RAMBLE ON: "Dicked Down in Dallas" by Trey Lewis

The drum fill before the second chorus of “Dicked Down in Dallas” is the funniest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard. It knocked me on the floor the first time I heard it and I’ve listened to the song over and over again just for that one moment. Rata-tata-rata-tatat; just amazing, I died laughing. There’s another drum fill right before the second verse that’s also pretty funny, not quite as funny as the other one but still a killer punchline. I wouldn’t call the guitar solo a punchline exactly but only because it's too long; it’s more like an extended comedy sequence, and every note of it is hilarious. I mean, that guitarist is just wailing. Hysterical.

That these wordless bits are so funny is especially impressive because “Dicked Down in Dallas” is a novelty song where the actual “joke” is not especially funny – arguably it’s extremely hackish and unfunny. The music video, with newcomer Trey Lewis thrusting his pelvis and making obscene gestures, is deeply not funny. The structure of “Dicked Down in Dallas,” however, is extremely funny. I’ve secretly listened to “Dicked Down in Dallas” more in the past year than most of my favorite songs. I guess you had to be there.

Trey Lewis is an unsigned country singer, apparently with ambitions to be a legitimate Nashville star. He’s got an uphill battle; he has a scummy redneck look to him, not much like the boyfriend-country beefcakes that Nashville prefers. He only had a small following when a joke song he released blew up on TikTok in the waning months of 2020. “Dicked Down in Dallas” starts out like a real song about some kind of runaway girlfriend, where Trey sings sadly about all the cities she’s puttin’ between him and her. And then the song takes a turn in the chorus – “She’s getting dicked down in Dallas, railed out in Raleigh, tag-teamed up in Tennessee,” and so on and so on. And the rest of the song is about what a dirty slut she is.

I got a comment on a video saying they were tired of listening to me figure out whether I’m offended by something; truth be told, I’m tired of hearing it from me too. Mostly I do that whole spiel to hedge my bets against anyone who is offended; for once, let me drop the pretense and say that I wasn’t remotely offended the first time I heard this. Multiple listens have revealed stuff that rubs me wrong – the jab in the second verse about the girl having daddy issues makes me wince – and in general I don’t find this kind of fratboy humor all that amusing, but for me the comedy in the song was never about slut-shaming (despite its fair share of detractors calling Lewis on it).

Lewis says the song started out being played straight, and had some kind of lame title like “Gone Back to Dallas.” But the concept wasn’t coming together – Trey couldn’t figure out what the girl was doing in Dallas, Raleigh, Austin, etc. A bandmate offered the lyric “she’s getting dicked down in Dallas” as a joke, and Lewis and his friends thought it was funny enough to just roll with it. I think the fact that it started out as a real song is pretty key to understanding why the song works.

I think the hardest I’ve ever laughed at anything is the seagulls in “Finding Nemo” shouting “Mine! Mine!” constantly. I literally fell out of my chair in the theater; people were looking at me like I was insane. You have to understand, I was raised a beach kid; I know the incessant squawking of those flying scavengers pretty intimately and it just felt insanely true that even in a cartoon world where birds talk, those greedy nuisances would only be able to speak that one word. Similarly, “Dicked Down in Dallas” busted my gut because it was just so very familiar; I grew up on country and I feel like I’ve been hearing unironic versions of this song all my life. It’s been so long that I can’t even name them now (“Texas Tornado” by Tracy Lawrence is the only one that comes to mind) but I instantly recognized the technique of “just name a bunch of Southern towns” as a time-honored Nashville tradition. If there is any kind of satirical point to “Dicked Down in Dallas,” it’s highlighting the absurdity of this cliché – why are we naming all these cities? How and why is this chick blowing through so many towns? (Heh, “blowing through.” Shut up.) How does this keep happening in country songs? Are we clapping like seals at the sound of local place names?

Probably the best direction that Lewis takes with the premise is that he keeps the narrator heartbroken. If he had been smug or angry, we would be invited to laugh with him, but I feel that mostly we’re laughing at him – his slurs on this girl’s character sound petty, jealous, sad and most importantly unaware that he’s saying anything funny. The joke is that Lewis is too dumb to realize that his foul mouth is ruining the song. And just as importantly, it’s a tone that fits the song’s original, unironic framework. I have no doubt that if Lewis had finished his sincere heartbreak song it would’ve sounded exactly like this; all the horniness and sexual jealousy would’ve still been there. Scratch the surface of many country songs and you will find many more “Dicked Down in Dallas-es”; all Lewis has done is turn subtext into text.

This is why the song’s at its best when it’s playing it completely straight, and why the drum fills and the guitar solos just absolutely kill me. They’re just so sincere. The video, which is terrible, is great when Lewis isn’t mugging at the camera and just plays his guitar and stares off into the middle distance. It’s all the stylistic tropes of Real Country, all the aching (but professional) earnestness. (That said, I also appreciate how the video takes pains to include a group of redneck girls singing along to dilute any negative feelings; see, we’re just having fun, ladies. I have no doubt that this song kills in sorority houses across the South.)

Incidentally, right now there’s another country song, apparently sincere, that reminds me a lot of “Dicked Down in Dallas.” That would be Mitchell Tenpenny’s “Truth About You,” an extremely ugly and bitter song where he threatens an ex who’s spreading rumors about him: “If you stop telling lies about me, I won’t tell the truth about you.” Critics immediately picked out the song as the worst example of country’s ugly bro tendencies, but I wouldn’t say the problem is necessarily misogyny. For me, the issue is that Tenpenny is a fucking moron who plays his clapback revenge anthem like a love ballad, with the same manful sincerity and soaring guitar solo. It’s dissonant; it just fucking sounds wrong; I have no idea how it’s a hit. It’s that same kind of dipshittery that Trey Lewis is sending up here; if anything, Lewis predicted it two years in advance. I don’t expect to see Lewis again anytime soon (his only other song of note is a trap remix with fellow Nashville outsider Rvshvd that doesn’t seem to have done anything), but I appreciate what he did with this song; it’s not his ex he’s exposed, he’s laid Nashville bare.