Wealth & Money Quote by Iris DeMent

DeMent’s complaint isn’t really about “the radio” as a device; it’s about an ecosystem that can sand down anything jagged, regional, or inconvenient until it slides smoothly between ads. When she says most music is “developed for making money,” she’s pointing to pop as product design: hooks engineered for retention, vocals polished into sameness, narratives tested to avoid alienating anyone. The sting is that “developed” sounds like a lab term, not an artistic one. It implies committee decisions, market research, and a kind of emotional outsourcing.

The line “It doesn’t feel true or honest” is doing a lot of cultural work. DeMent comes out of an Americana tradition where authenticity is both aesthetic and moral language: you earn belief through specificity, through lived-in detail, through an imperfect human voice allowed to crack. She’s defending not just a sound but a relationship between artist and listener, where the listener isn’t treated as a consumer profile.

“You can feel it in the music” is the quiet dare. She’s betting that audiences still have a gut-level detector for intent, even after decades of commodified intimacy. The subtext is less nostalgic than accusatory: if we’ve stopped “feeling” the difference, it’s not only because the industry is cynical, but because we’ve adapted to cynicism as a default setting. DeMent is arguing for stakes. Not virtue signaling, not branding vulnerability, but the messy, unoptimized truth that can’t be focus-grouped without losing its pulse.