Brad Paisley Ticks

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

He was interviewed in EW this week, and Paisley talked about how important this song was, because Country talked about being outdoors. Now, this song is about the eternal joys of having sex outside (and it has some real naughty lines, esp. for someone who proclaims his class and from someone whose last great hit was about Mama and Jesus.)

The problem is that country rarely talks about the outdoors anymore, except as a playground, and ideas of nature have become a playground for the suburban. The song then, is kind of creepy--he wants to take a woman from the bar, and bring her to a secluded "moonlit" meadow, where he will strip her, and "crawl all over her". The checking for ticks sounds like a cute cover for something sinister.

I never really got Paisley, his realtionship to women has been courtly in that suburban megachurch kind of way, and this is the first time that he has ever sung something explicit in its eroticism, and done another way, it could have destabilised the outdoors/suburban;bar/moonlight dialectic that infuses much country.

But the way he sings it, it has a serial killer vibe.

Comments

[koganbot]

I tend to like his songs OK when I hear them and then forget them. For me, "Ticks" ends up feeling more silly than creepy, with the questino "How's he going to pull off this metaphor?" and then "Um, did he pull it off?" managing to detach me from any actual message that the metaphor (or whatever it is) conveys. The music is mediocre compared to some of his others. It's a big hit on country radio, however. I hadn't thought of the relationship to the genre title "country" until you'd brought it up, though now that you have it obviously is there as something of a subversive subtext. Like, is nature really where you want to get it on? The sex in the country theme is done intelligently by Taylor Swift in "Tim McGraw" - in that one, the implication is that she and her boyfriend go to backroads to have sex 'cause they're still teens, hence houses and motels aren't an option. Someone should check how many of the spate of reminiscing-a-first-love songs since "Strawberry Wine" have meadows and nature as prominent settings. I can imagine Brad sitting around listening to one of these bittersweet teen idylls and saying to himself, "Yeah, well what about insects?" Hence a "funny" song idea is born.

(Pace Paisley, I'd say that the major division that country sets up isn't between suburbia (indoors) vs. country (outdoors) but rather suburbs and cities vs. small towns and farms, though of course blatant nostalgia songs will mention hollows and creeks and such.)(Saw or heard a headline this morning about how the busting of Mom and Pop meth labs is opening the way for vicious outsiders to move in. Meth not a big theme on country radio yet, though I'll be it's made it into several country songs; the subtext about illegal country goings on tends to be alcohol or marijuana.)

country

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

there was a discussion sometime last month, abuot appalchia, where hollows that were used for stills, alter grew pot, and now grow meth.

i know its supposed to be funny, but hes not, and i think that the discussion of country is entirely a suburban one, living near farm land and knowing farmers, they listen to country of course, but much less new stuff then people in sherwood park or st albert (choose suburbs of yr local area)

[(Anonymous)]

The whole point of the song is a joke and intended as such. He's poking fun of rednecks that would actually use those lines

i know its a joke, thats why its creepy

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

and it would be funny if brad paisley ever expressed anything relating to a sense of humour