So 2004 wasn’t an anomaly; if years were people, 2005 would look 2004 earnestly in the eye and say “good job brother, I’m gonna keep on keepin’ on.” And that brief interaction would be more poignant and meaningful than about 90% of the songs that cheesed their way up to #1 in the twelve months to come.
The
weightless but engaging novelty of something like Blake Shelton’s “Some Beach”
isn’t going to ruin anyone’s day, even if it gets stuck in your head for the
majority of it. It’s easygoing and hummable and if it got four weeks at #1 that
speaks more to the paucity of competition than anything. Darryl Worley’s
“Awful, Beautiful Life” would seem like a good song if you didn’t understand
English; the dynamic beat and scrambling electric guitars with twangy touches
of fiddle and steel speaks well for the Nashville studio cats, but every fine
line between relatability and flat-out pandering gets artlessly kicked over.
Granted, that was becoming country music songwriting’s house style in the era,
but that doesn’t let Worley off the hook. He’d done better before, and his
shoehorned-in shoutout to the troops in Iraq landed somewhere between
gratuitous and cynical.
Brad
Paisley’s “Mud on the Tires” kind of trampled the relatable/pandering line too,
but at least it was packing a little charm and humor. Yeah, sure, country boys
and girls like 4x4 trucks and outdoorsy dates, why not write a song about it? So
much of the era’s hits just felt demographically engineered, and you couldn’t
help but hear the gears grinding. It seemed hardly anyone was trying to write
an emotionally resonant classic, and when they did you’d usually end up with
something like Rascal Flatts and “Bless the Broken Road.” Intricately pretty,
lots of pious greeting-card poetry about love and gratitude, a kernel of
emotional truth coated in so many layers of sugar you just can’t stomach it
anymore.
Josh
Gracin was a marketing dream in the context of the era, a wholesomely handsome young
dude who was both an American Idol contestant and a US Marine when the
former was the hottest thing on TV and pro-military sentiment was across the
board. They didn’t go overboard trying to paint him as a war hero (sounds like
his mostly-stateside stint was uneventful) but he did have a scruffy
masculinity not every show-choir kid can muster. “Nothin’ to Lose” is the only
time we’re going to need to mention him; I had to go back to remind myself what
song it was, because the rapid-fire cornpone lyrics kind of overshadow the
hook, but yeah this thing was everywhere. The video was set in a high school
with youthful-looking actors making it pretty clear who the target demographic
was.
Craig
Morgan had a much longer military career and was on the verge of middle age by
the time his country music career took off. He’d been an independent-label
success story, which was rare in Nashville at the time, but bore little of the
scrappy individualism that “indie” implies; “What I Love About a Sunday” was
pretty par for his course, an earnest checklist ballad about wholesome churchgoing
suburban domestic bliss. Nice things in practice, it’s just really hard to
write a compelling song about so Morgan (and songwriters Adam Dorsey and Mark
Narmore) settled for reminding everyone their life was swell (or at least could
be if they went to church). I can easily buy that Morgan is a tough, honorable
guy who’s lived some life. But this and his other chart hits indicate he had a
hell of a time turning that into compelling music in an era when that was
highly optional anyway.
That
was Morgan’s last #1, but Kenny Chesney was going to be one of the genre’s
defining dudes for years to come, for better or worse. Stuff like “Anything But
Mine” make a pretty good case for him as a purveyor of relatable suburban fantasy;
a young-summer-romance fable written by the excellently-named Scooter Carusoe, it’s
not exactly full of depth or surprises but there’s a hearty Springsteen pulse
bubbling under some nicely detailed lyrics that make you either remember when
your life was like this or wish that it at some point was. Brooks & Dunn
were similarly determined not to be consigned to ‘90s nostalgia, and despite
the unexpected chamber-music intro “It’s Getting Better All the Time” put
Ronnie Dunn’s timeless twang to emotionally resonant use. The blend of
Broadway-ish melodrama and hard-country sentiments has certainly been done much
worse. Given the field, it may well have been the best #1 of the year.
Jo
Dee Messina was about to plummet off the charts; “My Give a Damn’s Busted” has
a little sincere kick to it that was becoming a rare commodity by then, but
feistiness wasn’t enough for a foothold in an era where female voices seemed to
be getting gradually crowded out. Keith Urban’s smooth, genre-blurred take on
country music was coming to be the predominant strain, but at least he had the
good taste to pluck a Rodney Crowell tune like “Making Memories of Us.” It’s a
bit fluffy by Crowell standards yet also a little edgy by Urban standards, and
better than anything Rascal Flatts was coughing up around that time. “Fast Cars
and Freedom” was upbeat and seemed to at least be reaching for an echo of
classic heartland rock like Bob Seger, but just couldn’t tap into that sort of
greasy authenticity. Toby Keith, by contrast, could go on effortlessly about
bar fights and hot twins on “As Good As I Once Was” and sound like a laid-back
working-class hero. Seemingly believing himself to be quite the badass but
leaving some room for self-deprecating humor, he was fun in the mellow lane he
made for himself after easing out of the saber-rattling-military-song one.
Faith
Hill was a superstar at this point but determined to let everyone know she was
still a down-to-earth “Mississippi Girl,” just like Jennifer Lopez was still
Jenny From the Block. “Well I spent a few weeks in California/They put my face
on the big movie screen/But that don’t mean I’ve forgotten where I came
from/That’s just me chasing dreams …” I don’t know why anyone listened to this
more than once, but I guess she’d earned her spot by then and it’d take more
than a heaping dose of faux-folksy insipidness to knock her off of it. If
anyone else other than Brooks & Dunn had put out a song called “Play
Something Country” in this era it would’ve come off as pot-and-kettle bullshit,
but it’s not like they were skimping on the twang even if some of their lyrics
were starting to land on the dire side of gimmicky.
Country-pop
isn’t inherently bad, of course; craft, taste, and sincerity can go a long way,
and Sara Evans could muster up enough of all of the above especially with
writers as talented as Radney Foster and George Ducas in the tank. “A Real Fine
Place to Start” is a real fine song to listen to, sunny and optimistic without
feeling emptyheaded or pandering. “Something To Be Proud Of” by Montgomery
Gentry wasn’t as finely-calibrated – it does sound kind of focus-grouped by a
Fox News panel in its nods to small-town working-class patriotism – but it’s got
a big, hearty hook to it and mostly speaks to the nobler side of modern
American masculinity. Others have done much worse with the notion.
Keith
Urban rolled out another busy mid-tempo number called “Better Life.” Pleasant
enough and all, it just sort of blended in with his other similar-sounding
songs from that years as well as the glut of contemporary tunes meant to sound
like they were replicating common domestic conversations among the listener
base with precious little poetic license. But enough people saw themselves in
it to keep it at #1 for six solid weeks. A couple years later he’d be married
to one of the biggest movie stars in the world (Nicole Kidman, if you’ve never
noticed them on the front row of several dozen awards shows) and these stabs at
regular-joe striving would get even less convincing. Meanwhile, Dierks Bentley,
the memorably-named kid of a Mississippi WWII vet, could do the whole
scruffily-relatable thing pretty well: “Come a Little Closer” was a
convincingly warm come-on of a song, something that could make the girls take
heart and the guys take notes. It was a great fit for his baritone twang, a
simple notion done simply well.
I
guess it’s too bad this song didn’t close out the year on a promising note;
instead we got the kind-of-anonymous Joe Nichols hamming it up on “Tequila
Makes Her Clothes Fall Off,” which never really gets more amusing than its own
title. Dierks did his damnedest to yank the #1 spot back after one week of that
mess, but then got edged out for the last week of 2005 by Billy Currington and
“Must Be Doin’ Something Right.” Much as I don’t like that bland bit of
devotional country-pop, in the longer run he’d have better tunes that at least
tried to keep a bit of folksy wit and wisdom in play on country radio. And with
occasional exceptions, that’d have to be about as good as it was gonna get.
THE
TREND
Woof.
I mean, “Some Beach” almost cracked the top five in the ranking, and some of
those titles down there look like they’re retroactively mocking any remaining
enthusiasm I had for mainstream country music. “It’s Getting Better All the
Time,” “As Good As I Once Was,” “A Real Fine Place to Start,” “Something To Be
Proud Of,” “Must Be Doing Something Right,” and perhaps most gallingly “Play
Something Country.” It’s not, you’re not, it’s not, it’s not, you’re not, and how
about this: just calling something “country” and throwing in a few regional
signifiers or nods to working class life doesn’t make you the heir to Merle
Haggard. Not everything was terrible, but nothing was really great either, and
there’s not a ton of motivation to change when something like “Bless the Broken
Road” or “What I Love About Sunday” could hang it at #1 for a month or more. It
was very much getting to a point where anyone that wanted something compelling
was well-advised to look elsewhere.
THE
RANKING
- It’s Getting Better All the Time – Brooks & Dunn
- Come a Little Closer – Dierks Bentley
- Making Memories of Us – Keith Urban
- As Good As I Once Was – Toby Keith
- A Real Fine Place to Start – Sara Evans
- Some Beach – Blake Shelton
- My Give a Damn’s Busted – Jo Dee Messina
- Something To Be Proud Of – Montgomery Gentry
- Anything But Mine – Kenny Chesney
- Mud on the Tires – Brad Paisley
- Must Be Doing Something Right – Billy Currington
- Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off – Joe Nichols
- Play Something Country – Brooks & Dunn
- Nothin’ to Lose – Josh Gracin
- Awful, Beautiful Life – Darryl Worley
- Mississippi Girl – Faith Hill
- That’s What I Love About Sunday – Craig Morgan
- Bless the Broken Road – Rascal Flatts
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