Love it or hate it, there is no denying that the country has gone country.

Beyoncé is touring on her Grammy-winning country album, “Cowboy Carter.” All races and ages are line-dancing to country-themed viral hits like “Boots on the Ground” and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” from the unlikely sources 803Fresh and Shaboozey. Lana Del Rey has long been more manic pixie pop star than country crooner. But there she was at Stagecoach last month singing country hits and debuting new, country-ish songs. If you made a Likert scale of pop music gangsta credibility, you could defensibly put Snoop Dogg on one end and Ed Sheeran on the other. Yet, last month they both signaled their country music intentions.

Occam’s razor would chalk their genre-switching up to politics: American pop culture typically goes country when the White House goes Republican. But there’s a wrinkle this time around — a veritable renaissance has come for country music over the last decade, as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and queer artists have staked a legitimate claim to the genre. In fact, they’re still collectively pushing to be included in a genre that wants their rhythm but not their blues. And that has left country music with an identity crisis. There are now two prominent ideas of what counts as country: Nashville’s manufactured, tightly controlled country bops and the last decade’s diversification of its sound.

Outsiders to the genre who want to take advantage of country music’s captive market and cultural power can’t stay neutral. Every interloper from outside the Nashville machine who flocks to the genre has to choose which version of country music they will embody: reactionary whiteness or reparative multiracialism. What they choose can tell us a lot about the artists and the political concerns of the culture they inhabit.

To understand the tension at the heart of country music, it helps to look at a holy trinity of artists widely lauded for country music’s resurgence with mainstream audiences: Jelly Roll, Morgan Wallen and Zach Top. These good ol’ boys — and they are all boys — aren’t outlaw country. They are “8 Mile” country, white acts making country inflected with contemporary Black music for mass audiences. Where Jelly Roll and Wallen’s country is hip-hop inflected, Top is channeling 1980s big-hat, traditional male country singers. Their success, though, is cut from the same cloth. These aren’t country music outsiders storming the gates. They are anointed by the industry as the genre’s white, male saviors.

They’re saving country music from the musical summer I am having. I attended the inaugural music festival Biscuits and Banjos in Durham, N.C., last month. It was about three days of country-ish music performed by artists that Nashville would not consider country because they aren’t white. But they are playing the banjo and the steel guitar, while singing traditional music. This summer and fall, Allison Russell, Shaboozey, Joy Oladokun and Chapel Hart are all Black, all country, all touring. Their ascendance is the direct result of the way the Black Lives Matter movement sharpened their demands for full inclusion, and an audience was waiting to receive them.

Years on, exhausted by nearly eight years of brutal reactionarism to the nominal idea that Black lives might matter, a lot of Black audiences are tired of being depressed. They want to dance and fall in love, maybe both at the same time. A generation of Black country artists that has been making music in the trenches is more than ready to serve it up to them. A neo-traditionalist like Rhiannon Giddens, the husband-and-wife duo The War and Treaty, wild child Adia Victoria and party princess Tanner Adell cultivated diverse Black audiences. Their music is high and low. It is traditional and pop. It is blues and it is soul. It is all country.