Off the Charts: Toby Keith

Shock and blah

By Newt Briggs

It seems like every time some slack-jawed bumpkin starts croaking about country-western rabble-rouser Toby Keith, the knee-jerk, liberal reaction is to get all prickly and hurl epithets like "redneck" and "white trash." At these times, it's easy to wonder exactly what Keith did to arouse such partisan wrath. After all, he's just a big-heart+++ed good ol' boy--a fan of blue jeans, fireworks, picnics, puppies and indiscriminately slaughtering anyone with skin darker than a marshmallow dipped in hot cocoa.

Or at least that's the message of Keith's 2002 ode to ill will, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." Insisting that putting "a boot in your ass" is "the American way," Keith's chest-thumping anthem lays out the tenets of democracy with a terse poetry that somehow escaped lesser patriots like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. And to think, we'd labored under Jefferson's clumsy "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" for nigh on two centuries! Oh, the sentimental naivete of our forebears!

Of course, Keith isn't the only country crooner who's jumped on the post-9/11, pro-war bandwagon. Clint Black ("I Raq and I Roll"), Aaron Tippin ("Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly") and Daryl Worley ("Have You Forgotten?") have all cashed in on America's apparent need for pick-me-up odes to bloodlust and intolerance. In the process, they have added their names to a wartime canon that already included the likes of Merle Haggard, Barry Sadler, Waylon Jennings and Lee Greenwood. So forget "The Star-Spangled Banner" and Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries"; from here on, American soldiers will charge into battle with killing in their hearts and country music on their headsets. In fact, the following songs might make a fine mix tape for kicking down doors, humiliating POWs and otherwise making the world safe for democracy.

"Don't Give Us a Reason (An Open Letter to Saddam Hussein)," Hank Williams Jr.: Never mind that Saddam's currently a pita-gumming feeb nervously anticipating his daily prostate exam; "Don't Give Us a Reason" can easily be applied to any dictator who might kinda-sorta be thinking about pursuing the raw materials that could potentially make a weapon of mass destruction. (Hello?! Kim Jong Il, anyone?). Plus, it's by that Are-you-ready-for-some-football guy, so you know it's got to be totally rock-tastic!

"Ballad of the Green Berets," Barry Sadler: Maybe it's the snappy snare drum at the beginning, but it's surprisingly easy to overlook the fact that this song is about a dad whose dying wish is that his young son also grow up to be killed in combat.

"Okie from Muskogee," Merle Haggard: Even though "Okie from Muskogee" is actually more about life on the homefront than the frontline, it still laid the blueprint for the conservatism, xenophobia and icon-worshipping that have become the hallmark of modern-day country music. Granted, Haggard was usually more preoccupied with drinking off a hangover than propping up the establishment, but on "Okie," he bashes long hair, orgies, sandals, beads, recreational drug use, San Francisco and back-talking intellectuals--all while simultaneously celebrating cowboy boots, Old Glory, moonshine and "livin' right." (For a more vitriolic tone, consider Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me.")

"Have You Forgotten?" Daryl Worley: Quite honestly, any of the songs referenced in the introduction would be fine here, but Worley's seems the best simply for the fact that he manages to rhyme "bin Laden" with "forgotten." It's a feat of lyrical wrangling unrivaled by his peers.

"The Eagle," Waylon Jennings: No war mix would be complete without a first-person narrative told from the perspective of the majestic symbol of our proud nation: "So lay all your doubts aside/ When you go to bed tonight/ My feathers have been ruffled/ And I'm ready for a fight."

"God Bless the USA," Lee Greenwood: How better to climax than with Greenwood's epic of jingoist saber-rattling? Few may remember his chart-topping single "It Turns Me Inside Out," but pretty much everyone knows at least a few of the words to "God Bless the USA"--a song that provokes the same response in NASCAR dads that "Puff the Magic Dragon" does in old hippies. The fact that Greenwood would likely be the last person to "stand up" and "defend her still today" hardly seems worth noting.