Bumper-Gate?

Just to show certain people that it ain't all tea and crumpets here at Llama Central, I was interested to read Michael Goldfarb's piece in the Weekly Standard this morning dealing with some controversy surrounding Chely Wright's Country hit Bumper of My SUV, a song about Wright getting flipped the bird in traffic for carrying a USMC sticker on her bumper.

Apparently, some of Ms. Wright's fan club had been posing as members of military families in order to boost exposure of the song. Wright herself denies any knowledge of the stunt and seems to have caused heads to roll when it was found out. Goldfarb suggests (somewhat unsuccessfully, I think) that Wright's motives in even recording the song to begin with might be more tainted than previously thought.

I can't really get all that worked up about this because I finally heard the song recently and, frankly, didn't think it was very good. To me, there's not that much point in getting caught up in a debate over a song's sentiments or motivation if the music itself is disappointing.

There have been a great many Country songs of late about the war against the Islamofacists. Some of them are, so to speak, geopolitical in scope and as you might expect, are pretty generally Red White and Blue Flag-Waivers. Others, like "Bumper of My SUV," purport to look at things from the point of view of individual soldiers and their families. They tend to stay off the politics and instead focus on the experiences and feelings of the actual people involved. Of this latter category, by far the best one that I've heard is John Michael Montgomery's Letters From Home. (As an aside, as much as I like some of Toby Keith's music, I think his "American Soldier" is rubbish.)