Old-fashioned tear-jerking or emotional porn?

I can't make up my mind: Has country music finally gone too far? Has the brilliant and powerful mastery of emotional manipulation that is its signature, its relentless effort to make you weep at all costs, at last taken it into territory—the bitter end of its manipulative side—that it might be better off avoiding?

Or does the advent of a subgenre you might call "cancer country"—that is, songs that make use of cancer as their chosen means of ratcheting up emotion—represent a perversely healthy evolution of country music, raising it to a new level of emotional truth—a realism beyond honky-tonk heartbreak and cheatin'-spouses sorrow. A deeper acknowledgment of the grim power of death and disease.

I write as a lonely defender of mainstream country in New York, a city that tends to turn up its nose at some of the more undeniably risible aspects of the genre's achy-breaky heart. (If you doubt my country credibility, let me cite the two weeks I spent traveling in Willie Nelson's tour bus as he played honky-tonks across the South. The highlight? Willie playing the "lost" verse of "Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.")

I've always felt that at its best, mainstream country music (not just hipster-friendly bluegrass and alt-country) is unappreciated as writing. That the best C&W songwriters have created an idiom, a genre, whose excellence in elliptical emotional compression rivals the best contemporary American short-story writing. Some of these C&W geniuses, people like George Jones and Rodney Crowell, are the unheralded Raymond Carvers and John Cheevers of their genre—masters of self-lacerating self-pity. Consider the spare, aching, profoundly needy lyrics of Crowell's "Till I Gain Control Again":

I've never gone so wrong as for telling lies to you
What you see is what I've been
There is nothing I could hide from you
You can see me better than I can.

On the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
'Til I can gain control again …

It always makes me lose control.

Sure, I get a kick out of good-time whiskey/sexy country (like the contemporary "Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off"). But it's the ones that know how to push your saddest buttons, the buttons marked "Regret," "Sorrow," "Remorse," "Self-Pity," in particular that I love.

But with no country radio station in New York City, intermittent bouts of watching the country-music cable channels have been my main fix. And one aspect I love about getting out of Manhattan is that there's almost always at least one country station on the car radio, which is, of course, the best place to hear country.

Even in wonkish Washington, D.C., which is where I was when I heard the latest in the cancer-country genre, the new hit from Craig Morgan, "(I Thought That I Was) Tough."

It's one of those songs that hit you in a way that makes you remember the mundane particularity of the first time you heard it. We were driving to a Safeway supermarket one sunlit Sunday morning. My friend, who—fortunately—likes weepy C&W songs, too, had the local country station on the car radio when "Tough" came on.