Scott Dorsey wrote:
Jeff Henig wrote:
OTOH, there is music with anger that is cathartic or uplifting, and then
there is music with anger that doesn't solve anything, and is noise. I
don't know how to break that down further, other than to paraphrase: I know
it when I hear it.
The following is the absolute best music review of all time:
"The wild corybantic orgy, this din of brasses, tin pans and kettles,
this Chinese or Caribbean clatter with wood sticks and ear-cutting
scalping knives... heartless sterility, obliteration of all melody,
all tonal charm, all music... This revelling in the destruction of
all tonal essence, raging satanic fury in the orchestra, this diabolic,
lewd caterwauling, scandal-mongering, gun-toting music, with an
orchestral accompaniment slapping you in the face... Hence, the secret
fascination that makes this music the darling of the feeble-minded
royalty, the plaything of the camarilla, of the court flunkeys covered
with reptilian slime, and of the blase hysterical female court parasites
who need this galvanic stimulation by massive instrumental treatment
to throw their pleasure-weary frog-legs into violent convulsions.... this
diabolical din of this pig-headed man, stuffed with brass and sawdust,
inflated, in an insanely destructive self-aggrandizement, by Mephistopheles'
mephitic and most venomous hellish miasma, into Beelzebub's Court Composer
and General Director of Hell's Music-- Richard Wagner."
-- J.L. Klein
as quoted in the Wagner-Lexicon
Nice!
Here's one of its competitors.
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 bull****. 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.
Not to get all old man on your ass, but most of the time I don't even
understand what the hell these dudes are saying. Brian Kelley and Tyler
Hubbard have their own language, partial to the most
grammatically-challenged and stupefying vocabulary lurking in the
dankest sewers of the English dialect, but not residing firmly in any
specific one of them so no truly proper translation can be obtained.
It's like Pig Latin for douchewads€”understood by them and them only. And
only with the perfect deficiency of brain cells will their concoction of
Ebonics, metrosexual douche speak, and stagnant gene pool rural jargon
become anything resembling coherent to the human ear.
Forget the already ultra-concentrated and extremely-narrow breadth of
modern mainstream country music's laundry list songwriting legacy,
Florida Georgia Line has devised a way to inexplicably make it even more
attenuated and terrible. "Girl, alcoholic beverage, truck, river or
lake"€” that's pretty much the alpha and omega of the Anything Goes
building blocks. Most of these songs have more songwriters than they do
basic lyrical themes, with an average of four cooks per diarrhetic
serving, and one song that boasts five songwriters and still struggles
to pen anything that comes close to a complete sentence or a
comprehensible thought.
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." Needless to say,
any moments involving depth, sorrow, self-reflection, doubt, or evolved
thinking in any capacity have been unceremoniously scrubbed from this
project entirely, save for one song, "Dirt," which only works to anger
the blood even more because it proves that these morons are capable of
so much more. A song like "Sippin' On Fire" tries to cobble together
some semblance of a love story, but bogs down like all these songs do in
focusing on the material objects and consumables inadvertently on hand
in situations instead of the honest sentiments being felt between two
people. Women and "love" are compared to alcoholic beverages and other
material objects, and vice versa more times than I care to count on this
album, as if they are interchangeable in stature in the human
experience.
Another song that would have been decent if only Florida Georgia Line
didn't figure out how to screw it up is "Bumpin' The Night." Despite the
title alluding to the listener being in store for yet another
demonstration of shallowness, the song displays a compositional depth
that is both surprising and enriching, even though what passes for steel
guitar is so transmogrified by the EDM production, it's hardly
noticeable. There's nothing wrong with fun, feel good songs themselves.
But in such a void of anything striking even close to variety, an
otherwise decent song like "Bumpin' The Night" suffers demonstrably
amongst its peers.
And talk about going to the cliché well too many times, there's a song
on this album called "Angel" that I kid you not is built around the
often sarcastically-used pick up line "Did it hurt when you fell from
the sky?" Any woman who hears this line coming from any man has my
personal blessing to immediately spray them in the face with mace and
knee them in the nuts. The idea that these knuckleheads think that this
line is "sweet" just speaks to the depravity of self-awareness they
suffer from in an irrevocable degree.
There really is a toxic concentration of bad songs on Anything Goes, and
it is all punctuated on the final track "Every Night" where the
hyper-everything that riddles this album somehow gets heightened even
more as Florida Georgia Line explain they don't need the weekend because
every night for them is a wild, raging good time. This personifies the
diabolical sameness of this album, where it's just a contiguous string
of carefree party references and virtually nothing else, almost throwing
caution to the wind and daring fate to make a mockery of this project
over the long perspective of time, if they're not openly cashing out on
the franchise in the face of the obvious dying of a trend.
I would call it country rap, but even that would give this album more
definition than it truly carries. I would call it pop, but even that
world would not stand for such vacuousness. And once again the listener
is left steadfastly perplexed at what Brian Kelley (the short-haired
one) actually does in this band beyond singing one verse of "Dirt" and a
few random backup lines so heavily Auto-tuned you can't tell for sure
it's him.
Everybody knows where Florida Georgia Line is going to lead. Scott
Borchetta must know it. Their producer Joey Moi, formerly of Nickelback
must know it. Their manager Kevin Zaruk, also formerly of Nickelback,
apparently knows it, and admitted as much in a recent Billboard
interview. "It's bizarre because I know so many people who say they
can't stand them but listen to Nickelback and go to their shows. This is
a band that sold hundreds of thousands of dollars in merchandise, and to
this day, I don't know if I've ever seen a person with a Nickelback
T-shirt on walking the streets anywhere in the world. I don't know what
it is, but for whatever reason it became cool to hate Nickelback, and
once that trend took off, it exploded. What I've definitely talked to
[FGL's] Brian [Kelley] and Tyler [Hubbard] about is that whenever
anybody becomes successful in any business, there's people that get
jealous."
This is the problem. Florida Georgia Line and their fans will read a
review like this, and truly believe that jealousy and nothing else is at
the heart of the criticism, and will point to their "success" as proof
of this. But Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Strait,
and so many more were wildly successful in their time too, and also
faced criticism, but never to the degree of criticism Florida Georgia
Line is faced with. The music of these legends withstood the test of
time, while artists like Nickelback, Billy Ray Cyrus, New Kids On The
Block, and MC Hammer were also wildly successful in their time, but now
their music is nowhere to be seen besides as a novelty, or listened to
as irony or nostalgia.
It is Florida Georgia Line's destiny to go down as a laughing stock, to
be the next Nickelback, where their fans hide their T-shirts and shun
them, tearing them down just as vehemently and quickly as they
artificially propped them up. Their sophomore album and a song like
"Dirt" was their one opportunity to change that destiny and be known for
something more. But instead they super concentrated what makes them bad
as either a last cash-grabbing hurrah, or as a misguided miscalculation
that their polarizing nature is due to the insecurities of others
instead of a true concern about substance and sustainability. Point to
current attendance numbers and call the haters jealous all you want. All
one has to do is point to Nickelback as an example of why this doesn't
work in the long term.
Florida Georgia Line and Anything Goes are an embarrassment to country
music.
http://tinyurl.com/l274ejn
--
shut up and play your guitar * HankAlrich.Com
HankandShaidriMusic.Com
YouTube.Com/WalkinayMusic