The Worst Band In America
By No band in America makes people with decent taste want to punch themselves in the face like Florida Georgia Line, the Nickelback of country music.
Ebola causes you to leak fluids from your body’s orifices and bleed internally until your body starts to slowly shut down. Then you die from a combination of low blood-pressure and organ failure. If you have the misfortune of being an American who catches this vile disease, the media will ruthlessly invade your privacy and reveal every minute detail of your life to the public. This is a horrid fate for anyone unfortunate enough to catch this terrible malady.
And I would gladly endure it all so long as I never again have to suffer the experience of sitting seven rows back from the stage while Florida-Georgia Line and Jason Aldean gleefully danced on the grave of one of the most purely American forms of art to the tune of cheers from 9,999 very intoxicated people.
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Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line looks like country music’s take on Scott Stapp, with his flowing hair and affinity for bare skin and crosses. While on stage he and Brian Kelley and the rest of the band all sported one of their own band’s T-shirts. Yes, they’re an entire band of “that guys.” Hubbard also handled most of the band’s singing duties, including occasionally dropping into a rap-like cadence while Kelley stood around playfully strumming an acoustic guitar that’s nowhere to be heard in the mix. Congrats bro-country, you have your Limp Bizkit.
Florida-Georgia Bizkit’s performance came to a giant apex of overtly stitched denim, explosions and smoke when the band launched into their current hit song “Dirt.” This is not said lightly, but “Dirt” might be the single worst song to be a No. 1 hit in the history of country music, though we’re about 5 years away from Axl Rose going country in a cash grab. Accept it, America: We’re getting a pedal-steel version of “Patience” and the country audience is gonna eat it up.
“Dirt” contains lyrics like “We all came from it” and “Build your corn field, whiskey bonfires on it” and for the love of everything I swear it’s like the people who love these songs don’t realize that none of them are actually farmers. It took everything in me to not turn to the dad sporting Puma branded golf gear and point out that driving a truck does not autocratically make one the Marlboro Man. Oh, and the band played “Dirt” twice just in case you were wondering how hard they were pushing the single.
Congratulations Justin Moore and Outlaws Like Me, you’re officially off the hot seat. Because right here, right now, I am unilaterally declaring that Florida Georgia Line’s new album Anything Goes is the worst album ever released in the history of country music. Ever. Including Florida Georgia Line’s first album Here’s To The Good Times, including anything else you can muster from the mainstream, including a 4-track recording made by a head trauma victim in a walk-in closet with a Casiotone keyboard and an out-of-tune banjo. Anything Goes can slay all comers when it comes to its heretofore unattainable degree of peerless suckitude.
In a word, this album is bullshit. Never before has such a refined collection of strident clichés been concentrated in one insidious mass. Never before have the lyrics to an album evidenced such narrowcasted pseudo-mindless incoherent drivel. Never before have such disparate and diseased influences been married so haphazardly in a profound vacuum of taste, and never have all of these atrocities been platooned together to be proffered to the public without someone, anyone with any bit of conscience and in a position of power putting a stop to this poisoning of the listening public.
Shiny objects and fire also seem to excite and distract Florida Georgia Line and fill them with a profound sense of wonder, and so soliloquies to these things also show up occasionally, as does the word “good.” They really like that word.
“Got on my smell good.
Got a bottle of feel good.
Shined up my wheels good.
You’re looking real good.”That verse pretty much sums up this entire album. And no, these are not lyrics to the song that is actually titled “Good Good.”
Florida Georgia Line is serving the same role for music critics as Guy Fieri does for food critics: as the prime example of why we can’t have nice things. Of course, the people who like Florida Georgia Line and Fieri, who I basically assume are the exact same people, don’t care. They are happy to spend $25 on a terrible burger covered with Guy’s Fiery Awesome Sauce and then drink 13 Michelob Ultras while listening to the worst music this nation has ever produced, a genre about trucks and rural life and being tough for a bunch of people who live in Round Rock or Cobb County who wouldn’t know corn from wheat or a bulldozer from a combine.
And is it my role to be a snob and look down on these people? Yes. Yes it is.