Jason Aldean – Dirt Road Anthem
Now let’s all imagine “Big Green Tractor” as a Ke$ha song…
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Chuck Eddy: This song has been puttering around the backroads ever since roly-poly hick-hopper Colt Ford did it (with co-writer Brantley Gilbert’s chorus-hook help) on his 2008 debut album; Brantley added his own version last year, and now this — finally a great big hit, but the way Nashville did it was by blanding it more each subsequent time it was redone. Diminishing returns, so by now the rap parts are only barely recognizable as such, even if Ludacris did do them on the CMT Awards. Truth is, the song wasn’t all that great in the first place: Even its rural petulance goes through the motions, and the namedrop making fun of George Jones’s riding lawnmower D.W.I. (I guess that’s what it’s doing?) just seems gratuitous.
[5]
Zach Lyon: Of course, Aldean doesn’t commit to the idea of rapping, instead appropriating Colt Ford’s verses into some classic country talk-singing. No problem with that. The problem is that Colt’s verses only translate well for a couple lines before they start to sound off. That sing-songy “I know somethin’ you don’t know” comes off natural when Colt does it, because it’s not unnatural for rap to occasionally break into melody. When Aldean does it, he makes it less melodic than the rest of the verse, which makes the opposite of sense, and the weakness starts to show. By the time he threatens to knock your loud mouth out, the verse has lost any semblance of concord between what’s being said and how it’s being delivered. Would’ve been much, much better if Colt’s original were just repackaged as a single, replacing Brantley Gilbert with Aldean’s gorgeous chorus and the lush muddiness of this new production.
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Michaela Drapes: I’m always a bit of a mess when a song goes on and on about the pleasures of night drives on out-of-the-way country roads (that was one of my favorite pastimes before moving to Brooklyn), so that may make me a bit biased to the treacly nostalgia of the lyric, but I’m also susceptible to falling for the smooth references to Lynyrd Skynrd in the production (so prevalent, in fact, that this borders on being a spruced-up Drive By Truckers song). And, in lieu of an “anything but country or rap” crack, I’ll just point out that to my ears the spoken bits owe more to Charlie Daniels’ delivery on “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” than any rap source material. I’ve definitely come to like this track more than Colt Ford’s original version; he always seems like he’s trying too hard, while Aldean managed to make a spoken bridge in the middle of a country track seem like the most natural thing in the world — even more so when you bolt on a cameo from Ludacris, too.
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Josh Langhoff: Great to see Colt Ford’s country rap going Top 10 on both the country chart AND the Hot 100, but I wish Aldean’s version was better. He may sing it better than Brantley Gilbert — who wouldn’t? — but he lacks Ford’s authority as a rapper, so his “Dirt Road Anthem” comes across as a stiff novelty more than a real live genre fusion. Also, the big country radio production forfeits the originals’ dirt road-sy ambiance. In the song’s favor, it flouts the Nanny State’s open container laws and it doesn’t put me to sleep like Gilbert’s Halfway to Heaven album.
[5]
Anthony Easton: The chorus isn’t rock, which is odd, because Aldean has been a rocker for a long time. But the choruses, with their verbal acuity and speed sound more hip-hop then any of the talk-singing that country has its roots in. It is less well-written than Big K.R.I.T., but spends less time in a desire to match genre purity, and I think it’s better performed. But it’s exciting that they can be compared.
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Alfred Soto: I keep waiting for an Aldean single to knock me out. Thanks to a semi-rap and how he makes you savor that cold beer, this one comes closest.
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Sally O’Rourke: “Dirt Road Anthem” is the rare stab at country rap that doesn’t insist upon its own novelty. Unlike modern country artists who name-drop the greats, Aldean sounds like he’s learned a thing or two from George Jones. And unlike the ’80s cheese-rock fetish plaguing most of Nashville, Aldean’s band isn’t afraid to get its hands a little dirty. “Dirt Road Anthem” isn’t perfect – the jokier lyrics clash with Aldean’s intensity, and at times the instrumentation abuts Nickelback – but it maps out an intriguing alternative route for the future of mainstream country.
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Jonathan Bogart: I wish there was more lyrical acknowledgement of a musical debt beyond George Jones — and I don’t mean hip-hop, as the patter sections owe more to “A Boy Named Sue” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” than to “Bring the Noise.” But this is a fine nostalgic reverie.
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Alex Ostroff: The country-singer-rapping trick has been deployed before, but this is the first time it hasn’t felt condescending. Aldean’s not particularly good at rapping, but he’s not deploying hip-hop slang with a wink to his audience or making jokes about gangsters. He’s just saying his piece. For that alone, I’m prepared to give him some credit. In the pantheon of non-rappers rapping, he’s not as marvelous as LFO but he’s certainly not as cringe-worthy as Madonna.
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Katherine St Asaph: An anthem for the least anthemic hours: when the sun’s too hot for you to peel yourself off the porch, you’ve poured enough tar-heavy beer into your gullet to nudge your center of gravity toward the concrete, and your brain’s lurching between shutdown and wondering, all a-mutter, whether Jason’s flow reminds you more of T.I. or Ke$ha.
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