It’s the return of the duo behind the acclaimed “Hillbilly Bone“!
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Alfred Soto: Hell no.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Blake Shelton’s better when he’s evil.
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Isabel Cole: When the revolution comes those who disparagingly compared Old Town Road to a country song by a white person will be first against the wall.
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Will Adams: Where to start? There’s the nonsensical title (was “Damn Yeah” taken?), the call and response aiming for comedy but landing on drunk, the bloated arrangement and, worst of all, the thinly veiled dogwhistling of getting that darn “Old Town Road” off the radio in favor of Hank Williams Jr. “Hell Right” is as cynical as they come. This is pandering at its worst.
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Kylo Nocom: Blake Shelton and Trace Adkins live in an idyllic country of phased guitar and pretty-sounding riffs. “Hell Right” is funny and takes me to a place of macho camaraderie that somehow sounds like a lovely warm night out. Shame about that corny “Old Town Road” line that, more than anything else, just plays into tired, toxic nostalgia. Their humor wears thin quick.
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Thomas Inskeep: “Hell Right,” a “boys gonna raise hell” anthem of the type Shelton’s fond, ostensibly to give himself bonafides with the jacked-up-truck crowd, is a solid enough song, and Shelton (a fair-to-middlin’ singer) and Adkins (a marvelous, rich-and-deep-voiced singer) make a great pairing — cf. 2009’s ridiculous and sublime “Hillbilly Bone.” But they just had to go and include that “then the girl from the small town/took off the ‘Old Town [Road]’/put on a little Hank Jr.” lyric, to which Adkins adds a “thank God” aside. And they can claim all they want that they’re just having a little fun, but I don’t buy it for a minute; the replacement of a queer POC with a country icon-turned-Confederate figurehead is a little too convenient not to be a (barely) coded dogwhistle. Which is a shame, because “Hell Right” is a [6] or [7] without it. But I can’t judge the song without including my feelings about that bullshit, either.
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Katherine St Asaph: And I was like hell right, hell right, fucking yeah no get out of here with this. Unlike the commentariat, I actually don’t think the writers (including bro-country notable Brett Tyler) deliberately sat down and chose a known reactionary artist to Send a Message with. Like “Kleenex” is to tissue paper, or “Dumpster” is to this song, both Hank Williamses have long been the go-to cliché namedrop that songwriters use to suggest Real Country Music, also deployed by Blake Shelton previously, and a Hank himself. There are implications and dog-whistles, sure, but a step removed. What it mostly is, is lazy — as lazy as rhyming “Junior” with “sinners,” or suggesting any girl in 2019 with “rowdy friends” would pick it as pregaming music. What isn’t lazy is obnoxious: taking the most delicate possible guitar and lighting a fart under it; wolf-whistling; touting authenticity on a bloated, Auto-Tune-slathered (“all her rowdy friends” is particularly glaring) song; not even cussing right.
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