The Band Perry - If I Die Young

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

Death to the Virginal Country Princesses... literally

The Band Perry
If I Die Young
Hallmark
#33 (HiMid)
Dec 30, 2010
Kimberly Perry
Nathan Chapman
Paul Worley

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If I was having any lingering guilt about not hating Taylor Swift, The Band Perry just expunged it... this Virginal Pop Country Princess thing is excruciating. If Carrie Underwood is there for mother/daughter tears at weddings and George Strait is working on dad mortality tearjerkers, The Band Perry is bleeding sap even more nefarious: dead kids.

Well, dead Virginal Pop Country Princesses, anyway... by measure of subject material alone, Swift looks like a Rhodes Scholar in comparison.

On one hand, this song is a letter to a grieving mother from her dead teenager: “It's okay, mom. I lived enough.” That strikes me as really tacky; I'm sure grieving mothers want to hear that, but cheap platitudes from pop country don't sound particularly genuine. This song can serve as 3:40 of “God just needed another angel. That's why he had to take her.” Thanks, Hallmark. I'm sure you've cornered this market.

A penny for my thoughts
Oh no, I'll sell them for a dollar
They're worth so much more
after I'm a goner
and maybe then you'll hear
the words I've been singing
funny when you're dead
how people start listening

On the other: this song is an extended teenage “They'd miss me if I was gone” moping dressed up in country princess rainbows. I suppose it's nice to know that it's not just the girls with multiple lip rings and tri-colored hair that do this, but there's a lot of creepiness in there. There's no mistaking the intent of “funny when you're dead how people start listening.” 

You never paid attention to me, but now you'll have to listen. Has Trent Reznor's stock sunk so low that The Band Perry can chisel into his market? That's a little sad.

Well, that... and the dollar/goner line is a bigger groaner than anything Taio Cruz could have written... but this song is full of terrible rhymes. That's the one that really stands out, though.

The connotations of the song are that Virginal Pop Country Princesses are, of course, virgins who will be welcomed into heaven (“I'll be wearing white when I come into your kingdom, I'm as green as the ring on my little cold finger.”)  Should I even comment on the song's presupposition of a Christian heaven?  Nah... everyone knows country music isn't for non-Christians.  When we die, the lord has no intention of making us into rainbows ("Lord make me a rainbow, I'll shine down on my mother, she'll know I'm safe with you when she stands under my colors.")

Phew... it must be sign-off time; I keep wanting to beat this song with its own lyrics, even though there's no further point to be made.  It's a sappy, pouty tearjerker... gee, I wonder who's making a song like this climb the charts.

RUN!

Stay with the song, walk away, or run like hell: