But really, as the first country song to ever go diamond, it’s about country songs not needing to be about anything. But what is it even about? Literally, it’s about getting a girl to ride in your truck with you.
And let’s be honest, the hook is probably in your head right now. “Baby you a song / You make me wanna roll my windows down / and cruise.” In the summer of 2013, with an added verse from Nelly, “Cruise” by Florida Georgia Line was inescapable. Soon enough, everyone was trying to rap about “cornbread and biscuits.” The popularity of “Dirt Road Anthem” offered just an inkling of the potential that its kind of sound, and shallow themes might hold when given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience. In 2011, a rap-influenced country song had never broken into the mainstream before, that is until the mash-up was endorsed by Aldean, an already established artist. “Dirt Road Anthem” was recorded twice before it became the highest-selling record by a solo male country artist, so it’s significant that its success came with Jason Aldean. Popular but polarizing, it’s worth acknowledging the best, or at least the most memorable, bro-country hits of the 2010s - if not for sentimentality’s sake, than to help us figure out where mainstream country music is headed in 2020. Coined in 2013 by Jody Rosen in New York Magazine, he pins down the subgenre as being, “music by and of the tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty American white dude.” Whether you like it or not, this character (and his infatuation with trucks, beer and girls) defines the past decade of mainstream country music. Originally, the lyric was “Baby, you like a song.” The track actually went through several edits when Florida Georgia Line first went into the studio with Moi, a veteran producer.Bro-country, a word that sends shivers down the spines of genre traditionalists, brings smiles to the faces of millions of loyal listeners and sounds like money to industry insiders. The line materialized while they were in the middle of writing a different song, and they ran with it. “Honestly, you gotta thank the songwriting gods,” he says.
With five co-writers on the track (Florida Georgia Line’s Brian Kelley and Tyler Hubbard, along with Joey Moi, Chase Rice and Jesse Rice), we had to know who came up with that inexplicably catchy - and grammatically incorrect - four-word intro. The mega-hit, which first made an impact in August 2012, has gone platinum five times over, making it the second-best-selling digital country song in history. It’s the opening line to “Cruise,” the summer-love party anthem that launched Florida Georgia Line into the pop-culture consciousness. If you’ve toggled through the radio dial at any point over the past year, chances are it didn’t take you long to hear the words “Baby you a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down, and cruise.”
0 kommentar(er)
