Super-extra-double-real, y’all…

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[2.30]

Zach Lyon: Now even country music fans can experience being sung at by a corpse! And I’m not talking about George Jones!
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Martin Skidmore: Why don’t we get more George Jones here? He’s one of my all-time favourite singers. Admittedly he does sound old and frail and tired now, with no bite left in his voice, and he can’t rescue this dreary country-tinged soft-rock position-statement ballad from the singer out of Staind.
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Anthony Easton: Did ya’ll read the GQ article this month about Billy Ray Cyrus, who thought genuinely that moving to LA and climbing aboard the Disney Train was the beginning of Satan controlling his life?
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Jer Fairall: “Now it’s been twelve years since I sold my soul to the devil in L.A.” — wait, do you mean to imply that there was something insincere and pandering about Staind? Better, I suppose, to lend your lugubrious moan to jingoistic bullshit like this than to the whitened smiles of, er, “It’s Been a While”, as the kind of folk typically at risk of being stirred into committing ill-advised acts of violence or political activity by like-minded odes to xenophobia will find this particular one far too navel-gazing and melodically inert to angry up the blood too much.
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David Moore: I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think parts of this cheap, pandering, base-thumping piece of red state red meat were fascinating — the choice to Autotune the Devil, say. Or the fact that Aaron, as described, sounds an awful lot like a hippie (lives rent-free in the middle of nowhere and smokes pot all day) but identifies hard right. Or how the “second flag” under the stars and stripes turns out, to my (relative) relief, not to be Confederate, but Gadsden, apparently a Tea Party symbol (shocker). But stupid is stupid — he disdains government assistance while living on land whose development was presumably heavily subsidized back when granddad got it for a thousand and change back in ’62 (wonder what it’s worth now!); I love country, then guns, then family in that order (thanks for remembering us eventually, dad); and songwise the whole thing has very little to do with Hank — it’s “Dead or Alive” fronted by a closet nu-metal mook who wishes he could at least sound a little like Jamey Johnson (he can’t).
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Jonathan Bogart: Even if Bon Jovi made better use of the chord progression twenty-five years earlier — and “Wanted Dead Or Alive” still isn’t anything like a good song — that’s still no excuse for letting the back half be nothing but clumsy Tea Party dog whistling.
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Alfred Soto: With more credits than a R&B song and a lineup more gangsta, this not unattractive plod through southern signifiers will get undue attention for the line “I’ve never needed government to hold my hand,” which you can expect to hear at a Huckabee rally near you. George and Charlie’s imprimatur and dessicated larynxes do the former Staind frontman’s bidding, including the effacement of the fact that Darius Rucker has more legitimate country johnny-come-lately points, and ten times the justifiable defensiveness. What we’ve got here is another example of white self-pity.
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Alex Ostroff: The title, the guitars, and the try-too-hard lyrics say “Country Boy”, but the vocals say Nickelback.
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John Seroff: The perverse novelty of hearing a Russian Jew from Massachusetts sing retarded anti-government/pro-American jingo about the joys of bow hunting deer in the Appalachians while lifting heavily from a Jersey Boy aside, this is somehow even more appalling than I would’ve imagined. I know, I know: knock me over with a feather that the frontman of Staind’s stab at a conservative country crossover is an ever-increasingly pandering teabagging for the ears, but did this sumbitch have to go and drag George Jones into his mess? Hasn’t the man suffered enough already?
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Chuck Eddy: So I guess — after Hootie’s crossover, and Nickelback’s “This Afternoon” video, and Eric Church swiping Collective Soul riffs, and Lady Antebellum sounding like Matchbox 20 sometimes — this is the most blatant scrunge-holding-hands-with-country yet. Could see Montgomery Gentry or Jamey Johnson (maybe an inspiration?) doing a dirge like this one starts out, including the selling-soul-to-L.A.-biz cliches. They’d sing it way less constipated, and get way more power (more rock) out of it, but that doesn’t mean this Staind joker is conveying no emotion here. The lack of dynamics works against him though, turns things monotonous, whereas Johnson might actually work the drone into intensity. And then, of course, it all sinks into jingo Tea Party nanny-state-baiting, and somebody stupid (Chris Young, I guess? Sounds too young and smooth to be Charlie, and I’m not gonna watch the vid to make sure) ends it all by informing me my attitude should be that any government changing “the way it is now” will have to go through him. So I hope public-sector workers in the Midwest, and Latin Americans in Arizona, are listening in — because it’s pretty clear union-busting and xenophobic government officials in those respective places want to change “the way it is now” for those constituents bigtime. But somehow I doubt that’s what these idiots had in mind.
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