Aggressively Average? Adulting Again? Applebee’s Ad?
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[3.57]
Edward Okulicz: An admirable attempt to redo “Fancy Like,” but with the doofy restaurant name-dropping replaced with garbage. And it’s not catchy — it needs an actual beat that does something, rather than trying to go down the middle between the genres he wants to be in. There’s also something so unforgivably noxious about people who say their spouse married down so smugly, having as it does the subtext that they did so because they’re so awesome. So instead of a silly but endlessly memeable chorus, we have a chorus that starts with Shit Dad Energy and moves through Humblebrag Gone Wrong. Because I’m already poisoned, I assumed “AA” referred to Hayes trying to stay out of Adult Alternative. He’s on his way there, and no amount of charch may save him.
[3]
Al Varela: Walker Hayes has found his niche appealing to suburban middle-class white people in the South who have enough to get by but not enough to vacation in Hawaii every year. This can be done right, but Hayes always picks these ugly guitar tones that sound like they’re out to annoy you. He also has this smug, self-satisfied attitude that makes him seem cockier than he really is. Hayes can self-deprecate all he wants, but there’s still something irritating about the way he brags that his wife is out of his league. What are you trying to prove, and to who? Maybe we should have given the viral hit to Brett Eldredge instead.
[4]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: A thoughtful and vulnerable confessional adulterated by flashes of toxic masculinity.
[5]
Katherine St Asaph: A slab of regressive values (“just trying to keep my daughters off the pole,” etc.) that half the country thinks are just duhs, good-ol-boy jaunt millions of people think is charm, “hey!” interjections they might have heard in a Nelly song, and a singsong hook that would be thoroughly annoying if Walker, Shane McAnally and Luke Laird didn’t play it restrained for some reason. (It’s certainly not their signature sound, since none of them have one.) The result is inessential, not remotely for me, yet not as obnoxious as “Fancy Like” — progress! Oh wait, there’s one more thing: a publicity stunt quasi-remix that turns the Nick Saban reference into Kirby Smart and may or may not be the test-run for a bunch of LMFAO-style “I’m in [Wherever] Bitch” regional remixes, or at least one for whoever wins the Super Bowl. Is that a point extra or a point off?
[5]
John Pinto: In the great tradition of self-pitying Southern men battling substance abuse, “My eyes are full of yellow bricks/Tiny dry horses are running in my veins” this is not. That’s by design, as Walker Hayes makes it clear over and over that he’s just trying to get by here, to keep his family together and “to do the dang thing,” and there is indeed nobility in that. After a listen or two, however, I moseyed over to another song with slammed mids and a 12-step referencing title, and I didn’t go back.
[4]
Katie Gill: Walker Hayes still can’t sing. Walker Hayes still can’t write a song. And “AA” still has the obnoxious problem “Fancy Like” had, where it seems like he released a song that’s three minutes of cosplaying poor-to-middle-class America by shoehorning references to things that wide swaths of country music radio listeners would recognize. “Oh! I know that! I too eat at Wendy’s and like Nick Saban, the most basic bitch choice in SEC football! Walker Hayes GETS ME.” No, he really doesn’t get any of this. It’s all a grift–hopefully country radio won’t fall for this one.
[2]
Nortey Dowuona: The Mode Reviews, in the Before Times, said that “Old Town Road” was not a country song and that the whole controversy stirred up over it was nonsense. In this song’s case, one of these things is still true: it’s clearly a country song, but the controversy over Walker Hayes isn’t nonsense. “AA” is middling country spiced up with 808s to force people who otherwise would never engage with this type of music of their own volition to call it an atrocity and draw more attention to a desperate hack trying to get rich. If Walker Hayes was a Donald Glover, it would at least make sense that “AA” was amateur and clumsy and too high on its own supply. But this guy is a country lifer who already made his debut back in the Before Times. Why is he making such a clumsy, halfhearted attempt to make acceptable country to country haters? Stand in that basic country bag and use better guitars next time.
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