Bret Michaels of Poison Pretty Much Just Released the Worst Country Song Ever

Photo: Handout
Photo: Handout

Well look what the cat dragged in, it’s Bret Michaels from Poison with his Maybelline eyes giving a new definition to the term “coyote ugly” with his caustic and aggressively-unoriginal song “Girls On Bars.” Congratulations country music, your hair metal phase has just graduated from figurative to literal.

Apparently Mr. Michaels took some malevolent pointers from Trace Adkins on how to screw up country with bad songs while they were both starring on Celebrity Apprentice, and now he’s released a “country” single to share what he’s learned. Stolen right out of the Bro-Country playbook for generic tripe written in Emoji and douchewad speak by Dallas Davidson and Florida Georgia Line, this song is so unconscionably generic I had to slap myself in the face to be convinced it wasn’t parody.

“Hot chicks, cold beer, let’s keep the party rollin’ up in here!”

OH MY GOD KILL ME NOW! DIE! DIE! DIE!

Just what we need, a song to stimulate drunk chicks in $7.98 Wal-Mart straw cowboy hats to get up on precariously-balanced bar tables with cigarette lighters shoved under one leg to stop from wobbling and strut their stuff. I hope that every bikini-topped wench that’s inspired to do an ass whip on the bar top and biffs it like hell on a lime wedge sues Bret Michaels from hell to breakfast, taking every bit of his millions from chemical tan endorsements until he’s forced to record new renditions of old Poison songs and release it through Kidz Bop.

bret-michaels-2Wait, apparently I spoke too soon. According to my internet research, that’s pretty much what Michaels just did—re-recorded a bunch of Poison crap on a new CD called True Grit, and it apparently includes a duet with Loretta Lynn on “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” Well screw me.

“Girls On Bars” had 72 songwriters, 36 producers, a seven-figure budget, yet the thing just feels so hackneyed and trashy. It’s not as much sick as it is sad, like it’s a musical illustration of the onset of America’s torpid devolution. Even the video looks like it was made by a bunch of grabasstic high school stoners using 20-year-old deprecated public school media lab equipment rented from the public library as a stop gap solution to a local ISD’s budgetary shortfall. When the camera goes all POV and starts twirling round on the top of a bar, I thought I was suffering from motion sickness. Then I figured out that no, it’s just that this song really really blows to the point of causing debilitating gastrointestinal direst.

I can’t say I’ve been paying much attention to the doings of Bret Michaels over the last few years aside from recognizing that he’s gone from someone who is famous for being a musician to someone famous for being famous. It’s a shame because laugh all you want, but when Poison was releasing singles like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” and “Something To Believe In” it opened the door for bands like The Black Crowes to resurrect rock and roll out of its hair metal doldrums. Hell I’d take either of those tunes in trade for this abominable turd.

“I never ask for a ‘gimme.’ Never,” Michaels told Billboard. “All I ask for is a chance. And that’s what country music does.”

Wait, it “does“?!? Boy the grammatical tense there tells it all. Country for these 50-something rock music washouts is just a safety net for their shitty careers amidst a rapid decline.

Bret Michaels proves that anyone, and I mean anyone, can slop out this Bro-Country bullshit. He should get back to raiding his sister’s cosmetic drawer. Bret Michaels has flames on his guitar and skid marks in his bikini-cut underwear. What sin did country music commit to be saddled with this cruel and unusual punishment?

The CMA will probably give this Song of the Year.

Two guns way down!

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