THROWBACK REVIEW: You're Gonna Miss This by Trace Adkins

Ah, 2008. What an absolutely fabulous year for music. There was a mix of silly club jams and more serious songs in terms of rap, pop was a mix of ballads, dance songs, and even some that are a mix of the two, the R&B was becoming a lot more sleeker, sexier, and smoother, and rock, ignoring the completely sludgy embarrassment that was Addicted by Saving Abel, was surprisingly eclectic and full of substance (granted, a lot of it was leftover from 2007, but even still). And while others will point to songs like Viva La Vida, So What, and Superstar for their favorite hit of '08, I'm pointing to a song from the one genre that took up only 1/20th of the year-end chart (1/25th if you don't count All Summer Long by Kid Rock like I do), that being country music. Seriously, looking through the year-end chart for 2008, country music seemed so sparse that year. I mean, I liked all of the songs from that genre that made it (yes, even All Summer Long, and yes, I am counting that as country), don't get me wrong, but seriously, three of them are Taylor Swift songs, and I'm pretty sure damn near everyone else, regardless of whether or not they consider it country, hates All Summer Long. Thankfully, we have a saving grace amongst them, the one I consider the absolute best, and it's made even more surprising from the fact that it's coming from such a hack as Trace freaking Adkins, of all people.

Yeah, not gonna lie, taking off the rose-tinted glasses, the vast majority of this guy's output flat out sucks. Most people only know him for the notoriously awful Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, and believe me, while that song does blow, it is *far* from the worst thing Adkins has ever released as he doesn't exactly have a very good track record. I mean, sure, he has a good song in him every now and then (I still think Hot Mama is ridiculously enjoyable in a screwball sort of way, plus there's the song we're gonna be talking about in a second), but even ignoring ol' Country Bar Butt Shaking, this guy's output sucks and in a variety of ways. From insufferable arrogance (Ladies Love Country Boys, Songs About Me, Rough & Ready) to bland, sappy, lifelessness (There's A Girl In Texas, Every Light In The House), as well as the obvious just being plain unfunny and utterly cringe-inducing (Swing, Chrome, the aforementioned Honky Tonk Badonkadonk, the first two actually being a lot worse than the last one, if you can believe it). That said, if there is one thing he is able to pull off and pull off well at that, it's sentimentality. He has the vocal range, expressiveness, and even the writing chops to make songs like I'm Tryin', Then They Do, Arlington, Just Fishin', and of course, the song on the table today, You're Gonna Miss This, work, and while out of what I just listed, I'd have to go with Arlington as my favorite of the bunch, this isn't very far behind, honestly.

For starters, the instrumentation is superb. It's incredibly spacious, melodic, and able to carry the feel through its lush guitars that gain a lot of power in the two choruses that aren't the beginning one, yet it somehow manages to avoid the trap of feeling too syrupy or like it's trying too hard to be emotional. It feels natural and organic, which is always a huge plus. On top of that, the loud/soft dynamic is being used perfectly here. This is the type of song that that would be perfect for, and it certainly isn't wasted here. It's all it needs to be: soft verses, buildup, strong chorus. It doesn't try for anything more, and honestly, it doesn't really need to. Well, except for the third verse, that is, which is actually my favorite part, musically. I especially love how percussive the song gets during that part without losing its melodic foundation, makes the first part quiet and soft, and then returns to the big, sweeping feel that it originally had. It's a pretty minor change in the grand scheme of things, but damn does it work well.

Then we have Adkins himself, and I gotta say, he really should use his deeper, more bassy voice for more of this stuff. Normally when he uses it, he's trying to sound cool and awesome, but more often than not, it makes him sound like a complete tool. He really is someone who's meant more to emote, and the lower range he's constantly working in is definitely best suited. If anything, he sounds more like a parent most concerned with the safety and well-being of their kid(s), and while that may sound bad on the surface, it actually works really well in this circumstance.

Of course, the big reason the whole concerned parent motif works so well on this song is because of what we now come to, the aspect of the song that really makes me fall in love with it, the lyrics. They tell this story of a girl who is thinking about her future perhaps a little too much as in one instance, she's in the car in front of the high school with her mom, musing about how she can't wait to be out of school and out of the house. The next, she's a newlywed getting her one-bedroom apartment, and when her dad stops by to help her get it ready to live in, she says that while it'll do for now, she one day hopes to upgrade to a house and have some kids. In the last moment of the story, it's half a decade later, and everything in her house is pure chaos from the phone ringing off the hook to the dog barking his head off to having to deal with two loud, crying kids (one crying a lot louder than the other, apparently). She keeps profusely apologizing to the plumber that's there working on the water heater, but he says he doesn't mind as he has "two babies of his own," as Trace has the plumber in that scene put it, who are ages 36 and 23 respectively. All three of these scenes are wrapped up with a chorus reminding her that while things may not seem as good as they could right now, she must cherish the moments she has right now as she may not be able to recapture them and may even want them back despite wanting out of the current situation she's in. It's very much a song about living in the moment, and honestly, you have no idea how well this works, or at least in my opinion. The framing of the song doesn't place anyone in a superior or inferior position, and the reminders to the young girl from her mom saying she was just like her at one point, to her dad, in a really loving manner, tells her "baby, just slow down," to the plumber bringing up his kids, it really is a song about embracing one's youth and just how much we take it for granted. I'm sure we all have had moments when we were younger where we longed to just be away from our parents (granted, this is coming from someone who still lives with his parents, so take that with a pinch of salt) and just be free of responsibilities, only to be slapped hard in the face by the reality that is college and the workforce and various other things that not only aren't free of responsibilities at all, but have a completely different set of responsibilities that we're not nearly as used to and could be even more difficult to keep up with, thus causing us to long for the days when we were still in high school, and all we had to worry about was how much homework we'd have that night and what we were gonna wear to school the next day. It isn't a song that holds the listener's hand, yet at the same time, it's not one that slaps them across the face and says "shut up, you don't have it that hard, now just do as you're told." It's the perfect middle ground, and I think that's why I love it so much.

Well, there you have it. You're Gonna Miss This by Trace Adkins: my favorite hit song of 2008. A beautiful country song with a magnificent message from an otherwise completely useless singer. Hope you guys enjoyed reading, and I'll see you guys next time.

THROWBACK REVIEW: Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace

You ever just randomly stumble across a song, one that you're pretty sure next to none of your peers have heard of, yet it's a song that you just can't get out of your mind, whether that be for positive or negative reasons? Follow up question: you ever see a music critic's best/worst list for a certain year based off of that year's Billboard year-end chart, look at what they said about similar songs in the one you're thinking about's vein, and wonder "wow, how did this person not put that song on the list?" Well, there are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I follow and keep up with the blog postings of one B-HOP Da Maestro. I briefly mentioned him in my 1995 best list I posted on my birthday six months ago, but let me just say that this man is an excellent reviewer as well as, from my experience following him on Twitter, an excellent person. This man can articulate why he likes/doesn't like/feels ambivalent towards a song in ways I could only dream of. He is very detailed, descriptive, and thorough in what elements of a song either make him smile in delight or revolt and quiver in disgust. He and I may not always see eye to eye on certain songs, but I do see where he is coming from at least most of the time. Another thing you need to know about me is that usually when I go through a particular year in music's Billboard year-end chart, I watch, for reference, videos on YouTube where snippets of the songs from that year-end chart are played in order backwards from 100 to 1 before listening to the songs that really stand out to me, whether for better or worse, in full to form some sort of opinion on them. One year that I keep coming back to, if only for the fact that it keeps popping up time after time in my "recommended videos" section, is 1990, and the second song from that list, at position #99, I keep hearing and have not been able to stop thinking about for nearly a year and a half is Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace, a Cuban rapper from Los Angeles California who used to be a member of hip hop group DVX before leaving to pursue a solo career in 1988 before the group would become Cypress Hill the following year. Recently, B-Hop finished up a project that he had been working on for months titled BACK TO THE 90s, a project in which he went through each individual year of the 1990s, did an in-depth worst list on each year from 1990 to 1999 (with his best list added at the end), and concluded with an in-depth, two-part look at his 100 favorite songs of that entire decade. I remember seeing him announce this on Twitter last year and being stoked as you have no idea how much of a sucker for retro lists like this I am, and given that he has expressed his disdain for douchey Hip Hop/R&B songs that involve cheating and being an all out bag of dicks for no good reason and/or no reason at all, such examples including Loyal and Post To Be as well as later thrashing I Got A Man by Positive K on the 1993 worst list and My Baby Daddy by B-Rock & Da Bizz on the 1997 worst list, I thought for sure that this song would be a shoe-in for his 1990 worst list given what I heard in the short, 25 second snippet of the song in this video. Alas, it got not even a dishonorable mention, and if I'm being perfectly honest, I don't really have a clue why because oh dear god, I am ready to say it: I consider this song to be the absolute worst hit song of 1990. Yes, even worse than the two Michael Bolton songs I used to give that title to (those being How Am I Supposed To Live Without You? and When I'm Back On My Feet Again, for those wondering) despite that man being the cancer of soft rock.

Where to even begin with this song? Oh, I know, how about with the godawful production? This song manages to take the guitar line from Santana's Evil Ways and make it sound so limp and pathetic that it quite literally sounds like the guitar is dying. It also tacks on a line from another Santana song, No One To Depend On, and chops it up and makes it stutter more than Jimmy from South Park because.........horse on a rainbow, hell if I know. Then there's the percussion consisting mainly of an annoying jumping sound from an old SNES game. And don't even get me started on the record scratching, oh my god, the fucking record scratching. Look, having the record scratch sound effect once or twice in a song isn't really that big of a deal for me, but when you have them out the ass like this song does, holy shit, it is un-fucking-bearable.

Then we have Mellow Man Ace himself, and I'll be straight up with you guys, this guy flat out sucks as an emcee. This dude has no flow whatsoever. His flow is so lethargic and lifeless. I'm surprised MC Hammer didn't sue for jacking his flow. On top of that, there's the mixing of the English language with Spanish to try and make the song a little more interesting, which I would be fine with if it wasn't so goddamn embarrassing. For something like that to work, you either have to be high energy and charismatic, or you have to be able to pull off a smooth, cool guy attitude. Say what you want about Gerardo's performance on Rico Suave, he at least had the former going for him. Mellow Man Ace tries to pull off the latter, but he is failing hard, and it just makes me want to punch this guy in the dick.

Of course, if the delivery didn't make me want to punch this asshole's penis off, then the lyrics would because now we come to the thing that pisses me off most about the song, the content. In this song, the narrator finds out that his girl is cheating because he received information that she went to a party instead of to her uncle's house like she said she was going to, unaware of the fact that he and the bartender are friends. Now, I will admit that the girl cheating in this scenario is most definitely in the wrong for cheating and lying to her boyfriend like that. However, the way this guy handles it is beyond childish. Dude, she may have been in the wrong, but the way you tar and feather her doesn't exactly paint you in a positive light either, ya feel me? He then goes on to say she's nothing short of a liar, a "straight mentirosa" as he calls her, who will say one thing one day and says something else the next, which calls into question why the hell he's with this woman if he seems to have this must distrust for her in the first place. The part that really tips this song into outright offensive territory for me, though, is that in the second half of the song, he outright slutshames her and makes her out to not be a worthy girlfriend because of how many guys she's slept with. Look, I don't care if this woman cheats on you a million times, steals your car, and steals your credit card and puts thousands of dollars worth of clothes, jewelry, and other expensive things on there. You do not ever, EVER say that a woman is unworthy of being with someone due to how sexually promiscuous she is or how many partners she may have had in the past. That is the sort of regressive, misogynistic attitude that damn near everyone hates, and to see this guy basically saying "come get her, boys, she's a whore anyway, so do what you want with her" is just blood-boilingly reprehensible in every single since of the word.

There you have it: Mentirosa by Mellow Man Ace: my pick for the worst hit song of 1990. A terribly produced, immature, childish piece of garbage that makes me want to shove scissors in my ear whenever I hear it. B-Hop, how in the nine realms of Asgard did this miss your worst list? Glad I got that off my chest. See you guys next time.