Blonde Ambition

Underwood, the 2005 American Idol winner, has won the commercial competition hands-down. Lambert, 2003’s third-place finisher on Nashville Star, has done well on the charts, but Underwood has emerged as one of the biggest moneymakers in American entertainment. In Billboard’s recent year-end issue, the Oklahoma crooner not only was listed as the top country artist (with the No. 1 and No. 9 albums of the year) but also the fifth-place pop artist (with the No. 5 pop album). By contrast, Lambert didn’t even dent the best-selling country performers list, much less the pop list.

Lambert, however, has won the artistic competition just as convincingly. In the eighth annual Country Music Critics’ Poll, 96 journalists from all over North America handed the Texas singer one of the most dominating victories in the poll’s history. Lambert won the critics’ vote for 2007’s best album (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), best single (“Famous in a Small Town”), best female vocalist, best songwriter and artist of the year. She became the first artist ever to place three different singles in the poll’s top 15 (“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Gunpowder & Lead” joined “Famous in a Small Town”).

There were other winners: Emmylou Harris was voted best reissue, Brad Paisley best male vocalist, Keith Urban best live act, Sugarland best group and Taylor Swift best new act. Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, Lori McKenna, Patty Griffin, Porter Wagoner, Little Big Town, Steve Earle, Dierks Bentley and Sunny Sweeney all placed high in the voting as well. But the big story was the contrast between Lambert and Underwood, who could only manage the No. 21 album (Carnival Ride), the No. 13 single (“Before He Cheats”) and the No. 10 slot as artist of the year.

How can we account for this disparity? Why has Lambert done so much better with the critics than record buyers and Underwood the reverse? It’s not as if they have radically different sounds: They both employ the ’70s arena-rock template that rules Music Row these days—as if Journey could be considered a country act if they’d only put a fiddler and a steel guitarist back there by the drum riser. It’s not as if the two 25-year-olds attack different subject matter—most of their songs are about romantic relationships gone wrong.

No, the difference lies in the contrasting reasons we come to country music—or to any art form, whether it be genre fiction or museum painting. Do we want reassurance from art, a confirmation that everything they already believe is true? Or do we want to have our assumptions challenged, to hear something we don’t already know? Do we want virtuosic performances that meet a platonic ideal we can stand back and admire? Or do we want idiosyncratic delivery that marks an artist as one of a kind?

It’s no news that a majority of consumers prefer reassurance and virtuosity. That’s the way it’s always been and the way it always will. But there has also always been a sizeable minority that prefers new challenges to further confirmation. And if you’re going to listen to country music every day and write about it for a living, you’re more likely to be in the second camp than the first. Thus this poll’s critics have flocked to Lambert for the same reasons they flocked to the Dixie Chicks, Rodney Crowell, Alison Krauss, Steve Earle, Patty Loveless and the Soggy Mountain Boys in the past.

While Underwood reinforces the conventional ideal of the “sweet, little, beautiful, wonderful, perfect All-American girl,” as she sings in “All-American Girl,” Lambert counters that the girl next door might be “made of gunpowder and lead.” When Underwood describes her broken heart on “Flat on the Floor,” she channels Heart’s Ann Wilson as she wallows in self-pity: “You can’t knock me off my feet when I’m already on my knees.” Lambert refuses to give in to her broken heart on “Getting Ready.” Channeling Bonnie Raitt, she wrestles with her self-pity as if it were a worthy opponent: “I’m getting ready to let you go / My hands are shakin’ / My heart’s unsteady.”

Underwood believes she can revitalize clichés such as “Sometimes that mountain you’ve been climbing / Is just a grain of sand” through sheer lung power. By contrast, Lambert may claim that being “Famous in a Small Town” is preferable to being a Nashville star, but she then turns around and suggests—in a sly, conversational tone—that local celebrity can be as confining and corrupting as any other kind. When Lambert sings, “These pretty girls they’re all the same / But they’re damn well gonna know my name” on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” she probably doesn’t have Underwood in mind, but the couplet does sum up the voters’ sentiments.