Country has always been pop’s most mature genre. It bespoke country’s devotion to realism, to songs about Saturday night’s hootenanny and Sunday morning’s moral reckoning, not to mention the kitchen-table truths of Monday through Friday. It stood for a masculine ideal, for stoicism and resolve in the face of hardship. That classic country vocal style wasn’t just ornamental. The hallmarks of country singing-the desolate croons and bent notes, just a step removed from Appalachia and the blues-are nowhere on Here’s to the Good Times. But it’s not a country sound in the classical sense it’s closer to John Mellencamp than George Jones. The vocals have a regional ring lead singer Tyler Hubbard, from Monroe, Georgia, and his harmony-singing sideman, Brian Kelley, from Ormond Beach, Florida, sing in thick drawls. There isn’t a fiddle or pedal steel in earshot. You can hear those changes on Florida Georgia Line’s debut, Here’s to the Good Times. It’s a movement that has been gathering steam for several years now, and we may look back on “Cruise” as a turning point, the moment when the balance of power tipped from an older generation of male country stars to the bros. In short, “Cruise” is bro-country: music by and of the tatted, gym-toned, party-hearty young American white dude. Put another way: If “Cruise” were a guy at a bar, he would sidle up to the hottest blonde in the room, laugh loudly at his own jokes, and, after crashing and burning with a couple of lame pickup lines, ask, “Have you heard this awesome song?” Whereupon he would whip out his iPhone and dial up the video for Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise.” It’s a big, amiable lunk of a song, one that lumbers out of your speakers, wearing a blinding ear-to-ear grin, overconfident in its own modest charm. The top country hit of all time may, in fact, be the most generic song you’ve ever heard. It’s a song about “falling in love in the sweet heart of summer,” which tosses out some familiar tropes-lyrics about swilling Southern Comfort and ogling girls in bikinis-before circling back around, in the chorus, to, well, itself: “Baby, you a song / You make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise.” It’s a summer song about summer songs, in other words, which is cute, but not exactly impressive by the witty standards of Nashville’s Music Row. Like much of today’s country, “Cruise” has hooks that lean toward pop and hefty guitars that tilt toward rock. The most extraordinary thing about it is its aggressive ordinariness. The weird part is, “Cruise” doesn’t sound like much at all. The song recently logged its 22nd week at the top of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs rundown, shattering a record that had stood since 1955. “ Cruise,” the debut single by the country duo Florida Georgia Line, is baffling-a song that causes a critic to shelve his two-bit theorizing, drop to his knees, and tremble before the mysterious movements of the pop gods. Photo: Christopher Polk and Rick Diamond/Getty
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