ft. Toby Keith ft. Jimmy Buffett ft. Toby Keith ft. Jimmy Buffett, an infinite loop of featuring, forever.
[Video][Website]
[4.50]
Iain Mew: Still not drunk enough to enjoy this song.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: In order to be self-deprecating you have to actually have the capacity for deprecation. Bawling enthusiasm is no substitute for a sense of humor.
[2]
Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: The act of karaoke is somewhat under-appreciated, from the spontaneity of the performance to the variety of performers on stage to the many different approaches performers have. Everyone becomes an artist, regardless of how great or how terrible you may be during your four minutes on stage. (Sometimes more than four: once upon a time I spent over six minutes on stage when a friend and I decided to perform Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss”. Readers, don’t ever perform Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss” on a night out.) Misters Buffett and Keith understand the easy-going appeal of karaoke with an easy-going song, laying down a sole golden rule: “Be a legend in your own time.” Okay, two golden rules: two-for-one margarita pitchers can help you reach legendary status pretty fast. Art is hard, y’all.
[6]
Patrick St. Michel: I’ve never done the sort of karaoke where you sing in front of a bar of strangers, and “Too Drunk to Karaoke” touches on every reason I probably never will. Who could wait an hour…or more than ten minutes…to sing a song? And who wants to worry about winning over fans? I’ll take the karaoke-box style, with people you know and drinks smuggled in, over that any day. I’d also leave this forced attempt at karaoke jam off the list.
[2]
Brad Shoup: I got something to say! I spent 2009 in North Austin karaoke bars. I saw an elderly man with MS, making a grand re-entrance with his beloved Sinatra. I watched a host bring his female friend up every week to duet on “I Got You Babe,” changing “babe” to “bitch” in the fadeout like some awful recurring fruit-fly capitulation. I saw middle-aged men break down during Garth Brooks ballads, and middle-aged men summon a party with “Friends in Low Places”. I’ve seen a hipster bro mug his way through Creed, his detuned ironic instincts slowly and deliciously crushing his self-esteem. My best friend once requested “Back in Black” and sang “Genie in a Bottle” over the chord changes: a daring karaoke mashup. I learned just how popular modern rock is, and I witnessed the unreal power of bachelorette parties with encyclopedic memories of G-funk hits. I celebrated friends’ birthdays in a Korean-owned, BYOB karaoke bar, ending one such night vomiting into a tiny wastebasket: the only time anyone, in my experience, has been too drunk to karaoke. There’s no way Toby and Jimmy know karaoke; they know hits, and they ought to stay on that side of the chasm.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: But Toby Keith already has a karaoke song. It’s “Red Solo Cup.” If you get a private room — something Jimmy and Toby obviously aren’t, setting their song at amateur night — you can bring your own red Solo cups. And it’s funnier to sing while drunk (n.b. I have never done this and neither should you, because you will propagate this.) What gives?
[3]
Alfred Soto: Unlike many fans, I glowed at the prospect of pairing these poet laureates of inebriate pleasure. Both have coasted for years, although not so’s it’s hurt Keith’s commercial prospects and Margaritaville’s bottom line. Here the scene stealers are those messy guitars, worthy of Keith ‘n’ Ronny, and, hell, Buffett’s slurred note-averse vocal. As for Mr. Red Solo Cup, he understands karaoke: stand back and let the guy who risks making a fool of himself wow the crowd.
[7]
Anthony Easton: Jimmy Buffett is kind of genius. He peddled the same kind of music for decades, made a fortune slinging it on tour, had a bit of a cult following, set up a batch of restaurants, made the brand perfect and seamless and middle American. When he figured out he was getting a bit stale, he went knocking to Nashville, and Nashville figured out that they needed to preserve an aging A-lister while trying to convince us a B-lister could come up from the minor leagues. So Buffet talked to Kenny, and Kenny figured out how to work out making money on a set of side businesses (the specific nature of the tequila came from Sammy Hagar, and if you were a mathematician, Country’s Taste could be straight in the middle of a Venn Diagram between Kenny, Sammy and Jimmy). The Zac Brown Band realized that if they were doing a beach album, they would have to play the same game, and they went off and talked to the Sybil of the Keys. They kept playing back and forth — kept recording together, kept working it out. They couldn’t quite do the tropical thing, because Keith has been running on creative fumes since Toby did “Stays in Mexico” in 2009. So, they looked at what was playing — saw how much Brantley Gilbert’s “Country Must be Country Wide” cribbed from “I Love This Bar,” noticed that they both had a restaurant that needed to be propped up, thought about some excellent cross marketing, stuff that could be played on Wednesday nights at Jimmy Buffett’s Cheeseburgers In Paradise or Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar and Grill, and make some money on the up-sold margaritas, and put something out that was just gorgeous in its cynical reserve. Jay-Z should bow down. The best thing about all of this is how ingrained Buffett is in Nashville — he was a songwriter in the ’60s, and he has been in and out of the market for a long time, and really set the whole thing off with Alan Jackson in 2004. Toby’s 2009 song is a five-year-old attempt at reclaiming something from 2004. The 2013 song is an attempt to reclaim something from 2009 which tried to reclaim something from 2004. But because Buffett, and really Toby, are so damn good at playing the markets, noting where the demographics are, and making product for a fairly tight niche audience; realizing that country, because of its regional and social cachet, is one of the last few niche markets left, and because that niche market depends both on touring and on localized spaces where those communities can get together between touring; and also knowing that in the suburbs those spaces are usually chain restaurants, and chain restaurants depend on theme and brand; and lastly, knowing that they are brands. It is a perfect circle of working out the product for the money. The song’s production, its “fun,” its elegance in how it knows its market — it is more a Warholian artifact of working-class realism. (“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”) A blended margarita during singing karaoke at either of those places has this glamour and anti-glamour. It is Toby or Jimmy, but Toby and Jimmy are just like us, and maybe one day we can have this luxe leisure time, and to do that, what we need is another round. That kind of work can only be done if you spend as much and as much effort in figuring out which way the business is going, and if you have enough wisdom to know where it has been. The hamburgers might not be Edenic in Cheeseburgers in Paradise, but that shit is fun. You might not Love This Bar and Grill, but you damn well know that if you go in on Mondays and you are in the military, you get 20 percent off. That is more than enough. The song is for the marketing, the text itself doesn’t matter much.
[10]