This song is about as unique as another season of Survivor. Maybe the contestants are different, maybe the specific setting is different, but it’s really all the same in the long run.
There’s very little else to be said about this song, a preview track from Rice’s upcoming album Ignite the Night. It contains the same clichés as fifty other songs currently being played on your average mainstream country radio station. And it doesn’t do anything even remotely different with them. It contains the same auto-tune that you’ll hear in many of those other songs. It doesn’t do anything different in that regard either.
And while the song may not be as up-tempo as some as Rice’s other offerings, it’s hardly a novel idea to have these clichés in slower songs either.
Rice defends the clichés in the song to Radio.com. “People talk about how they’re tired of hearing, get a girl in your truck, drive her around, take her down the dirt road, however you word it,” he said. “I brush that off real quick. Trust me, these people I’m seeing at these shows are doing that. And they’re doing that because that’s their life. I’m singing about it because that was my life before I was touring all the time.” (Ref. 1) | "It contains the same clichés as fifty other songs currently being played on your average mainstream country radio station. And it doesn’t do anything even remotely different with them." |
Hell, even Rice’s defense of the material isn’t original or unique. It’s basically a paraphrase of the defense Dallas Davidson offered of Luke Bryan’s atrocity “That’s My Kind of Night.” Davidson was quoted as saying, “We write about what we know about. What I know about is sitting on a tailgate drinking a beer. Hell, I live on the river. When Luke called me to tell me about what happened, I was literally smoking Boston butts on my homemade cooker at my 800 square foot river house with about four of my buddies with their trucks backed up, sitting on a tailgate.” (Ref. 2)(Davidson didn’t elaborate that apparently the other things he knows about are racial and homophobic slurs, but that’s another story from another website (Ref. 3)). And while "writing about what you know" is all fine and good, if you only know about one thing, then say it once and shut the fuck up. We don't need to hear about it every time you open your mouth.
Honestly, if you didn’t know this song was by Chase Rice, you wouldn’t even be able to tell. Largely because not only is the song not unique or original, but neither is Chase Rice. He has yet to put out a song that is distinctly him; he has yet to put out a song that separates him from the crowd of people performing the same types of songs. At least Luke Bryan was good at one point in his career. He had some solid material earlier in his career, especially before he hit it big, and later sold out. (Do yourself a favor and listen to his song “Small Town Favorite.”) That distinction can’t be made about Rice.
But even so, the song’s not even blatantly offensive to country music the way some other songs are lately. While it may rely heavily on auto-tune, especially in the chorus, it doesn’t suffer the offense of drifting into EDM or hip-hop. It could be a whole lot worse. In fact, melodically, the song has a decent beat and a nice sound. With completely different lyrics, it probably wouldn’t be unpleasant to listen to. Unfortunately, as the song is, it’s just another song that doesn’t do anything to break free of the pack.
Ref. 1
http://radio.com/2014/07/22/chase-rice-gonna-wanna-tonight-new-song-ignite-the-night/
Ref. 2
http://www.countryweekly.com/news/thats-my-kind-night-songwriter-says-zac-browns-comments-were-not-cool
Ref. 3
http://www.savingcountrymusic.com/bro-country-songwriter-dallas-davidson-arrested-uses-homophobic-racial-slurs