I
guess we’re hitting the point here where I’d checked out of contemporary
country radio entirely, because I remember about four of these thirty songs
that hit #1 in 2009. It’s a slightly eerie feeling, a little like a peek into
an alternate universe where I recognize the big names but they’re doing things
I don’t remember them doing. I haven’t felt this way since the late ‘60s/early
‘70s entries where I kept finding songs I’d never heard by artists I’d
considered myself pretty familiar with (Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Charlie
Rich etc.). Stuff that was presumably all over the radio for awhile but it just
happened to be before I was born, and in hindsight it got overshadowed by their
even-bigger hits. But in those entries I feel like I was stumbling across gold.
Here in 2009 it’s more like wondering what you just stepped in and looking for
a place to scrape it off.
If
it’s not clear by now, Rascal Flatts is just not my thing. I can concede that
“Here” isn’t a bad idea for a song and it’s not impossible to imagine a more
palatable version of it by Blake Shelton or something. But Gary LeVox’s reedy
tenor just sort of spoils things for me, he could be covering Guy Clark tunes
and I probably still couldn’t stand it. Sugarland is way easier to take, I like
Jennifer Nettles’ big honeyed twang more often than not, and the brisk waltz and
lyrical momentum of “Already Gone” come off pretty nicely even if you’re not
grading on a 2009-mainstream-country curve.
Two
of the era’s heavyweights (figuratively speaking … they’re no Trace Adkins,
stature-wise) joined forces on “Start a Band.” Keith Urban at least kind of
resembles the metrosexual dudes Brad Paisley was bagging on the year before
with “I’m Just a Guy” but I guess they sat their differences aside enough and
bonded over their shared guitar-shredding skills and cresting radio-friendly
fame. There’s some tasty guitar work, as you’d expect, but the song’s a bit of
a clunker with obvious lyrics and not much groove or swagger. You’d think you
could mine more out of two guys with disparate aesthetics and backgrounds,
talented and fortunate enough for their paths to cross at the top of the game, coming
together for an event-level collaboration, but nah. Hard to imagine hearing
this song would inspire anybody to embrace their own musical creativity, unless
it’s in the “jeez anybody can do this shit” kind of sense.
Even
the great Alan Jackson seemed like he was just sort of farting around on
“Country Boy,” with only a few lines about four-wheel-drive specs raising it
above the level of paint-by-numbers. It was his third single from the Good
Time album to hit #1, a stat that sort of suggests he was reestablishing
himself as one of the genre’s top guys, but it was more of a last hurrah. His
next couple of singles, “Sissy’s Song” and “I Still Like Bologna” were more
personal and playful, respectively, but they stalled out more quickly and that
was about it for major solo chart hits. Still, he was sort of a legend in his
own time by this point, and had enough fans that he could still crank out a
record for the faithful once in awhile and gig or tour as he saw fit with no
doubt that a crowd would show up to make it worthwhile. He’s put out at least
five well-received albums since 2008, been inducted into the Country Music Hall
of Fame, and never once came off like he was sacrificing his dignity or
priorities to keep his career rolling. Country music’s been lucky to have him.
And
Blake Shelton was lucky to have country music. His first single had gone #1
back in 2001 and he’d had sort of a hit-and-miss run since then, but his
fortunes changed when he scored a gig as a judge on Nashville Star in
2007. Shelton’s a good singer, but he grabs an extra gear as a TV personality,
confident and funny and telegenic; if it had ended at one season of Nashville
Star I doubt anyone outside of his immediate family would remember. But it
set him up for a gig a couple years later on NBC’s smash reality singing
competition The Voice, which I’m sure you’ve seen even if you tried not
to. But even the relatively modest Nashville gig seemed to boost the
establishment’s opinion of him, because after “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” hit #1 in
2008 he started a near-unbroken string of #1s for about a decade, even as The
Voice got so huge that being a popular country singer started seeming like
his side gig. Like a lot of his stuff, “She Wouldn’t Be Gone” is just ok, but
he delivers it convincingly enough, keeping up with the cascading melody and
litany of romantic self-recriminations like the showbiz pro he was sure as hell
turning into.
Dierks
Bentley, for his part, never got a similar ticket to multilevel celebrity; to
this day, he’s more likely than not to go #1 with any given song, but he’s
never broke out to the larger pop culture scene or been a stadium-level
headliner. Still, his batting average is pretty good in terms of admittedly
subjective quality, and he’s used some of his clout to dabble in bluegrass and
Red Dirt-type stuff to keep things artistically interesting. “Feel That Fire”
kind of works as a metaphor for that sort of restless artistic ambition, the
feeling that continuing commercial success is worthwhile but the spark of
something more volatile and unique is still worth chasing. Sure, he’s singing
about romance like he usually does, but it does nicely resonate with his
apparent career paths. Guys like Kenny Chesney stubbornly remained bigger
deals, to the point that he could put out something as stripped-down and
easygoing as “Down the Road” even if he recorded it as a duet with the song’s
originator, Mac McAnally. McAnally had released a few projects as a recording
artist down through the decades with middling success, finding more footing behind
the scenes; he’d written hits for folks like Alabama, Shenandoah, and Sawyer
Brown (and early-career Chesney, come to think of it) and been a longtime
collaborator and band member for Jimmy Buffett, the latter of which presumably
sparked Chesney’s reverence the most. It’s a simple, sweet-sounding song, even
if you’re not crazy about how it keeps coming back around to worrying if some
guy’s wealthy and religious enough for your daughter.
Toby
Keith’s “God Love Her” had some thematic overlap, despite being a Tom Petty-ish
rocker by contrast, a character study of sorts about a girl from a clean-living
family and her romance with a relatively hard-living dude (watch out folks!
he’s got a motorcycle!). It’s got a nice brisk sound to it, Keith manages to
sound both tough and reverent in his vocal delivery, and even if it’s not an A+
lyrical triumph it still gets points for hinting at some complexity and
conflict in life and love. Keith Urban followed up (hey, Toby-Keith-Urban …
that’s kind of fun) with his 10th #1, “Sweet Thing.” As with many
Keith Urban songs, it is astoundingly OK, some nice guitar flash and pleasant
vocals but it doesn’t add up to much. It’s not even the best song called that (Van
Morrison, Chaka Khan, and Ben Morris have some good ones).
Darius
Rucker’s big career move continued to kick up rewards with “It Won’t Be Like
This For Long,” a wholesome targeted heartwarmer about how babies aren’t babies
for very long so we should live in the moment, not get frustrated, savor the
sweetness of it all etc. As a dad whose kids are growing up too fast I concur,
and Rucker’s bighearted delivery is always worth a listen, but anyone who was
hoping he might bring a new perspective or approach to modern country music
might’ve been disappointed. As a celebrity who’d already seen some major career
ups and downs, as a black man in a white-dominated business, as a guy who’d
reached the heights of success in a whole different genre … but nah, more
wholesome dad-country ballads and love songs.
Then
again, George Strait had been intermittently doing that for a few decades with
no complaints by this point, and “River of Love” got him his 80th (you read
that right) top ten as well as his 44th and – as of now – final #1. Despite
the whole river metaphor it’s more attuned to beach music, with a vaguely
tropical rhythm framing some sweet steel guitar in such a way that cleverly kind
of takes the instrument back to its Hawaiian roots. In yet another display of
his featly to the songwriters who helped him amass such a magnificent run at
the top, Strait brings in the song’s writers (Billy Burnette, Shawn Camp, and
Dennis Morgan) to sing backing vocals that sort of sound like they just got off
work at one of those Broadway Lion King shows … it’s a trifle, and out
of Strait’s usual wheelhouse, so maybe it’s an odd one to wrap up on but it’s
not like he was done. Strait was a regular in the top ten through 2012 and soon
thereafter announced a semi-retirement, mostly meaning he was backing off his
usual album-every-year, tour-every-year schedule that sounds exhausting but looked
easy in his hands. Ten years later, it’s probably still a little early to start
framing out Strait’s legacy … he’s still highly visible, still plays
high-profile shows here and there or pops up on tribute albums, still seems to
be in great health in his early ‘70s doing commercials for his
recently-launched Codigo tequila brand, and it’s not hard to imagine even in
the current environment that he might notch another #1 hit before it’s all over,
because nobody has had his sort of staying power as a commercial country
powerhouse. It’s a nice bonus that so many of the songs were so damn good …
nobody wanted him to leave the party. I’ve alluded to this before and I’ll say
it again: when I was a kid in the ‘80s, George seemed like the only young guy
on country radio, and by the time I dropped off circa 2007 or so he was the
only “old guy” on the radio, relatively speaking. Legend status long since
earned.
The
next run of songs was not encouraging. Rascal Flatts put the ol’ nails back to
the chalkboard on the explosively weepy ballad “Here Comes Goodbye.” Rodney
Atkins wedged himself somewhere between aw-shucks folksy and rah-rah patriot on
“It’s America,” a sort-of rocked-up song about things people like about America
that kicks off with a verse about cute kids with a lemonade stand and comes
back around to mention lemonade so often you’d assume the songwriters must have
been dying of thirst (which presumably also distracted them from quality
control but hey, they’ve already written at least one more #1 hit than I have).
#1 means heavy rotation, of course, and begs the question just who the hell
wanted to listen to songs like this every hour on the hour. It seems like
torture.
But
at least RF was trying to sing something heartfelt, and Atkins was trying to
paint a pleasant picture even if comes off as pandering. I’d listen to either
of those stinkers twice a day for a week before I’d give Jason Aldean’s “She’s
Country” another spin. This is Aldean’s second #1, after 2005’s earnest-enough
“Why,” and why indeed. Riding a big crunchy butt-rock riff that sounds like a
defanged Buckcherry, Aldean spits bars about some hellraisin’ Southern gals
(who also pray, in case Grandma’s still listening after the first couple power
chords) that are mostly boiled down to some sort of bangable stereotype in
cutoffs rolling around in oversized pickups. It really takes some work to make
hot girls in big trucks sound unappealing, but damn if Aldean wasn’t up to the
task … still, it went to #1 and in the process unmistakably established “bro
country” as a highly viable commercial approach, even if nobody started calling
it that until a few years later. Big riffs and beats borrowed from recent rock
and hip-hop, shouty but shallow lines about redneck girls and big engines and booze,
attempts at tough-guy swagger to match the aggression of the music, gratuitous
shout-outs to patriotism and/or Southerness or ruralness or occasionally
religion … like it or not, it was here and it was officially on sale, and so
was Aldean.
Sugarland
sort of seemed like counterprogramming in that context: female-led with a
folk-music background that informed their tendencies towards sweetness,
quirkiness, and layered acoustics. Jennifer Nettles was and is lovely but didn’t
seem like someone who’d get all tarted up just to please Aldean-esque jocks
who’d try to shove her little buddy Kristian Bush into a locker. “It Happens” shoots
for a blend of cleverness and rocked-out abandon and only sort of connects;
Nettles was so good with lovelorn ballads but I assume the act wanted to
demonstrate that that wasn’t all they could pull off, even if it kind of was. Brad
Paisley was still among the surest bets on country radio, shuffling back and
forth between his two gears of “sort of satirical upbeat song” and highly
sentimental numbers like “Then.” If Aldean was spawning what would become “bro
country” then perhaps Paisley, despite his touches of new-traditionalist sound,
was ahead of the “boyfriend country” curve by about a decade. Starry-eyed,
super-reverent songs about the perfection of your object of affection. I assume
Paisley’s wife likes it. I just don’t see anything about it that lifts it above
the dozens of similarly-themed songs knocking around out there.
Anyway,
time to party again I guess … Kenny Chesney’s “Out Last Night,” which I just
got done listening to for the first time, is upbeat and clever enough, not near
Shel Silverstein levels or anything but there’s at least a few fun rhymes and a
bit of a pulse to it. Dierks Bentley, who I’ve generally given credit for being
among the more gifted and tasteful 2000s country dudes, sunk to the level of
his surroundings on “Sideways” … even the title and concept seemed ripped off
from a fairly-recent Darryl Worley song. It’s lame beer-commercial country-rock
at best, from a guy who usually did his listeners one better. Things picked up
a bit with Lady Antebellum’s first #1 hit “I Run to You.” Usually spotlighting Hillary
Scott’s vocals with nice backing vocals from co-founders Charles Kelley and
Dave Haywood, in an earlier era they would’ve made way more sense as an
adult-friendly pop-rock outfit along the lines of (best-case-scenario here)
Fleetwood Mac, but MOR was largely MIA by the mid-2000s (just ask Darius Rucker)
so they found their spot in country music. And honestly that’s a little hard to
bitch about, because their mature, intelligent but not over-your-head approach
to songwriting was pretty welcome in a genre that all too often seemed to be
hellbent on dumbing things down. If you’re a particularly young listener/reader
and don’t know who I’m talking about, the band goes by Lady A nowadays; the
same sort of heightened social sensitivities that turned the Dixie Chicks into
just The Chicks convinced them to drop the part of their name that refers to the
pre-Civil War American South. A bunch of conservatives were pissed off for 15
minutes, the word ‘woke” was probably thrown around a bit, and everybody pretty
much shrugged and moved on.
Billy
Currington scored with another likable, ambling country tune not unlike his
“Good Directions” hit; this one, “People Are Crazy,” recounts a friendly
encounter with a talkative old dude that results in a surprising reward. It’s
kind of nice to hear a story song that you don’t mind hearing again once the
ending’s spoiled, I don’t consider this one an all-time classic or anything but
it stood out nicely from the 2009 pack. Darius Rucker came barreling back in
with the jangly, generic “Alright,” one of those “I’m a poor boy but I got it
all” slabs of modern country schmaltz that folks like Montgomery Gentry had
made their bread with for decades by this point. Aside from his pleasantly
familiar voice, there’s really not much to this one … I still like Hootie &
the Blowfish more than most modern folks would be willing to admit to, so maybe
I’m the only one surprised he didn’t bring more to the table. Meanwhile, Taylor
Swift was exceeding expectations with stuff like “You Belong To Me” … I was
hardly the target audience for this sort of thing, but her ability to project
genuine age-appropriate emotion and storytelling with catchy, energetic verve
was shooting her to the head of the class whether you liked it or not at this
point. It’s sort of like her and Rucker were crossing paths in different
directions … as his big-picture pop-culture relevance burned out he found a
comfortably unchallenging niche, while she got too big for the niche to hold
her anymore and got an opportunity to embrace bigger and bigger plays for
cross-genre superstardom.
Others,
of course, would be content to double down on the core audience that was eating
up “country music as a lifestyle brand” and probably found all the references
to small-town and rural trappings reassuring instead of forced and repetitive.
Jason Aldean chilled out considerably from the butt-rock excesses of “She’s
Country” and rolled out the pleasant-enough “Big Green Tractor” as a follow-up,
sort of like chasing a shot of awful rotgut plastic-bottle bottom-shelf whiskey
with a bland but inoffensive domestic light beer. It’s not without its
wholesome charm, painting a pretty nice picture of a country-ish dude who’s willing
to take his girl out for a nice night on the town but knows she might be
happier with something a little more downhome. Newcomer Justin Moore shot for a
similar appeal but fell hard on the side of grating with “Small Town USA,” a
slab of pandering unwitting self-parody. Moore’s pubescent-sounding chirp of a
twang doesn’t do much to elevate lines about work he sounds too young to do and
beer he sounds too young to drink, but I guess that’s where we were at that
point because he’d stick around for multiple more #1’s before it was said and
done. Toby Keith sounded like both a grizzled old-timer and a fount of lyrical
ambition by comparison on “American Ride,” an angry little snarl of a song that
somehow rose to the top in an era of witless feel-good numbers; “American Ride”
rambles like a drunken grouch at the end of the bar, griping semi-coherently
about oil prices and YouTube and cosmetic surgeries. I guess it’s supposed to
come off vaguely conservative? I don’t think modern country radio would’ve
played it if it didn’t, and usually they preferred to avoid explicitly political
songs entirely (or at least enough to keep them out of the top ten) so maybe
the song’s vagueness was intentional. At least it’s got some fire to it, that
was more than you usually got atop the 2009 charts.
And
then you get Chris Young and his first #1, “Gettin’ You Back Home (The Black
Dress Song).” One of those domestic love songs about date night achieving its
desired effect and reminding some good ol’ boy that he’s still got the hots for
his wife. Nice sentiment, obvious appeal to the married suburbanites in the
audience, and Young’s baritone makes the wholesome horniness believable enough.
I hadn’t heard this song until my cousin sang it in a round of living-room
karaoke on a recent Christmas get-together; I’ve probably heard of Chris Young,
looking over his discography he’d be a frequent #1 artist well into the more recent
past, making him more or less one of the defining artists of modern country
music even though I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup. I guess the
super-generic name doesn’t help. He’s pretty good, with a strong whiff of
traditional country to him. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to kick him off the radio
if Nashville lost their mind and handed me veto power all the sudden. It just
seems interchangeable with a half-dozen or so other guys from the era making
similar stuff.
And
then there was the other vein of guys like Keith Urban – easily one of the
genre’s defining stars by this point – who didn’t have much use for tradition
and more or less cribbed together a new strain of pop music for the mainstream
country listenership from pieces of big-production arena rock, the last couple
decades of easy listening, and maybe even some country music as refracted through
the lens of recent stars with strong pop instincts like Garth Brooks. “Only You
Can Love Me This Way” is one of the better versions of this, easing in on a
simple but fetching acoustic guitar riff and making more out of Urban’s earnest
croon than most of his soundalike mid-tempo stuff. Meanwhile, the Zac Brown
Band was still around for a good time; if their breakthrough “Chicken Fried” worked
as sort of an Alabama-ish arena-country hoedown, “Toes” (as in toes in the
sand) was their play for the Jimmy Buffett crowd, a vaguely Latin-y/island-y
beach tune that was edgy enough to throw in a weed reference. In the bigger scheme
they were catching on as something like a good-time genre-blurring jam band, but
they knew (at least at the time) how to throw radio a workable single here and
there.
And
so did Carrie Underwood of course, still riding high and still changing it up here
and there with something like “Cowboy Casanova” to mildly counterbalance her
squeaky-clean Disney princess image. She can capably sing anything, of course, but
despite a couple of rapid-fire verses this one was hardly worth it, a big noisy
slab of arena-country with no meat on the bones. Lady Antebellum threaded the
needle between pop bigness and country sincerity far better with “Need You Now”
and were rewarded with a pretty massive crossover hit. It’s the sort of smart,
crafty songwriting you might have gotten from Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell a
couple decades prior, not quite as lyrically deft as those two but with enough
melodic punch and layered, sophisticated-but-not-overdone production that draws
in the casual listener and rewards the closer one. Both emotionally complicated
and refreshingly direct, at least it was a good note to end on for a
frustrating year.
THE TREND?
Bro-country
still hasn’t kicked in entirely and the new-traditionalist stuff left over from
the ‘80s and ‘90s is mostly gone at this point, Alan Jackson and George
Strait’s lingering presence on the chart being arguably the only example of it.
So we’re left with the same unappealing (at least to me … obviously someone was
digging it) mix of “lifestyle country” that encourages everyone to identify as patriotic
good ol’ boys and gals with at least some connection to rural roots (real or
imagined) and big, kind-of-generic love songs meant to hit more or less the
same chord as contemporary pop but slightly more targeted to a white Middle
America audience. It’s pretty boring, even kind of disheartening depending on
how seriously you take this stuff, but in its own way I guess it’s part of a
long tradition where country music tries to both appeal to the specifics of
their listeners and hit them with some approximation of whatever the
contemporary pop music is, satisfying people who like aspects of pop but prefer
to identify as country music fans and mostly stick to that. It happened
with countrypolitan stuff back in the ‘60s and happened with folks like Eddie
Rabbitt, Ronnie Milsap, Crystal Gayle etc. in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and sooner or
later you got a pack of “outlaws” or “new traditionalists” to shake things up. The
thing is, though, that by the late 2000s you’re well into the internet age and further
cultural splintering that goes with it. Artists that couldn’t or wouldn’t
kowtow to the Nashville mainstream but still had undeniable talent could build
a satisfying niche of fans outside of it, and not have to worry too much about
what they were going to sacrifice for the sake of major label contracts or
radio play. Robert Earl Keen, Lucinda Williams, Lyle Lovett, Reckless Kelly, Old
97s, Gillian Welch, Drive By Truckers, all sorts of stuff. By 2009 I was mostly
just listening to them, and it was pretty clear that Nashville didn’t care what
folks like me thought anymore.
THE
RANKING
- Need You Now – Lady Antebellum
- Already Gone – Sugarland
- Feel That Fire – Dierks Bentley
- God Love Her – Toby Keith
- You Belong to Me – Taylor Swift
- River of Love – George Strait
- I Run to You – Lady Antebellum
- American Ride – Toby Keith
- Only You Can Love Me This Way – Keith Urban
- Toes – Zac Brown Band
- Gettin’ You Back Home (The Black Dress Song) – Chris Young
- She Wouldn’t Be Gone – Blake Shelton
- Big Green Tractor – Jason Aldean
- Country Boy – Alan Jackson
- Out Last Night – Kenny Chesney
- It Happens - Sugarland
- It Won’t Be Like This For Long – Darius Rucker
- Then – Brad Paisley
- Sweet Thing – Keith Urban
- Start a Band – Brad Paisley and Keith Urban
- Alright – Darius Rucker
- Cowboy Casanova – Carrie Underwood
- Sideways – Dierks Bentley
- It’s America – Rodney Atkins
- Here – Rascal Flatts
- Here Comes Goodbye – Rascal Flatts
- Small Town USA – Justin Moore
- She's Country - Jason Aldean
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