Thehead of my publicity team casts a line graph onto the screen at the front of the conference room, showing the increase in my social media engagement. If I could, I would gaze out the window while she rambles on about the latest changes in the algorithm, but unfortunately the shades are closed to favor the screen’s backlight, so I can’t even see the Glambam parking lot as a reprieve.
There’s a zig-zagging pink line (Instagram) laid on top of a blue one (Facebook) on top of a red one (YouTube) on top of a teal one (TikTok). They cross each other in a few places but all of them trend in the same direction—upward. Stefanie smiles and types a few notes on her laptop next to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad things are going well. I would just much rather focus on making music than on the business details. Algorithms, follower count, video time watched …
Sometimes I feel like I’m going to drown in the data.
“I just pulled these numbers ten minutes ago, so they’re completely fresh,” says Lori. “I looked at them last night, and somehow between now and then they’ve jumped. You can see here on the right.”
Indeed the lines all zag steeply from their second-to-last points to their last points.
“Do we know why?” Stefanie asks.
Lori shakes her head. “I haven’t had time to parse all the accounts again this morning—this is just what my program was able to grab automatically—but there could be multiple causes. For example, if a well-known YouTube artist covered one of the songs on an earlier album and uploaded it a few hours ago from the East Coast, being three time zones ahead of us, it could have renewed interest in Harm’s music and her online presence.”
“Or someone dug up an old clip of me and turned it into a viral meme again,” I say.
One surprised facial expression caught on camera and suddenly I’ve got “the crazy eyes.”
“It’s possible,” Lori admits, “but doubtful. You’ve been doing very well. ‘Friction’ has been climbing the charts for weeks now and everyone is still talking about it. Which means Riff Hurley has been trending too, and even though it’s not showing him in the most positive light, Charles doesn’t mind because it’s plenty of focus on the Glambam family. Win-win.”
The IT director—the real one—passes the room’s half-open door, sporting a gruff beard and a navy-blue polo as he makes his way down the hall with some cable adapters. His titanium wedding ring gleams briefly in the fluorescent hallway light.
Now that I’ve had multiple opportunities to pay attention to him popping up at the label’s office building, I can see just how wrong I was about his resemblance to The Country Singer Who Shall Not Be Named (Directly). His hair is not honey blond but sand blond. His eyes are not brown but gray. He is of a slightlymore slender build, does not possess the same full lips nor faint dimple on his chin, and, most prominently, doesn’t send a tingle down my spine that turns into an aching need.
Yes, it has occurred to me since the FANTASIE release party that I may have overreacted when I found out that Griffin was actually Riff Hurley. Except then I looked him up, skimmed his socials, and listened to a lot of his music. And while he is objectively talented and apparently well liked, he is nothing like the guy I spent time with that night. His Wikipedia page does mention that he is in fact from Ventura County, the grandson of the owners of Eckhart Groves, and a UCLA graduate with a degree in journalism, but beyond that, he’s a completely different person to the public.
Every magazine photo shoot features him in fitted shirts and tight jeans, with a smoldering half grin on his face. On average, his songs are all about road trips in old Chevy trucks wearing Ray-Bans, tailgate parties drinking out of red Solo cups, picking up girls after watching them line dance at the bar, and sentiments about never wanting to leave some small hometown in the middle of nowhere (which is insane considering Ventura has over a hundred thousand people and is very much the edge of somewhere).
Some of his older work is more sentimental, I’ll give him that: things his father taught him, childhood nostalgia, the metaphor of growing things and how it relates to setting up a good future in advance.
But each and every one of his last seven music videos features half-naked women, whether it’s bikini tops and shorts, low-cut mini dresses, or whatever they’re wearing when they’re partway through a game of strip poker. Hood ornaments and arm candy, not so much human beings. The only redeeming quality in this is that, unlike so many other bro-country videos I’ve seen, there’ssome ethnic diversity among them, and they’re not all runway-model thin. He objectifies women of all kinds—isn’t that nice?
Of course not all creative decisions are going to have been his, but there’s a pattern he can’t be fully divorced from. How can someone who participates in and promotes this type of stuff not be … well, the type of person who participates in and promotes this type of stuff?
I’m aware that every country artist doesn’t necessarily have a true country background. Some aren’t even from the United States, let alone the American South. The thing about all of them, though, from what I can see, is that they have a passion for country music and a desire to be a part of whichever country subculture they’re working in. In Riff’s case, it appears to be the subculture founded on cold beers and hot women.
So who was this Griffin that I momentarily felt so comfortable with?
“If anything, it’s onstage where I misrepresent myself.”
He said the country persona was the lie. What he didn’t say was whether it was a lie he liked to tell. But how couldn’t it be? It’s a lie that gets him expensive cars (trucks?) and houses. It’s a lie that gets him any woman he wants.
Well, almost any.
My phone buzzes with a reminder to take allergy medicine—a reminder I snoozed twice before I left to come here, despite knowing I’m going to have a sneeze-fit later from the cat dander that permeates every floor of my Spanish Revival abode. I pretend I’m getting a text message instead and take the opportunity to swipe through my Notes app, pausing on the collaborative folder where I keep the lyrics I jot down when I’m on the go. The folder is shared with Stef, as well as a small team of musicians that help me produce my songs. There’s a song in here titled “Lip Sync” that I keep coming back to every few days, thinking I should delete—especially whenever I see the ITguy (whose name is apparently Tyler) and I’m reminded of my confusion outside the Pinkfeather Resort. Except I still like the concept and I don’t quite know how to part with it.
I know the music and the words,
It’s nothing that I haven’t heard,
But I can’t seem to make a sound,
I look at you and I guess I’m spellbound
Somehow I think you know it too,
Your lips are moving right on cue,
