The Singles Jukebox

So you guys don’t want to check out this new small-batch double-hopped India Pale Ale with me?

[Video]
[6.30]

Will Adams: Some of my friends make fun of me for drinking Pabst Blue Ribbion — they say it’s just fizzy water that hipsters drink. So there’s a big voice telling me to embrace the respectfully short “Cheap Beer” with open arms, but it’s caught between two poles; the chorus is “I don’t give a fuck” in the awesome way, and the verses are “I don’t give a fuck” in the bad way.
[5]

Alfred Soto: Twenty-three and still drinking cheap beer, twenty-three and working in a surf-rock riff, twenty-three and getting Descendents right. 
[8]

Patrick St. Michel: That this might be a screed against snobby beer drinkers is pretty funny, and much like indulging in bottom-shelf brew every once in awhile, freaking out to this song live is probably a lot of fun you’ll probably regret later. Unfortunately, I am not in a mosh pit but in front of a computer, so this isn’t really doing it for me. 
[4]

Scott Mildenhall: They sound like graduates from the Andrew W.K. School Of Partying. A good education, but not good enough for them to resemble any more than pupils.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: It’s unfair, and probably musically/culturally inaccurate, to hear the chorus as frat pledges yelling fuck me and my beer. But I’d feel a lot better about this if I didn’t suspect they got the Trashmen sample from Seth MacFarlane.
[4]

Crystal Leww: The only discernable line in the song is “I drink cheap beer; so what? Fuck you.” It’s delivered with such anger and volume that the “so what?” that is trying so hard to sound like they don’t care what you think comes off as defensive and angry. It’s obvious that they do care what you think even if they don’t want to. It sounds exactly like a lot of boys I know, probably the same crowd that loves FIDLAR. FIDLAR does defensive boy very well because they get the tone energetic and loud and the guitars fast and melodic. The song is just short enough to where the loud guitars and even louder screaming don’t yet wear out their welcome.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: FIDLAR seems to exist primarily to make loud noises and say “fuck” a lot, and that’s a mission statement I can get behind — at least when its executed with such raucous abandon and fervent commitment to obnoxiousness. There doesn’t seem much modest about the trebley chug that opens “Cheap Beer,” but when the feverish blithering of the lead vocal enters for verse one, those opening “bah-bah-bah-bah”s seem all but quantized in comparison. The hook gets even more unsavory thanks to a series of punctuating guitar yelps that, as with similar accents in Radiohead’s “Creep,” sound like a deliberate act of sabotage. That the hullabaloo should turn out to be a celebration of getting trashed on spare change makes the whole mess even more thrilling. 
[9]

Jer Fairall: The Ramones-style baa baa baas win me over just as readily as that charmingly boneheaded chorus, though the first beer company to adopt the latter as their new slogan will instantly win my undying loyalty.
[7]

Anthony Easton: The problem is that most cheap beer isn’t really good, and is really difficult to get seriously fucked on. This song, however, is cheap but really quite good, and efficient in its time to fuck-up ratio. (They have songs about cheap cocaine, which is never a working-class drug, weed which is but impossible to get fucked up on, and shitty pills — which might be a West Coast thing, because any pills I’ve had in the middle of the country have been both pretty easily available, quite good quality, and not that expensive. I am waiting for their meth epic.) The last few seconds before the hyper efficient chorus ride the line between sublimity and pure chaos with a gorgeous energy. 
[9]

Brad Shoup: I worked in a factory off and on for a few years after college. Never made the first shift; I alternated between second and graveyard. When I was 23 or so, I got on the second shift at a plant in Northeast Austin. They gave us 30 minutes for dinner, with a 15-minute break at 10:30 PM. As soon as break hit, I hauled ass for the Quik Stop by the offramp, grabbed a six-pack of Bud Ice (6.0 ABV) and left it on the floorboard. When the shift ended, I’d head home, pull out one beer for now and put the rest in the freezer. By sunrise I’d have drunk all six, and while my roommates slept upstairs, I’d be watching the music-video channels, dancing to Gwen Stefani and Sophie Ellis-Bextor and T.I.: a buzzy, bubbling fool. Then I’d hit the mattress and do it again. Cheap beer was a small comfort for a kid who had no confidence; it built toward drunkenness slowly until rushing the brain in seeming seconds; it was an interloper’s subconscious solidarity with folks who were living to move from temp to full employment. My last day at the factory was in 2006. When the shift ended, Lawrence told me to grab two paper cups from the break room. I walked with him to his trunk. He pulled out a bottle of Hennessy and poured a toast.
[6]