Spot the Felonies: Texas Edition!

[Video][Website]
[3.75]

Anthony Easton: I cannot review this out of context: a) This is not the first out gay country song. Aside from the history of lesbian country blues from the 1920s onwards, and work that is heavily coded as gay — I heard Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” at a dyke bar last night — there is a history from the ’70s onwards of independently produced country music for gays and by gays (including a song called “Cryin’ These Cocksucking Tears“). In the ’80s and ’90s, the music moved a bit, but you could say that the Topp Twins in New Zealand, kd lang in Canada or Melissa Etheridge in the States had solid country roots. b) Shane McAnally, who is one of the most popular producers and writers in Nashville right now, came out this year and wrote Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow,” which drops his first explicit reference. This and Miranda Lambert coming out in favour of “marriage equality” suggests that a kind of safe, bourgeoisie gay identity might be emerging of late. c) This dude — hairless, genially handsome, almost sexless — will be getting the press, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets a major-label effort, and it will last an album, and then bomb because of that geniality (see Chely Wright’s career problems post-coming out) d) Country is in the middle of a major resettling about what masculinity means, and this might be part of that. e) The producers, writers, label staff, even perhaps performers (but not Jamey Johnson, he’s a homophobic prick) tend towards the whitebread middle of progressivism, but the audience is still really quite conservative. But that is also changing a bit. For people my generation and a bit younger, homosexuality — when wrapped up in marriage and the flag, when it is this sexless, when, like in the Musgraves track above, it’s about love — is quite safe. f) Which means, you know, as a queer fan of country music, I should be impressed, but I am mostly bored: by his skill, by his narrative and by this track, which is terribly boring. 
[3]

John Seroff: Gender equality and inclusivity feels more worthwhile when what’s being shared is justice or human rights and not STDs or watered-down anthem pop.  I get that the YouTube phenomenon of Grand’s sudden fame is more about the startling and welcome cultural climate of acceptance for a break-out genderbent pop-almost-country star (as long as he looks like an Abercrombie and Fitch model), but this particular bit of questionably forward thinking and by-the-numbers fluff ain’t hardly a Brokeback Molehill musically speaking.
[3]

Iain Mew: All of the bravery has gone into the subject and none into the specifics or the music, resulting in dreary clenched-fist emoting that gets tiring really fast. Well, not quite none. It does easily beat denpagumi.inc for longest silence in the middle of a 2013 single, but he even fluffs the resultant chance to make a big impact by coming back in on drawn out feedback.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Heavily indebted to Lady Gaga’s “You and I,” “All-American Boy” sounds similarly tailored to small-club pyrotechnics. Gaga’s lust for corncake lay somewhere between celebration and tourism. Grand’s is just poignant. It’s not the fact that his dude is (mostly?) straight, but that he represents all these worn-out symbols of normalcy: jeans and fireworks and “America”. There’s none of that it-gets-better shit here; it seems our hero would like nothing more than to hang around his hometown. Like Victor Willis and company, Grand agrees that Levis and tees are the best. But he’s looking to crack their code, rather than construct his own. So we’ve got a wide-eyed depiction of desire smuggled in a hard Phil Vassar shell. Sometimes, the best way to deal with a symbol is to set it on fire.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Nothing in the arrangement — as loud and ponderous as if the engineer thought Slippery When Wet a touchstone — suggests what I had to look up online: a narrative by a queer country songwriter. “Narrative” is generous: the details gleaned from several generations of AOR, voiced by a singer whose prowess can fill a karaoke bar.
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: Is this really pushing the envelope? Maybe I just don’t have the contextual experience to understand the implications of it being country or the invocation of the words “All American”, but it doesn’t seem all that incredible. My actual experience, growing up in a slightly isolated, steadily decaying, 97% white, working class English town was that not being straight — perhaps to elide the T from LGBT — was no big deal. Myopic, yes, but that’s how I’ve always felt, and stories like the one in “All American Boy” being on TV for as long I can remember are just the more pointed part of a patchwork of unimportance that contributed to that. Granted, less of those stories have been on the radio, and that’s quite odd, but there’ve definitely been some, many made before Grand or I were born. As an apparently independent work then, is this likely to gain much more traction than the little it has online and join them? There’s a fair amount to like about it – the piano, the Yearning and the subtle pigeonhole rejection of the “boys and girls” line — but it doesn’t feel that important. If it does to anyone else though, then job done.
[7]

Edward Okulicz: An out country singer with high production values and overt narratives, groomed for mainstream consumption! Great idea on paper, and this is no doubt someone’s fantasy but it’s not mine. Not just groomed, Grand’s scrubbed clean and stereotype-tastic. He’s gorgeous and there’s nothing wrong with his voice; it’s just the story is so hackneyed and the delivery has absolutely no sex or passion in it. Grand’s homosexuality is presented as merely desexualised longing and the trite fantasy of the video doesn’t add any believability to the desire so much as compound the problem. I don’t doubt that this comes from his heart but I’m not convinced it comes from his loins.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I never really appreciated just how hooky “Bad Day” was until now.
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