truck songs of the week #28: when gross sounds kinda good

black Dodge Rams, catfish & two karat diamonds

Jun 07, 2024

This week is calling you late at night and then hanging up. It’s driving past your house. It’s replaying those long-lost summer nights over and over again.

Drive safe.

Get the full 2024 playlist here.

“You’re Still” by Logan Crosby

Dodge Ram boys 🤝 Jeep Cherokee girls

This flashback to a mid-2000s summer romance is the perfect commodification of nostalgia.

Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube

“Choctawhatchee Cowboy” by Cypress Spring

Is this song kind of gross? Yes. Do I absolutely love it? Also yes.

Consider this passage from W. David Marx’s Status and Culture:

While kitsch and extravagance have their charms, an ecosystem solely composed of low complexity culture quickly becomes stagnant. Even the most conservative humans seek some amount of surprise. Cultural ecosystems that encourage symbolic complexity solve this problem: innovations of high complexity trickle down and “refresh” mass culture. Contemporary country music would surely feel archaic in the twenty-first century without the influences of pop, rock, alternative, and hip-hop. When ecosystems push toward complexity at the margins, everyone wins. Smaller, erudite audiences enjoy difficult art, and simplified versions engage less knowledgeable audiences.

The more familiar our pattern-seeking brains become with the conventions of a particular genre, the more we delight in new, increasingly complex, and even abrasive patterns. Gross starts to sound good.

This Soundcloud mumble rap-infused version of a country song is as thick and swampy as summer in the Panhandle. In real-time, we get country music iterating, adjusting to incorporate the influence of other contemporary genres, reinventing itself into oblivion.

Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube

“Diamondback” by Julia Cole

This song by newcomer Julia Cole is practically buckling under the weight of too many puns: “You're a dime a dozen, snake in the grass / I'm the dime that still gave the diamond back.” Are we doing a crossword or listening to the radio?

Nashville hits love to traffic in this kind of heavy-handed wordplay, maybe an impulse downstream from popular country’s strong foregrounding of lyrics.

So I’d like to propose a “Novelty/Real Music” framework. Consider Maddie & Tae’s kitschy country tracks — 2014’s breakout single “Girl In a Country Song” or last week’s “Sad Girl Summer,” neither of which quite manages to transcend its high concept. The lyrics are too tongue-in-cheek and referential. The effect is one-dimensional, offering no emotional heft beyond a punchline. Pure novelty. The perfect opposite of a modern country standard like 2014’s “Cop Car,” which bristles with songwriter Sam Hunt’s lived experience and where nary a pun can be found.

Cole’s track mostly works, even if you tune out the wordplay, placing it squarely in the middle of the spectrum.

Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube