I have some pushback on this- Adeem The Artist is in roughly the same folk/singer-songwriter subgenre as Willi Carlisle (who is also queer and sings about it) and Willi still gets all the attention/praise that he deserves. Adeem has a couple of issues that are specific to Adeem and not the queer folk space.
-they're a serious social media troll pretty often. I haven't been on Twitter in a while but they were about as bad as anyone else on Twitter at fighting with people. This does not help one's career. People are turned off by this even if they agree with you.
-Adeem's music isn't the most accessible either, which is one of the issues.
It's totally true that the general backlash against LGBT people and against pro-diversity initiatives has wiped out some of the attention that folks were getting around 2020, but Adeem isn't the best example of that. Orville Peck continues to plug along doing great, we have Chris Housman singing and making videos about being gay and I think he recently quit his day job to pursue his country career full-time, and there are dozens of other queer country and folk artists who are doing fine in their niche of country music. one of the Vandoliers came out as trans and it hasn't changed their career as far as I know. Lots of female indie country artists are singing about being queer and it's not making much of a dent in their career. Katie Pruitt's last album made huge waves (for the subgenre she's in). There have been a bunch of other folks whose music got perfectly fine reception for the scale at which they operate.
Adeem is just pretty weird as an individual and a songwriter and any lack of success is probably not about the queer part.
As far as Black artists, there was definitely a moment around 2020 when people tried to highlight contemporary Black creators and there has been a backlash against it, but again Jake isn't the best example of the backlash - he plays old time music which is just a limited genre (I play this stuff btw)- other than a tiny minority of fiddlers who somehow break through to mainstream attention (like Rhiannon Giddens for instance). There are thousands of fiddlers playing this stuff that you also have never heard of because it's just not very commercial music (mostly instrumental, no solos, other issues that affect how palatable it is to most people).
A lot of folks from the Black Opry Revue and related scenes made it into Beyonce's album a couple of years ago and got a lot of positive attention for it, although it's true that there are fewer of the kind of articles and feature pieces about Black country artists right now than there were in 2020 due to the general American backlash against talking about diversity. Shaboozey was/is massive. Kashus Culpepper's rising on the basis of his massive talent and no one seems to be gatekeeping him out of indie country music. There are lots of other examples of folks who are doing fine since 2020's moment and the backlash against diversity isnt' affecting them from what I can tell.
There was also a weird thing for about 3 years that was algorithm-driven- SO MUCH of the alternative country and folk space was dominated by white, male, straight knockoffs of Zach Bryan. It got to the point where even fans of Zach and that kind of music were commenting about how many zach-alikes were out there. IT finally broke 12-18 months ago with the coming of a huge newish neotraditional (ie 90's sounding country) trend, which is definitely dominated by white people cosplaying as 90's mainstream nashville white radio stars cosplaying as 50's honkytonk stars. The whole honkytonk retro thing tends to be super white compared to even rockabilly or other country-adjacent subgenres. I"m not really surprised given what was happening to Black people in the 50's. I do think there are a bunch of great Black country artists doing very neotraditional country whose careers never took off because they were actually EARLY to the neotraditional revival- Chapel Hart (whose career was apparently mismanaged by nashville's talent pipeline), Coffey Anderson (who had to scale back due to his wife's cancer fight), Aaron Vance, and a few other folks who popped up around 2019 with a neotraditional sound but didn't quite make it before the zach bryan sound took over everything for years in the country/indie country space.
I have some pushback on this- Adeem The Artist is in roughly the same folk/singer-songwriter subgenre as Willi Carlisle (who is also queer and sings about it) and Willi still gets all the attention/praise that he deserves. Adeem has a couple of issues that are specific to Adeem and not the queer folk space.
-they're a serious social media troll pretty often. I haven't been on Twitter in a while but they were about as bad as anyone else on Twitter at fighting with people. This does not help one's career. People are turned off by this even if they agree with you.
-Adeem's music isn't the most accessible either, which is one of the issues.
It's totally true that the general backlash against LGBT people and against pro-diversity initiatives has wiped out some of the attention that folks were getting around 2020, but Adeem isn't the best example of that. Orville Peck continues to plug along doing great, we have Chris Housman singing and making videos about being gay and I think he recently quit his day job to pursue his country career full-time, and there are dozens of other queer country and folk artists who are doing fine in their niche of country music. one of the Vandoliers came out as trans and it hasn't changed their career as far as I know. Lots of female indie country artists are singing about being queer and it's not making much of a dent in their career. Katie Pruitt's last album made huge waves (for the subgenre she's in). There have been a bunch of other folks whose music got perfectly fine reception for the scale at which they operate.
Adeem is just pretty weird as an individual and a songwriter and any lack of success is probably not about the queer part.
As far as Black artists, there was definitely a moment around 2020 when people tried to highlight contemporary Black creators and there has been a backlash against it, but again Jake isn't the best example of the backlash - he plays old time music which is just a limited genre (I play this stuff btw)- other than a tiny minority of fiddlers who somehow break through to mainstream attention (like Rhiannon Giddens for instance). There are thousands of fiddlers playing this stuff that you also have never heard of because it's just not very commercial music (mostly instrumental, no solos, other issues that affect how palatable it is to most people).
A lot of folks from the Black Opry Revue and related scenes made it into Beyonce's album a couple of years ago and got a lot of positive attention for it, although it's true that there are fewer of the kind of articles and feature pieces about Black country artists right now than there were in 2020 due to the general American backlash against talking about diversity. Shaboozey was/is massive. Kashus Culpepper's rising on the basis of his massive talent and no one seems to be gatekeeping him out of indie country music. There are lots of other examples of folks who are doing fine since 2020's moment and the backlash against diversity isnt' affecting them from what I can tell.
There was also a weird thing for about 3 years that was algorithm-driven- SO MUCH of the alternative country and folk space was dominated by white, male, straight knockoffs of Zach Bryan. It got to the point where even fans of Zach and that kind of music were commenting about how many zach-alikes were out there. IT finally broke 12-18 months ago with the coming of a huge newish neotraditional (ie 90's sounding country) trend, which is definitely dominated by white people cosplaying as 90's mainstream nashville white radio stars cosplaying as 50's honkytonk stars. The whole honkytonk retro thing tends to be super white compared to even rockabilly or other country-adjacent subgenres. I"m not really surprised given what was happening to Black people in the 50's. I do think there are a bunch of great Black country artists doing very neotraditional country whose careers never took off because they were actually EARLY to the neotraditional revival- Chapel Hart (whose career was apparently mismanaged by nashville's talent pipeline), Coffey Anderson (who had to scale back due to his wife's cancer fight), Aaron Vance, and a few other folks who popped up around 2019 with a neotraditional sound but didn't quite make it before the zach bryan sound took over everything for years in the country/indie country space.
Good read, thanks.