RAMBLE ON: "I Hate Everything" by George Strait

One of the odder things about “Trolls: World Tour” (where we learn the titular Trolls live in separate societies defined by different musical genres) was its depiction of the country music Trolls as an society of heartbroken cowboys and cowgirls crying all the time. This is an old, old stereotype – my wife left, my dog died, my truck broke down – that hasn’t really felt relevant in some twenty or thirty years, certainly not since the bro-country era. At some point the music of sad bastards shifted over to the rockers, the alt kids, the emos.

But as I think about it, country music hasn’t entirely given up its label as tear-in-my-beer music; it may have different priorities now but it can still compete. It’s not a surprise at all to realize that the canonical Saddest Song of All Time is an old-school country singer’s cover of an alt-rock song. But Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” is not quite my favorite country soul-crusher; that honor goes to a different Nashville veteran.

In 2009, George Strait was honored by the Academy of Country Music as the Artist of the Decade. He could have been their artist of the ‘80s (that went to Alabama) and of the ‘90s (that went to Garth), and if they had given an award for Artist of the ‘80s and ‘90s Combined, it certainly would have been Strait. Artist of the ‘00s seems like a makeup call – Brad Paisley, Carrie Underwood, Alan Jackson, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney and Toby Keith all arguably have stronger claims – but it is true that the man only barely slowed down in his third decade, and it was definitely an achievement as Nashville turned increasingly toward youth and pop. He and Alan Jackson also won some awards for “Murder on Music Row,” a song about how shitty country music had gotten. (Little could they imagine what lay in store.)

The year after “Hurt” came out, George released his own entry into the desperately depressing country song genre. The narrator meets a man drinking, and the man spills about his miserable life. Unlike “Hurt,” it remains firmly a country song. Don’t get me wrong, “Hurt” may have roots in alternative rock but it’s a worthy country song; it’s by a country legend and gets almost all of its weight from Cash’s age, his weathered voice and lifetime of regrets. Reznor’s lyrics, though, remain firmly alt-rock, full of abstractions and metaphors: my empire of dirt, my liar’s chair.

Country doesn’t generally have the time for such flights of fancy, and George stays firmly grounded. He doesn’t have any of Cash’s dry, dusty production; he keeps things traditional with fiddles and a genteel steady backbeat and he sings with all of his Southern charm. You would not necessarily listen to the music and expect it to be very sad.

It also dispenses with any florid poetry – George just presents the simple facts of the story, as if any other approach would be a distraction. He sings it not as a heartbreaker, but just as an interesting anecdote. The narrator goes to the bar and meets a man who is getting way too drunk, even though by the guy’s own admission he hates this bar and he hates drinking. But no, he corrects himself, that’s not what he hates. What he hates is everything.

“I hate my job,” he says. “I hate my life. If it wasn’t for my kids, I’d hate my ex-wife.” (The fact that he still has it in him to not hate his ex-wife, even only for his children’s sake, makes him seem almost implausibly decent.)

The second verse is an absolute stunner. He describes the crappy one-room apartment he lives in now; he calls it a prison. He utterly collapses in the pre-chorus. “I hate summer,” he says, then adds, “and winter, fall and spring… red and yellow, purple blue and green… I hate everything.” (That pause after “summer” is key.)

What Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” communicates is futility, and the transitory nature of existence – everything goes away in the end. “I Hate Everything” communicates something else entirely – despair. This man lost everything and it didn’t “go away in the end”; maybe his life is closer to ending than it is to starting (I would say he’s probably mid-40s), but it’s far from the end. He still has much life to live after hitting rock bottom, day after day of self-loathing and rotgut liquor, and deep down the absolute certainty that things will never get any better. This is as good as it will ever be from here on out. There is no joy, there is no love, he’s not going to meet anyone else, he’s not going to get over his wife leaving him for another man, it’s just this from here on out. Rock bottom isn’t an empire of dirt. It’s just waking up every day in your shitty little apartment forever, divorced and broke and failed at life. Strait may as not have been as aged as Cash but this song is just good a display of what country music lost when it stopped being music for adults.

Naturally, Nashville radio would never play a song that bleak, so there is a tacked-on copout ending. The narrator thanks our sad divorcee for his time, pays for his drinks, and then calls his wife to say they’re going to work it out. It’s a spoonful of sugar on a desperately sad song, and to put it bluntly, it doesn’t fucking work at all. I think it’s meant to soothe the hopelessness by giving the song a happy ending, but it sure isn’t much of one. This drunk guy saved George’s marriage by serving as a cautionary tale; being a sad example of how not to end up is probably not much comfort to him. It’s worth noting that the writer couldn’t think of a happy ending for the man himself; there probably isn’t one, and if there is we won’t learn about it in the timeframe of the song. Divorce isn’t actually the end of a person’s life, of course, but everything we hear about this man is meant to rip your heart out. Giving a happy ending to someone else is both discordant to the tone of the song and a distraction from its main character.

That said, I’m almost grateful for that final verse. The happy ending doesn’t distract me from the song’s hopelessness but the deeply flawed creative decision-making does. It gives me something else to think about. And I really don’t want to think about Bitter Divorced Guy, doomed to spend his life drinking shit whiskey in a shit bar. Despair is inextricably linked to boredom, and during the pandemic all of us got to be a little more unpleasantly familiar with the experience of days that never get better and never change. I didn’t listen to this song while writing this article and, while I love this song, I wouldn’t mind never hearing it again. I don’t need to be hating everything, George!