Blake Shelton - Who Are You When I'm Not Looking

Fairly important: the formatting on this post goes to hell in most feeds, and it will be best read at ericonthecharts.blogspot.com

And now, the worst rhyme ever sung...

Blake Shelton
Who Are You When I'm Not Looking
Ass Kissing
#99 (Low)
Nov 11, 2010
Earl Bud Lee
John Wiggins
Scott Hendricks

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When the song starts, I get the immediate impression that Blake Shelton is the countriest dude to come down the pipe so far. The music's not rollicking at all, but it's mopey in a somewhat traditional, cryin' in yer beer way, with weepy pedal steel backing up a pretty straight forward guitar.

Then he sings.

And then I pick myself up off the floor and back the song up, because I missed most of it laughing so hard. For bad rhymes, Taio Cruz has nothing on this guy. He can rhyme “plans” with “dance” all he wants, as long as he's a buffer between me and this chorus:

My oh my, you're so good lookin'
Hold yourself together like a pair of book ends
But I've not tasted all your cookin'
Who are you when I'm not lookin?

I know he rhymes “lookin” with “lookin,” and that usually bugs me. “Lookin” and “cookin” rhyme, sure, but let's go right to line 2, where the laughter starts and just won't stop. What rhymes with “lookin?” I dunno... how about “book ends,” which not only do not rhyme, but also do not hold themselves together, if anyone wants to give Mr. Shelton a refresher course in irony.

Rhyming aside, that refrain is so badly composed, so nonsensical, and so fucking corny... I can't believe he sings it twice in the first 90 seconds of a three minute song. Yes, I get it: the cookin' in question is a metaphor for all the different facets of the woman in the song, but it's a really, really bad metaphor. It's a metaphor that could have been avoided if he didn't feel the need to open with “My oh my, you're so good lookin,” which is lame in its own right.

The rest of the song is basically sucking up to womankind, the best way Blake Shelton knows how: it's got bubble baths, painted nails, and phone calls to mom. It's definitely a song about the Ways of a Woman written by a man, but he's doing his best to show interest and play to the crowd. “You ladies like chocolate, right? Lemme hear it!”

For as bad as this song is, it made me laugh (and laughter is a good thing), and it does have the basic, bedrock quality of not sounding like someone raped country music in a Pro Tools session and handed it to a London producer. Faint praise, sure, but better than no praise at all.

Walk

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