I am amazed at the startling disconnect between the modern male and female country music songwriter.
So many of the men are writing songs about the purty women that obviously exist only in their dreams. Sexy, sultry women in halter tops and tight cutoff bluejeans who can do it all – drive a truck, rope a calf, rock a baby and wear a gown at a ball like no woman ever has since the ancient days of fairy tales.
And love their men. Boy can they love their men.
However, many of the women songwriters are telling a different story. They are completely fed up with the men in their lives.
Fair enough, but instead of just walking away from these brain-dead bozos, they want to see these idiots suffer.
I heard one of these songs again today and it made the hair stand up on my head (well, it would have if there was any there to stand up). The song was clever and a bit tongue-in-cheek, but wow. Just wow.
It seems as though, if I have this straight, the singer’s man hadn’t yet cheated on her, but she has big plans if he ever does. To be blunt, she intends to murder him. And she is fairly graphic in the song.
She is willing to die to exact her revenge. She doesn’t spell out how her consequent doom will happen – whether by death penalty or her own hand. But at one point, she sings that someone should tell the gravedigger that he will need to dig two graves – one for her and one, obviously, for her dirty, cheating rat of a partner.
In another recurring line, and this is the last one in the song, she tells her man that if his ring feels a little too tight, they can read her her last rites.
Now, I can follow this woman’s logic up to a point, but then she loses me. If I have her view of the everyday marital relationship right, any man who agrees to be her partner better commit to being her lover exclusively, or die for his failure to do that.
Not only that, she is willing to give up her own life upon finding out that she has been teamed up with someone she considers despicable.
And this is where I get lost in all this.
I hope I never have to face a situation where I feel I need to kill somebody. I don’t know what that circumstance would be but losing the affection of a wife would not be one.
Similarly, I have a very short list of reasons why I would want to kill myself but finding out there is a third party in my marriage would not be on that list. I live in a free country and my wife, as are all the people around me, is free to make her own choices.
I believe this singer should have made it clear to her man before they were married that if he ever cheated on her, she would take him out and that she was so serious about it, she wouldn’t mind hitting the exit with him.
Maybe I am supposed to chuckle at all this, and I will admit the song is pretty well written and performed, but it would be a little less disturbing to me if this woman’s message isn’t one that is playing out in homes all over the world every day, although it is usually the men who are the killers.
If this is what things have come to, then the best survival strategy any thinking human being could ever adopt is to stay forever single.
Dream about all the purty women and eye candy men if you want but stay the heck away from the altar. Seems like for some, it’s a dangerous, dangerous place to venture.
©2015 Jim Hagarty
