Tag Archives: sleazy country

Reviews

Single Review: Thomas Rhett Brings Music to an All-Time Low With “Vacation”

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Rating: 0/10

Much like Luke Bryan’s atrocious “Strip it Down,” I had planned to wait until Thomas Rhett’s album release to pass judgment on this song. But much like “Strip it Down,” a couple of sentences on an album review isn’t going to do this little work of art justice. Fourteen songwriters are given credit for this work of brilliance because it is so similar to “Low Rider” that the original writers had to be cited. Yes, my friends, that’s what country is today–the taking of previously good pop, r&b, and/or hip-hop songs and making them into your own brutal mess that wouldn’t pass for good music in any genre except country. But why spend any time crafting any original thoughts when country radio will play anything? No, it’s better to take another decent song and add your own shit. Then you only have to do half the work, and the teenage fangirls will buy it. If you were Thomas Rhett, and this is all you had to do to make money, doesn’t it seem reasonable that you would do it too?

And speaking of the fangirls, I am told by Trigger and the good commenters of
Saving Country Music that the video is full of preteen girls dancing around in bikinis singing about drinking beer. This is something I can’t verify, as I am blind and can’t judge the video, but I have no reason to doubt them, and this fact is possibly even more disturbing than Luke Bryan releasing his “Strip it Down” video to Tinder. Can country get any more embarrassing and sleazy?…no, Chase Rice, don’t answer that in your next video. Again, I’ll quote Maddie & Tae–“We used to get a little respect, now we’re lucky if we even get to climb up in your truck [to dance around in your video], keep our mouth shut, and ride along, [and sing along], and be the girl in a country song.” Let me speak as a woman to other women here…do you see this as respectful, and is this how you want your daughters to see themselves? Do you want your daughters or future daughters to view this as normal behavior for, and treatment of, women and young girls? Things like this have gotten so normal in our culture that they are too often ignored, but Maddie & Tae are right, and it sickens me to see women, especially mothers, being okay with this sort of thing.

The actual song that these fourteen have concocted is some sort of party song where the premise is “let’s party like we on vacation.” Fourteen songwriters, and no one thought to mention that in country, “we” = “we’re.” The rest of the lyrics aren’t any better, and it is a waste of my time to quote any…feel free to listen to them yourself. Keep in mind, it took fourteen songwriters to come up with them, so I can only imagine the country gold we’d get if one of them had to manage alone. The instrumentation is, to keep this short, a headache-inducing blend of anything but country. It doesn’t have a token banjo to pretend. It’s blatantly flipping off the entire genre. In an earlier review, I said that in 2015, you can call anything short of straight rap country, and that’s probably coming. Well, here it is. Now, we’ve had rap in country before, most notably from Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem,” which made the whole thing somehow acceptable for the first time. But again, there were token country instruments thrown in. This is a song where, if I turned on the radio, I wouldn’t even be able to mistake it for maybe, possibly being a country station. This is country losing its entire identity.

All this makes it arguably worse than “B.Y.H.B,” which I reviewed on July 14th as
the worst song I’d ever heard, from any genre Well, congratulations Thomas Rhett, you’ve topped this piece of shit in less than two months, because your masterpiece will actually get played on country radio. Why? Because Thomas Rhett released it, so it must be good. This is why the mindless fans of “music” like this are worse offenders than the artists. Artists make this shit because, as I mentioned above, this sells. This says Thomas Rhett and his team are good businesspeople, sellouts, not country, don’t care about music, etc. This says that our culture is actually so gullible and lazy that the majority of people will not only stream and purchase this song, they will consider it good country music. Right now, I have much more respect for pop and r&b fans than the fans of mainstream country radio, because this trash would have been laughed out of any other genre (evidence = Sam Hunt.) But apparently the “evolution” of country music means that terrible pop/r&b/hip-hop music now = good country….nice. This is a train wreck in any genre and a blatant mockery of the genre that Thomas Rhett professes.

Reviews

Single Review: Luke Bryan Explores a New Kind of Crap With “Strip it Down”

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Rating: 0/10

Luke Bryan has released a second song from his upcoming album Kill the Lights–and it actually is not a copy of “That’s my Kind of Night” or “Kick the Dust Up.” Country Exclusive didn’t exist when the atrocity that is “Kick the Dust Up” came out, so you were saved the rant, but let me say that that “song” was one of the driving factors behind this blog. I didn’t think I could possibly hate anything Luke produced worse than “Kick the Dust Up,” but then I have underestimated these things before. Enter “Strip it Down,” the r&b/pop copy of Jason Aldean’s hit “Burnin’ it Down.” Incidentally, Luke released this lyric video “exclusively” on Tinder, and I won’t go into a rant about how sleazy this is, but do yourself a favor and go read Trigger’s own rant on SCM
Here From the article:

It’s only fair to mention that officially, Tinder is not meant to be exclusively about setting up sex rendezvous. It’s just a dating app. But I’ll tell you this: If I was looking to blow off a little steam and hook up for the night, or was feeling a little lonely and wanted to go looking for love, the last thing I would want to see is the country music Gomer Pyle on there shilling his stupid video. I mean shit, you can’t get away from this guy.

But since SCM took care of that, let’s discuss the song itself. It’s about Luke wanting to reconnect with an old love by “stripping it down.” Immediately, Dierks Bentley’s “Come a Little Closer” comes to mind, as this is basically the premise of that song as well. So let’s compare the two.

Dierks’s is country with some rock. Like I already said, this is pop and r&b, with the only reference to country being the comment about getting back to the way things were “When it was an old back road and an old school beat, Cowboy boots by your little bare feet.” Dirt roads get an obligatory mention even when the song is not bro country. I assume the “old school beat” is the bro country sound before this new r&b/pop/metro-politan disease infected the genre…irony at its finest. Also, Dierks Bentley talked much more about the girl. “I feel like layin’ you down on a bed of sweet surrender where we can work it all out,” “I wanna touch you like a cleansing rain,.” and “I feel like lettin’ go of everything that stands between us and the love we used to know.” Luke does say, “Let me run my fingers down your back” but more often we find lines about the scenery, like the “white cotton sheets,” “feel my belt turn loose from these old blue jeans,” and this completely unnecessary “I wanna drop this cell phone out, Let it shatter on the ground.” It’s trying to be romantic, but it comes off like he is in a hurry to have sex rather than desperate to get back the love they lost. In fact, love is never mentioned, at least not in that context; the song simply says, “We both know that we lost it somehow, let’s get it found, strip it down, down, down.” The word “Love” is mentioned once in the bridge, with the line, “I just wanna love you so bad, baby.” So again, it sounds like he is just desperate to hook up with her. Then again, if they are getting back to the way it was on an old back road with an old school beat, then hooking up with her by a river is probably what he is going for here. Last, but certainly not least, Dierks Bentley’s “Come a Little Closer” shows emotion and actually makes you want to go have sex, whereas Luke Bryan’s “Strip it Down” just made me bored, distracted, and eventually disgusted and ready to rant about it.

This is not headache inducing like “Kick the Dust Up” and maybe wouldn’t have gotten a 0 if I hadn’t compared it to “Come a Little Closer.” But the fact is, I immediately did, and in that light, this song goes from being boring, unoriginal crap to something I hate as bad, if not worse than, his bro country collection. Those songs, at least, did what they set out to accomplish. This, after “Kick the Dust Up,” certainly does not bode well for Friday’s album.