Song Review – Dustin Lynch’s “Good Girl”

The name Dustin Lynch is quickly becoming a direct match synonym for derivative bottom shelf white boy culturally appropriating pseudo rap R&B bullshit. Don’t let the cowboy hat and rugged jawline fool you. This guy’s like the Wyle E. Coyote from Looney Tunes, dressed in an ACME sheep suit to blend in with the rest of country music, only to devour what’s left of the mainstream’s self-respect and credibility when the sheepdog’s not looking.

Holy shit this is bad. Normally Dustin Lynch wouldn’t even be worthy of our criticism as a country music bottom feeder that broke our hearts after showing early promise. Better to ignore him than to draw inadvertent undeserved attention to his bottom shelf talent. But now that the Grand Ole Opry has inexplicably decided to anointed him as their newest member over an incredibly wide and deep field of much more qualified contenders, let him feel the sting of the poison pen.

Hanging on the nuts of Sam Hunt, and hoping to exploit the vacuum left since Sam went virtually AWOL from the studio, Dustin Lynch swoops in to lobby for strong consideration as the preeminent hoser in all of mainstream “country,” peddling the worst R&B-infused transparently pandering lowest common denominator schlock. It only takes the first two lines of “Good Girl” for the song to become incredibly recycled, cliché, and horrifically redundant, while portraying a young woman in the “girl” pejorative to drive home just how shallow his perspective is.

The only thing more lazy than rhyming “good girl” with “good girl,” is rhyming “good girl” with “good girl” a third time before you’re even allowed to exit the first damn phrase. Throw in a little bit of filched vernacular from the hip-hop world with “yeah you up and took my whole world,” and just the first stanza of “Good Girl” checks off nearly all the boxes of what’s wrong with today’s “country” music.

The fleeting dobro is just a teaser, almost like a trolling of traditional country fans to remind them of what has been torn asunder in country music’s wayward trajectory, while shortly a sound bed composed completely via a computer interface offends the ears, with the Auto-tune plugin close at hand to make the otherwise vocally-talented Dustin Lynch sound like he swallowed an iPhone. Even the guitar solo sounds like it was played on a keytar, or MIDI controller while the composer was wacking off to Tinder profiles.

This is country my ass, and the last thing we can do is let a song like Dustin Lynch’s “Good Girl” become a commonplace occurrence, or go unchallenged in the marketplace. Average Joe citizens out there walking the streets see a guy like Dustin Lynch sporting a cowboy hat and hear he’s a country singer, and all of a sudden they think this shit is what country music is supposed to be.

The worst part about this entire enterprise is that despite the jarring sensation “Good Girl” injects in the true country fan, we known that if you drilled down to the nugget of what Dustin Lynch is, there’s a good ol’ country boy born in Nashville, Tennessee that knows right from wrong. But the allure of the big payday and the stadium full of adoring fans is too powerful for Lynch to deny, and he’s fallen in line to become just another nameless and faceless mainstream country music male.

Two Guns Down (1/10)

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