Why Country Music Was Drunk All Year in 2014
To be sure, Music Row has been drunkenly spiraling towards rock bottom at least since Toby Keith started performing “Red Solo Cup” while flanked onstage by 10-foot-tall red Solo cup inflatables. Last year, Keith, whose current single is “Drunk Americans,” gave us “Drinks After Work.” This year, Little Big Town inspired us to skip work altogether and do a little day drinking.
If it was hard to not be cynical about country music’s dependence on alcohol in 2013, it’s downright impossible now. Especially when so many of today’s rising and falling country stars are ready and willing to shill for liquor companies and the like while singing about drinking in songs that just as often tend to involve driving. While country music failed to produce a novelty-song-slash-commercial as hokey as “Red Solo Cup” in 2014, plenty of artists name-dropped liquor companies in similarly transparent displays of product placement.
Florida Georgia Line — who hosted this year’s American Country Countdown Awards partly from behind a bar — sing about at least four different beer brands on their 2014 smash Anything Goes. Lady Antebellum boast about taking shots of Crown Royal in “Bartender.” Dustin Lynch let us know PBR is his beer of choice in “Where It’s At (Yep, Yep).” Jason Aldean, FGL and Chesney all name-checked Jack Daniel’s, while Bryan was lucky enough to kiss a girl with Bacardi on her lips in “Roller Coaster.” And congrats to Chase Rice, who, in his hit “Ready Set Roll,” found a dream girl who hits the spot like a Fireball shot. Also lucky in love is McGraw, who went lookin’ for that girl and found a “neon Jägerbomb country-oke singer.” (Certainly that can’t be a description of Faith?)
And mad props to Jake Owen, who managed to rhyme “Corona” with “Daytona” in his effervescent cracked-tallboy musical mist “Beachin’,” a song during which you’d have sworn you heard the Florida native sing the word “cocaine” when slurring the phrase “cold can.” Still, the Drunken Rhyme Scheme Award goes to Blake Shelton, who pulled off rhyming “fajitas” with “margaritas” in the passive-aggressively beige “Doin’ What She Likes.”
As 2015 dawns, it doesn’t seem likely that country music will sober up anytime soon, especially as party songs continue to dominate country radio. But perhaps artists and songwriters will change the way they utilize booze in their lyrics. There is already a hint of such transition in songs like Eric Church’s “Talladega,” which incorporates a subtle nod to drinking whiskey as a means to summon nostalgia, not as a way of racing toward the inevitable blackout. And to that, we raise our own glass.