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Country Songs a Form of Torture

By Gloria Diaz

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Fort Wayne Reader

2016-07-14

Recently at work, I’ve been subjected to country music. For one three week stretch, it was all country, all shift. The themes were familiar: patriotism, broken hearts, alcohol, bad grammar, twangy accents and good old boy machismo. It was starting to drive me nuts. I wasn’t the only one. Even my co-workers, who said they liked country music were getting a little tired of it. On the last night of the Three Week Country Fest, I hijacked the P.A. system and played “Linus and Lucy.” I figured it was the least offensive song on my phone. It was well-received: people were dancing and looked in a better mood than they had been in about … three weeks.

I heard certain songs over and over, and came to dread some of them. To cope, I tried making up new lyrics to some of them, but others had me laughing because I was mishearing some of the words. One song sounded like, “Boobs been, have your boobs been longer?” I knew that couldn’t be right, so I did a Google search. Turns out it’s Shania Twain’s “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” I heard it at work today and burst out laughing.

Another song that was inescapable was “Sangria,” by Blake Shelton. The chorus, “Your lips taste like sangria,” seems to repeat way too many times, and it gets on my nerves. I can’t think of any word that rhymes with “sangria,” but there’s a line that ends with the word “front” and I can’t mention the word I can think of that rhymes with “front.” Well, there’s “grunt”, “stunt”, “want”, and “bunt”, but I wasn’t thinking about those.

Then there’s the song about hearing a song on the radio by Luke Bryan. Instead of the “Oh my God, this is my song,” line, I’ve switched it to “Oh my God, these jeans show my thong, I’ve been worrying all about this all night long.” I haven’t finished the chorus yet.

And then, there’s “It’s America.” It celebrates the great things about the United States, like lemonade and people cleaning up after tornados, rides in Chevrolets, high school proms, Springsteen, cities and farms, open arms (not lately Rodney Atkins!) and other things. I thought of creating a 2016 version. “It’s a homemade pipe bomb, it’s a Taylor Swift song, it’s a black guy getting shot, yeah, it’s smoking pot in Colorado, everything topped with avocado, it’s Muslims and immigrants and Hispanics getting blamed, It’s America!

We’re starting a new week, so I can’t wait to see what music we having going on tomorrow. For a while, we had the 50s and 60s Muzak channel on, and I realized how upbeat the music was. I was dancing and wiggling more than usual. I had to chuckle at the lyrics too. They seem so innocent compared with more recent music. The Big Bopper was singing about Chantilly lace, a pretty face, and a ponytail. Missy Elliot sang about shaving her chocha in “Work It.” Then there’s the ever so classy, “My Neck, My Back,” by Khia. How far we’ve come—or how far we’ve fallen—into the gutter.

Hopefully, it will be the oldies channel. Gotye’s follow-up song to “Somebody That I Used To Know” took several years to come out (at least that’s what it seemed like) and it sounds bizarre. Then, the “Budapest” song gets on my nerves too. It’s enough to make me want to hijack the P.A. system again and bust out “Even the Clouds Get High” and “Don’t Trust Whitey,” by James Kochalka. They aren’t radio friendly songs, but they make me laugh. And I don’t mishear the lyrics.