Cocaine & Rhinestones: The History of Country Music
5.0/5
Critic Rating
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Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Randall Roberts • LA Times • Apr 22, 2021
"...fiercely told, relentlessly researched podcast on the history of country music. It’s Coe’s penchant for drama, history and storytelling that draws listeners...Decidedly unpracticed, the first season vibrated with the duct-taped energy of a punk song: Coe’s tone, a mix of dry wit and self-assuredness, demands attention through its feral, get-the-message-out urgency. Each an epic, the episodes contain so much data and dredged-up Nashville marginalia that you are left equal parts dumbfounded and enriched. "
Score: 5
Chris Lay • Vinyl Me Please • Oct 15, 2018
"Tyler Mahan Coe is the first, best and so far only podcaster out there making a point to dust off some of the lesser-known weird old stories from country music. Each entry in the series is carefully assembled for maximum narrative propulsivity, and built on a foundation of untold hours of intense research."
Score: 5
Stephen M. Deusner • Pitchfork • Mar 12, 2018
"“Cocaine & Rhinestones” Is the Country Podcast You Need to Hear to Believe. In examining these kinds of stories, Coe makes country music messy again. Even the word country becomes hard to pin down across the podcast, and the genre becomes something not so self-contained, as it intersects with different cultural worlds. Country music is changing, like it or not, and “Cocaine & Rhinestones” reflects that shift."
Score: 5
Sarah Larson • New Yorker • Mar 7, 2018
"...an opinionated, feverish, wildly entertaining podcast about twentieth-century American country music, written and hosted by Tyler Mahan Coe, we learn why, from a progressive guy with an arsenal of doggedly presented research. The podcast has a distinctive, essayistic sound, narrated entirely by Coe and delivered in a tone somewhere between that of a news anchor, Jonathan Goldstein on “Heavyweight,” and a prosecutor delivering a closing argument. I often laugh while listening, admiring his zeal."
