And here I was thinking it was Professor Utonium…
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[5]
Tara Hillegeist: Somewhere between “Stand By Your Man” and “Salute,” and my fondness for it wobbles massively depending on whether my mood’s letting me take all those reiterated “somebody’s gotta”s as well-deserved praise and shoulder-squeezes for those of us who have to perform this much bullshit affective labor or an admonishment against desiring anything else. Her voice is rich enough it provokes sympathy, but her performance is impersonal enough it invites ambiguity. I suppose it could go both ways, depending on how many boys in your life you care to give any time of your day. Which makes me feel perversely glad self-identifying as trans and dykey means I’ll never have men love me enough to demand this of me, regardless of if I’ve ever wanted to give it to them or not. “Perversely”: what a depressing reason to feel good about my life choices.
[6]
John Seroff: If this is Monday, it must be “problematic pop on the Jukebox” day. I wouldn’t exactly call “God Made Girls” a backlash to the outlaw ladies of country boomlet; more of a blatant restatement of core genre policy values. Thematically, this is regressively deterministic horseshit; both you and I know more than a few girls who don’t want to wear a pretty skirt and both you and I know more than a few boys who do. That said, RaeLynn’s got a stronger than your average reality show contestant’s Voice with an interestingly nasal filigree. “Girls” is musically a strongly constructed song and it showcases her well. If you can get past a video and an ethos packed unironically with princesses, ballerinas and an ivory staircase to heaven, there’s a worthwhile song hiding under all that muslin.
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Thomas Inskeep: I know this is corny; I get it. RaeLynn’s accent is ridiculously thick, and the lyrics to her debut single are semi-silly. But something about it – I guess the whole package, the way it all comes together so seamlessly – gets me. It makes me not mind the cliché-ness of itself. The sum of this is definitely greater than its individual parts. “God Made Girls” is a sweet, simple little song that makes me smile, and what’s wrong with that?
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Alfred Soto: Her voice has a becoming elasticity, and she sounds like her own woman, but beyond the predictable way in which the fiddles and mandolins ornament instead of toughen the cornpone this is way too reactionary for my tastes. God made girls for boys. Girls wear skirts for boys. God told the boys, guys, I got something that’ll rock your world. There’s no suggestion in the music, RaeLynn’s intonations, or, of course, the words to suggest girls wear skirts and flirt for their own sake. There’s a song to be written from the point of view of a girl just past her teens trying to make sense of feminist values in a conservative culture, but “God Made Girls” accepts the culture without fuss.
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Brad Shoup: Can’t imagine how tough it is to write a prescriptive country song about being a woman, especially with the last decade offering so many good glimpses of opting out. Or maybe those are the outliers, and so coming up with something like this is pretty easy: just take a bro-country record and flip it like a pepper shaker. React accordingly. In places, RaeLynn — who was mentored on The Voice by Miranda Lambert, for what it’s worth — sings with a sense of noble responsibility; elsewhere, it comes off as low-grade policing. But hey, it plays out like this all over. I looked up the words on AZlyrics.com and found that they’d been transcribed by Amanda Mayer, Adrianna, Persephone, Amanda, and Hannah. I wonder what each of them looks at when they’re on the highway, staring into the middle distance.
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Jonathan Bradley: Adam’s rib gets a back story: some nice frocks were just going to waste, one thing led to another, and all of a sudden a TV talent show contestant has a minor hit. Women, RaeLynn proposes, were delivered unto the world as ornaments, but that doesn’t mean she considers being “something beautiful and breakable that lights up in the dark” to be a poor thing — and put that way, it sounds kind of magical. This is the core tension of the song: it insists that traditional expressions of femininity are something valuable and powerful and worthy of respect. I haven’t lived a life in which ideas about femininity are intertwined with my understanding of my self. If had, perhaps I would find the earnestness with which this embraces convention stifling: the list items — “somebody’s gotta…” — are a series of obligations, even when they’re admirable ones. But maybe I might thrill to hear something of my gender experience celebrated so affirmatively? I don’t know. What I do hear is a song that echoes Carrie Underwood’s “All American Girl” in its attempt to celebrate femininity and familiarity in the same breath. The Underwood song, however, shimmered brighter; this sets its sights lower, melodically and imaginatively. The lilt in RaeLynn’s delivery goes some way towards making up for that.
[5]
Anthony Easton: The hyper-femininity of this would seem to lend itself to camp readings. The mention of God and of women as civilizing influences suggest an old-fashioned space, where women are obviously submissive. But the irony is well defined — playing hyper-feminine becomes a way of using soft power to control those with hard power. Rae Lynn convincing the boy in question to erase what is viewed as messy (he needs to be told to wash his truck, or get dressed up, or dance properly), while maintaining her own power (she rocks his world, she’s strong enough to break his heart) is a fascinating example of the construction of the power. That she does this by self-identifying as fragile, but marking her power against his unstable body, perhaps sexually — that ellipse after “blow his” — is as much of a response to the absence of women in country music as “Quarterback” or “Follow Your Arrow.” I think that recent attempts to critically pay attention to country, is that the conservative quality of some of the discourse, while occasionally intended for nostalgia or sales (see “Automatic,” or most of Kenny Chesney’s career) is inherent to the history and the culture of the music. There is an attempt in certain critical circles to pay attention to Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” and not pay attention to Tammy Wynette’s “Womanhood,” or to spend a lot of time with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” but not spend a lot of time with Skeeter Davis’ “I Can’t Stay Mad at You.” This song is nowhere close to any of these four, but it’s a legitimate, fascinating response and part of country music history that is often erased. The vocals are strong, the guitars are bright, and the writing is snappy. In the words of the Big Lebowski, at least it’s an ethos.
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Katherine St Asaph: In reality, RaeLynn has graduated from The Voice audience to the subset of The Voice audience who will support her on radio and iTunes: the Hunger Games A&R mechanism by which all singing shows work. To The Internet, and to many of you reading this, RaeLynn has graduated from “who the fuck who cares” to THINKPIECELAND! Of all the problems with music writing in 2014, this might be the most harmful to artists. Columnists — most of whom live in Brooklyn, seldom if ever listen to pop, hip-hop, country, or whatever is being discussed, and are active racers in the social-justice-as-anti-normcore competition that characterizes New York media — hear a song once or twice. They apply urban and/or Dan Savage norms to suburban, heartland and/or teen-directed songs (RaeLynn grew up in Texas and was born in 1994), resulting in such ludicrosities as accusing Meghan Trainor’s narrator on “Title” of “withholding sex” for not wanting to sleep with her date until they’re official, or “God Made Girls” being called uniquely regressive despite its Hallmark complementarianism gracing embroideries, sermons, and girls-night-out Facebook memes for years. As writing, it’s useless — the audience isn’t Southern teens but people who want their anti-genre prejudices easily confirmed again — and as criticism, it both says nothing substantial about the music and forces musicians to battle fake media narratives to their own career deaths. RaeLynn is promising; she’s got a crackle in her voice that simultaneously evokes down-home stylings and Sia, and there’s something of a character actress to her interpretation. Unfortunately for her, this kerfuffle will probably result in her being given material with less personality. Can you see how nobody wins?
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