That’s right!
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[4.80]
Patrick St. Michel: Drinking is cool. Football is also cool. Sometimes the football team we like wins and we are happy, but sometimes they lose, and we are not. There is no need to stretch this out for four minutes.
[1]
Ramzi Awn: A lot of things change on a day-to-day basis, but you can always count on country. I still remember the day I got into Vanderbilt — the postman pulled up to me on the side of the road and handed me the letter in my friend’s car. I still think about all the football games I missed not going there, the parties, the music, the boys. But I still say y’all, and I can still commiserate with Billy Currington.
[7]
Katherine St Asaph: “We all,” you say? At various points growing up I was a barhopper, churchgoer, cheerleader, nailbiter, shift worker, skeptic and most definitely outsider, and at none of those points did I give a shit about our high school football team. Somehow the census did not count me out. Then I went to UNC, a school with many football problems: the fact that we suck at it, the fact that Butch Davis got a $2 million salary for sucking at it, the fact that the NCAA just revealed to the tune of heavy sanctions that despite rampant academic fraud we still suck at it. My stance on organized sports fluctuates from “necessary evil” to “exploitative, alienating phenomenon,” and at the risk of over-egging the rhetorical pudding there are certain genuinely awful news stories that have come of towns’ football problems. If there’s a song less “for me,” I don’t know what it is. And without that camaraderie, what’s left is tepid Southern rock and Currington’s nasal voice, belaboring his one punchline.
[3]
Iain Mew: That’s a hell of an idea for a chorus, but there’s little enough in the verses to support or add interest to it that it might as well be stuck over a picture of some Minions.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: A pale mimeograph of a number of superior Toby Keith songs (like last year’s “Drunk Americans”), sung more limply than I’ve ever heard Currington sing.
[3]
Anthony Easton: The best thing about this hackneyed but very tightly constructed song,is not the demographic lists, wordplay the pun that centres the whole enterprise, but the pleasure that is evident when he sings that last little “ooh” and the guitar grinds upward.
[8]
Brad Shoup: If only he cradled the football imagery like he does the phrase “drinkin’ town”. The mandolin lends a little dignity in spot duty; he’s got a decent Cougar going, but some specific details would make this more than a little less cynical.
[5]
Micha Cavaseno: Yeah, this song sounds like a town anthem written by a high school, with CollegeHumor-level chest thumping.
[2]
Alfred Soto: The fiddles, scrappy guitars, and loud “hey”s that are the hallmarks of an early ’90s Mellencamp production help. Splendid title, after all — I wish Currington’s writers had teased out the ambivalence instead of treated it as a boast.
[6]
Mo Kim: My first few days of college, I was astounded at how big everybody’s worlds seemed: how many countries they had been to, how many languages they spoke, how they wore their accomplishments and talents as casually as their skinny jeans. Looking back, I think my envy was less about my classmates’ worldliness and more about their freedom, the feeling I had of standing on the outside, peeking in at all of the things in the world I knew I could touch if I weren’t being held back by my own trauma and fear and insecurity and anger. There’s this duality to growing up in insulated communities, whether they’re towns with populations of 1,009 or churches with populations of 110. These are meant to be families, places where everybody knows you by name and all the adults are keeping tabs on the person you’re growing up to become, yet they’re also places where it always takes several rounds of drinks to crack everybody open, places where your mom and sister can joke about lesbians to your face while you wrestle your protest to the ground. My world is a lot bigger and scarier now, and even as I cling to the notion of sobriety I can still feel my body circling away, slowly drifting out of a home that I feel like I’m outgrowing. But when I wake up tomorrow morning, hungover on bad dreams and kindergarten stories, I need to remember where I was, where I come from. I need to remember how all of this felt.
[8]