It May Be Dumb, But Lots Of Fun

I guess I’ve tired of Top 40 radio tunes. So while I drive (and provided my wife’s not with me) I listen to “Ninety-Seven Five, Hawaii’s Hot Country.”

It provides me some comic relief in these serious times.

That music seems to glorify drinking, hopping from woman to woman, not going to school, not having a job and dressing and acting in a generally unemployable way.

A prime example is Billy Currington’s I’m Pretty Good at Drinking Beer:

I’m not the type to work in a bank,

I’m no good at slappin’ on paint,

Don’t have a knack for makin’ motors crank, no

But I’m pretty good at drinkin’ beer.

Aaron Lewis in Country Boy sings that:

I like my jeans and my old T-shirts,

And a couple extra pounds never really hurt.

‘Cause a country boy is all I’ll ever be.

Well, if I ever heard a song of no ambition, that’s it. But he also says he has no need for the government to hold his hand. I doubt he’ll be singing that when he’s in his 70s and in need of Social Security and Medicare.

Or the grammar in Steve Holy’s hit:

Baby, love don’t run Baby, love don’t hide

That’s “doesn’t,” Steve! But I guess if Iz can get away with “for you and I,” then you can skate with “don’t.”

Have you heard Tracy Byrd’s Ten Rounds With Jose Cuervo? Tells of 10 glasses of tequila and how smashed you get. Just like another song I heard about going to church on Sunday, then playing a ball game with the guys, hitting the bar and drinking “right through to the next day.”

I heard a country-song woman singing “I should kill you right now and do the whole world a favor.”

The songs about loving God, family and the USA are OK so long as they’re not to the exclusion of tolerance for atheists, gay families and countries posing no threat to us. But I get the sense most of it is about exclusion.

It seems that if you have a tractor and a pickup truck but little schooling, you’re a country boy hero in current songdom.

No money? No problem. And the worse your jeans or your booze habit, the more the girls will love you.

So I keep hoping that most of the listeners are not our up-and-coming generation, which needs something more inspirational than:

I smoke a little weed.

I still live in the sticks where you wouldn’t go,

In a town of 12-hundred off an old dirt road.

And a country boy is all I’ll ever be.

And finally another one from Billy Currington:

Baby, I Want You To Love Me Like My Dog Does.