.

One summer after “All Summer Long” came out, the Zac Brown Band put out a song called “Toes.” (Kid Rock is actually in the video.) “Toes” is another song about chillaxin’ at the beach, and has this lyric: “Gonna lay in the hot sun and roll a big fat one and grab my guitar and play.” Nobody noticed. Radio listeners were more outraged about the word “ass” than the fact that the song has a line about getting high.

Then the hits just kept coming. Randy Houser sang “I’ve been known to giggle on a joke/Mostly when I’m smokin’ on my smoke” in “They Call Me Cadillac.” Eric Church’s “Smoke A Little Smoke” has this lyric: “Dig down deep, find my stash, light it up, take me back.” The music video shows the singer puffing on a cigar, but you’d have to be high to think that song is about cigars.

Something interesting is going on. Despite Nashville’s reputation for clean-cut family music, country radio is suddenly celebrating weed. It might be a cultural reflection of the heartland declaring that, like Americans everywhere, they like to get high. Merle Haggard was wrong—they do smoke marijuana in Muskogee.

Drugs have made appearances in country music before. Traditional country sometimes mentioned hard drugs in cautionary tales about hard living, like Johnny Cash singing “Cocaine Blues” at Folson Prison. Willie Nelson released an album with a huge ganja leaf on the cover. Jimmy Buffet long ago named his band The Coral Reefers. And there would be no country music without songs about drinking. But this new breed of country is the first to have so many party songs explicitly about about illegal substances.

One recent exception is “High Cost of Living” by a singer named Jamey Johnson. Sounding a lot like the outlaw country artists from the 1970s, Johnson sings, “That Southern Baptist parking lot was where I’d go to smoke my pot and sit there in my pickup truck and pray.” The character in his song could have had a good life, “but I traded that for cocaine and a whore.” In the end, it’s a song about recovery. “In my newfound sobriety, I’ve got the time to sit and think of all the things I had and threw away.”

“High Cost of Living” is the way country songs ought to sound. The most enduring country lyrics are poems about struggle, consequence and pain. We turn to country to make sense out of the difficult stuff that happens to us and our friends and families. At the end of a difficult day, when we get in our cars and put the radio on, country songs are supposed to help us untangle our minds.

I can’t deny that Kid Rock song is catchy, but all I feel when I listen to it is a lazy cloud of mellow feelings. Country music is a reflection of American life—superficial on the surface, with complex knots of emotion below it. It is about as close as we come to acknowledging that in pop culture. Let’s not lose it in a haze of smoke.