Lookit his adorable bubble microphone! Bubbles!…
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[5.33]
Josh Langhoff: As part of country music’s ongoing quest to prove Nixonland right, along comes Brantley Gilbert to heighten the contradictions with this litmus ode to fallen soldiers and cancer victims. If you dare to point out, correctly, that getting buried to a 21-gun salute isn’t “the only way to go”; that “USO tour veteran” Gilbert would himself fail his own test for dying well; or that fighting cancer isn’t more inherently noble than dying in a civil protest, you might as well be yelling “Rubber baby!” in a crowded theater. Noticing this stuff means you’ve missed the point: finding yet another opportunity to fall on your knees before Real America. Give Gilbert this, though — he sells the survivor’s guilt. Not only does he say the word “cancer” in a song, he somehow claims cancer as America’s disease. The guy might wheeze like an iron lung, but his band’s about as heavy as one, and that lead guitarist does the positive polarization like Spiro Agnew.
[6]
Edward Okulicz: Listening to this, I feel like Lisa in that Simpsons episode where Bart usurps her news program with segments on mundane people, gawping at the sentiment. Yes, Brantley Gilbert has pumped this song so full of sap, you’ll be blowing your nose with a pancake. But that chorus absolutely bellows “never say die.”
[7]
Alfred Soto: So long as Florida resists rising coastal waters I’ll love “Bottoms Up,” so I’ve cut Just As I Am slack. Gilbert’s affected croak suggests he’s struggling to register something meaningful about the people he’s loved and lost, and when the effort defeats him those Ritchie Sambora riffs lift those guitar necks heavenward (and the lick garnishing the chorus’ lyrical twist echoes “Summer of ’69,” of course). Those repelled by the labor of distinguishing bro country’s gradations of kitsch won’t find anything novel here. Me, I hear someone pushing at the limits of his abilities — and empathy.
[7]
Madeleine Lee: That’s one hell of a way to deploy a huge-ass chorus. (That’s a compliment.)
[5]
Anthony Easton: Brantley Gilbert just got two giant pistols tattooed on his back; between that and this, someone should take his guns away, until he learns to quit sentimentalizing violence. (Also, nothing sells better than dead soldiers, and yes — he is that cynical)
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: I don’t have a substantive ideological or theoretical argument against it, but I have such a viscerally negative reaction to the trembling-lip aggro masculinity on display here that I can’t buy into the sentimentalism. And that’s speaking as a man with a brother who could very well have died in war and another who could very well succumb to the thing that’s eating his brain.
[4]