The Singles Jukebox

They did another thing wrong…

[Video]
[2.53]

Tim de Reuse: A terrifying peek behind the bro-country event horizon; the whole genre scrunched up like a loaf of Wonder Bread in a hydraulic press. The “guitar” is an alien, glassy thing, kept around out of habit and inertia like a vestigial organ. Marshmello’s instrumental is coherent only if you don’t actually try to pick out a single instrument from the haze. Commodity fetishism finally stripped of pretense, un-sublimated, all metaphor drifting away like diesel fumes, leaving only the genuine desire to achieve orgasm with your dick in a $60,000 luxury pickup.
[1]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: That sounds mad uncomfortable, dude.
[2]

TA Inskeep: I hate this ode to fucking in the back of a pickup for the following reasons: 1) grown men need to stop calling women “girl”; 2) a trad EDM-adjacent boom-bap shouldn’t be all over mainstream country radio; 3) “we could break it in, if you know what I mean” is an utterly icky turn of phrase. 
[0]

Iain Mew: The instrumental is cookin’ on about half a burner, but the bigger problem is an acute case of metaphor backwash. By the time you’re singing “you and me in a truck bed wide like a California King” you’re not using creative ambiguity, you’re just singing about having sex on the back of a truck. From there the “it” easily glides into being about the woman he’s with; read that back into the already weird “these wheels are innocent”, plus “no history and you just can’t fake that” and “let’s put some miles on it” and there’s some gross implications. Basically the song is too easy to read as Kane Brown waggling his eyebrows and saying “hey babe, let’s get together and depreciate your market value”.
[2]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: At least it’s a significant improvement from the last rodeo. 
[3]

Julian Axelrod: Now this is a song that could use a big Phil Collins drum fill.
[5]

Ian Mathers: This actually feels less ersatz than Brown’s own “I Can Feel It,” but he’s still pretty generic; the real surprise is that Marshmello keeps the boshing relatively restrained, which is a pity. It’s not bad, wouldn’t be mad if I heard it in the wild. But I am also going to take this blurb space to talk about a superior modern country song (and track I missed blurbing when I was inconveniently sick last month), Shaboozey’s superior “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, which is an easy [10] and makes this feel even more milquetoast than it does in isolation.
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: Are there any good EDM/country crossovers? This is just emotionally flaccid grocery-store-core.
[1]

Taylor Alatorre: Justice for Icona Pop.
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: It should be exactly the wrong point in the nostalgia cycle for anyone to be resurrecting the festival EDM meets festival folk of Avicii’s biggest hits… and it is!
[2]

Hannah Jocelyn: One quarter of a single Mississippi and three quarters of “Wake Me Up” — much less leaden than “I Can Feel It,” and so it’s more likable!
[6]

Aaron Bergstrom: I have to assume the new truck is a replacement for the horse they’ve already beaten to death.
[1]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Could not believe when this ended that it did not break the three-minute mark.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: This is an awful single that stops trying to be a real song somewhere around the four-“miles on it”-mark. But if you replace everything but the backing track with the hook from “Timber,” it becomes catchy, so sorry, I can’t score it any lower.  
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: “Fuck this movie.” – Sean Burns
[0]