Toby Keith: Shock'n Y'all : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

After opening with the likable "I Love This Bar," the Oklahoma native's first full album of new material since his 9/11 broadside "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" continues with songs of equal boldness, "American Soldier" and "If I Was Jesus." Toby Keith also addresses the joys of $2,000 boots and Dixie chicks, barbecues a music critic and, in "The Taliban Song," encourages opposition to that hardly celebrated organization, summoning the grace to sing of an Afghan herder living in a "two-bedroom cave." Alan Jackson's taste, Tim McGraw's cool: These are not for Keith, who aspires to a down-home version of the outrageous, closer to gangsta rap or shock rock. But unlike Ludacris or Marilyn Manson, Keith doesn't use controversy as a means to an edgy kind of country. His ravings are the main course.