Florida Georgia Line - Can't Say I Ain't Country

Florida Georgia Line
Can't Say I ain't Country
2019
Spotify

There is pandering, then there is pandering in country music. Both are similar, but when it comes to country music some acts are ready and willing to claim they are just down home country folk through one side of their mouth and live extremely different lives in reality. The country music machine is so dialed in and so relentless that there is almost no genre or style it won't lift from in the hunt for numbers. Florida Georgia Line are some of the worst offenders. This new album Can't Say I Ain't Country attempts to prove the boys' pedigree, but it does little more than offer lip service. Will arena's be filled with people singing along to "Can't Say I Ain't Country"? You bet there will, but this idea of being a Mountain Dew drinking (a real line from the title track) pickup truck driving simple down home boy is absurd. Florida Georgia Line's success is tied in almost exclusively with their image. The millennial cowboy who knows about Instagram but still drinks longnecks is infectious and irresistible to some fans, throw in the fact they are easy on the eyes and blam you have yourself a shitty band that the masses are going to love. Florida Georgia Line are the Nickleback of country music, with true fans pulling their hair out trying to understand why anyone would listen to this all the while watching their streaming numbers explode through the roof. It won't surprise you that both Nickleback and Florida Georgia Line share a producer, Joey Moi. Nothing about them feels authentic or real, just a manufactured duo custom made to sell tickets.

Then there is the fucking stupid skits throughout the record with one member leaving a fake voicemail message from a fake brother who is much more country than his country star bro. "Women" with a Jason Derulo feature (no it is not 2010) is about as out of touch as you can get when trying to sing a song praising women. Do you think the political environment in the US is out of hand and toxic, well luckily Florida Georgia Line have penned "People Are Different" to remind us that hey, people ARE different. It goes from stupid statement to stupid statement track after track with the band saying nothing and more importantly doing even less. They make their music just to be so far removed from anything edgy that it ends up just being a blob of generic bullshit. They also try to blend in hip hop elements which is fucking hate so much. With all this in mind though this really is not Florida Georgia Line's worst album. They have dialed back some of their more egregious tendencies and blended in some classic country elements. However that is not nearly enough to save this record or this band. Avoid this shit like the plague.

1.0 out of 10