From the initial driving drum beat, hip hop bassline and cringeworthy “uh uh”s that begin opener to ‘Crash My Party’ and hit single ‘That’s My Kind of Night’, it is clear Luke Bryan has come a long way from the promises of his 2007 debut, ‘I’ll Stay Me’. Six years later and we have witnessed quite the transformation, from a man who co-wrote 10 out of 11 tracks on his first record with a real heartfelt, deep country twist on modern mainstream styles, to someone who relies almost entirely on other people to write and paint his image as some sex object and caricature, existing purely to make teenage and pre-pubescent girls scream and discover their own sexuality. Unfortunately, there are much better ways to do that (trust me), and however alluring the thought of Luke Bryan’s body may have been before, what this album shows is a puppet trapped in a marketing machine whose only output is monotony and poorly-disguised innuendos, and that’s not alluring at all.
It’s a sad state of affairs that so many young women and young girls not very much younger than myself buy into the crap that ‘Crash My Party’ delivers. It’s sad because the 528,000 copies that Luke sold in the first week of release shows the lack of intelligence that all his female fans possess. You’re really going crazy over a guy who wants to drink drive and screw you (but only if you’re an unattainable kind of beauty that includes being able to pull off wearing daisy dukes and being covered in fake tan)? What Luke Bryan and his team are selling here is a fantasy, something often present in popular music, but a 21st century kind involving beautiful, angelic but sexually promiscuous young women who apparently populate all the tiny, middle-of-nowhere towns in America. Now, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all, but I am getting a little sick of an ideology that both serves the sexual fantasies of male listeners (and video watchers), and provokes further insecurity in the women who feel completely under pressure to perform to these standards of womanhood. They want to feel like they’re the beautiful girl in the song or the video that the man cannot help himself over, and reality is Luke Bryan is not going to want to screw any of you. No.
I’ve been there, and it’s not a healthy place to be. Songs like ‘That’s My Kind of Night’, and ‘Beer In The Headlights’ absolutely encourage young teenagers to not only get drunk out of their mind, but drink and drive, because that’s Luke’s target audience. Young teenagers, not just women but men as well. Is it a really good idea to sell this fantasy to kids of 13 and 14, getting drunk and having sex outside on a Friday night? Not to sound like someone’s grandma or a massive prude, I am 21 years old and definitely the least prudish person I know, but can we actually pretend to care what example we’re setting as adults? As a father of two young boys, I am appalled that Luke would agree to being this kind of artist with this kind of image and reputation, no matter how coerced he was and how much money he was promised. Lord, he’ll have enough by now. Greed is not an attractive quality and does not make for happy personal lives either.
And this is all before I come to the sheer monotony of this album. Completely devoid of country sounds now, Luke lives within a bubble of laundry list clichés about country living, and we see this on ‘We Run This Town’, ‘Sunburnt Lips’, ‘What Is It With You’, ‘Play It Again’, ‘Out Like That’, ‘Shut It Down’, ‘Dirt Road Diary’, ‘Blood Brothers’, to name just a few. There is very little to distinguish the lyrics and stories of these tracks, if you could argue there’s any story at all. A few differ marginally, ‘Shut It Down’ describing a working man getting distracted by his sexy lady while he’s trying to get through ploughing fields or whatever, and ‘Blood Brothers’ celebrating the friends you make in a small town, but they share just as many similarities with the “chasing hot girl with booze, sex and cars” songs. In fact, they share many musical similarities too. Luke’s brand of half alternative rock/hip hop and half polished pop/R&B production is out in force, the title track, ‘Play It Again’ and ‘Roller Coaster’ contributing to the latter, and despite my dislike of country pop they’re actually far more preferable. They may be bland and sickly sweet at times, but they’re far less offensive and annoying.
There is the odd time that Luke actually delves into something of a more negative emotion with any substance, and ‘I See You’ is one of them. Unfortunately musically rather similar to ‘That’s My Kind of Night’, Luke was a co-writer on this one and it tells the story of a past lover who is haunting him. ‘Better Than My Heart’ is a hangover song of heartbreak and ‘Your Mama Should’ve Named You Whiskey’ does the same old of comparing a love to an alcohol addiction. The fact that Luke is even able to tap into deeper emotions at this point in his career should be applauded as he’s beginning to come across more shallow than a stream, despite the fact that these deeper emotions represent convention and things we’ve all heard before.
The only two decent songs on ‘Crash My Party’ are ‘Goodbye Girl’ and ‘Drink A Beer’. The former is actually what I would consider a country song, when looking at melody, harmony, instrumentation and lyrics, as it covers the subject of a girl making him fall for her repeatedly and then running away every time, taking advantage of him every time. I actually enjoyed this track, and the same for ‘Drink A Beer’, arguably the most heartfelt and deepest song on the album. FAR more stripped back than the others and based on acoustic guitar, dobro, beautiful harmonies and light, earthy percussion, it explores the discovery of the death of a loved one and the coping mechanisms that follow. The answer for the character in the song is getting away from everything and drinking a beer. Unfortunately the act of drinking a beer is horribly tainted by the rest of the material on this album, which associates it with partying and having sex, and perhaps whiskey would have been a more appropriate drink to use for the context here. Having said that, I still genuinely love it, and I don’t understand why Luke and his record company don’t think it’s worth pursuing material like that further.
Luke Bryan recently told Huffington Post that the stereotypes in country music are getting less and less prominent. I probably laughed for a good hour when I read it. To even suggest that the stereotypes are getting less prominent, when he has jumped on a bandwagon full of laundry list clichés about country living and backroad partying that is damn right insulting to this artform of a genre, is downright ridiculous, and a cause for major concern if he genuinely believes that. ‘Crash My Party’ is a lesson in what silly trends can do to good music and quality artists, an hour’s worth of songs that sound exactly the same as each other and do nothing to make themselves stand out or be any less forgettable than the last. Not only is the songwriting incredibly lazy and frankly a mockery of what Nashville has to offer, but I’m not sure Luke quite has the vocal chops to pull off some of the songs, and thus it comes across as strained and shrouded in effects. This album is interchangeable with the rest of the frat boy mess we find tramping all over our beloved genre, and I am severely disappointed in Luke.
Enjoy the money, the fame and the success while it lasts sweetheart, cause in 30 years’ time you won’t be remembered too fondly unless you fix this.
