BURNING IT DOWN-JASON ALDEEN
Phil you have been on fire here and brought up some good ones. Now this is one that we always have to deal with. You ask "Is it just that it is Aldeen?" Yes. In every career "art' there are interesting things that happen. When Elvis Presley went through this HOLLYWOOD phase, and did 33 versions of pretty much the same movie, people loved Elvis. They went, even though the movies were pretty silly. But he would never reclaim his spot as "King of Rock and Roll" and died pretty much a caracature of himself.
Jason Aldeen decided a while back to conciously go after a demographic that has never worked to well in Country, rap and hip hop. His pairings with people like Colt Ford, worked and he started delving into that world. Just like Kenny Chesney and the Jimmy Buffett crowd and Taylor Swift in the teen age crowd, somethings just work for some people. But it often brings the negative side of those worlds as well. In the case of Chesney, every one going for the beach and alcohol elements which would lead to bro country. Taylor would create a lot of imitators, in many cases bringing the art form to a very sophomoric attitude and of course, angry chick singer songs.
With Rap and hip hop, you get endless drum loops, extrodinorilty repititous and redundance sounds, nothing in the way of melodic interest and subject matters, well, which are about one thing and one thing only. SEX.
This song is just about "getting it on." No ambiguity, no confusion, just talking about getting down and dirty. Leaves nothing to the imagination. While it might have a couple of rhymes in it, "Flirty and working", for instance that are kind of cool, the rest just kinds of lays there. There are no double meanings, no entendres. Just lays it all out there.
Now, I am no prude. As a guy who has a song called "Cleaning up around the house", about having sex in every room in the house, I can push that envelope too. But I think it is nice to have some kind of clever elements to the song. I don't believe this has any that I see.
This is what I would call a "fist pumper" song. It is much the same as the 'party song". If you have ever seen a big concert crowd, all packed in the front of a stage like sardines, all bunched up together, with their hands pumping in the air or waving side to side in unison. That is what this song does. Interestingly enough, you see kids about 10 or 11mouthing the words to these types of songs, I am not even sure some of them know what it means. But the rhythm of the lyrics and the beat drives them forward.
Every song can't be a great piece of work. More are like this one than not. Just feel good to some people. I think we could analyze it all day long and point out what is wrong with it, but at the end of the day, none of us would be it's target audience. You have to just accept the fact that it happens and it finds an audience that keeps it out there.
How this all applies to our own writing, which is the point of doing something like this, is discovering what is out there, Both good and bad. For instance. two of these songs are miore rapid fire lyrics, and that is something I don't have much of an interest in. It is not something that I would do well, so I would avoid it in my own writing.
The same for you, Phil, if you didn't feel comfortable in writing the inner rhymes like we did on that one song, you would not do that. You would make something that works for you.
In the cases of songs to pitch, you get outside input, but if you have a "gut feeling" you go with it. If someone is going to cut a song but have some problems with certain words or phrases, they will tell you if they really like the song. Sometimes you do it, sometimes you don't.
The only real thing that this song tells me is how really big the "tent" of country is. It covers a lot of different types of songs. From the more traditional of Brad Paisley,George Strait and Alan Jackson, the rock attitude of Montgomery Gentry, Hot pop chicks like Miranda Lambert, Taylor Swift, and Carrie Underwood, humerous country of Big and Rich and Dierk's Bently, Male model country or Fla./Ga Line, Mellow vocal sounds of Zac Brown, soft voices like Allison Krause, testostorone of Toby Keith and Blake Shelton, and pretty much everything else in between. You can't really define it and it is breaking a lot of rules as it goes.
It is good that you are paying attention and breaking it down. But you can't get too caught up in things that don't go where you would like them to. You are not the target audience for that. Find elements that you like in other songs and concentrate on that, and leave the rest to others that like that style.
Different strokes for different folks.
MAB