When I Think About Cheatin' - Gretchen Wilson

Country Doesn't Mean Sad

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukBiKhxxu0s]

Just cause it's slow doesn't mean it's sad...

There are a lot of cheatin' songs out there in country music. Most of them are after-the-fact type songs. We get to hear about what goes down after someone cheats or how someone feels after cheating or being cheated on by someone, etc. Wilson takes things another way. She looks at the consequences of her actions beforehand. She then weighs and measures the benefit from the loss she'll suffer. That loss keeps her from acting on her impulses to cheat. It's a very good message to send out to people. Wilson wrote the song, and it made it all the way to #4 on the charts.

This weekend I had a conversation with a fellow musician about being responsible with the message(s) the song(s) put out there in the world. We were packing up our gear after finishing a show, and the house sound system was playing the radio. Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats" was playing, and we discussed how it sends a very destructive message to women. Not only that, but I'll almost guarantee that at least one woman out there has been in a serious domestic violence situation after she took the advice of Underwood's song. It just seems like irresponsibility.

I don't mean to pick on Underwood; there have been many songs like this one. "Goodbye Earl" by The Dixie Chicks comes to mind, and there are plenty of other areas in the entertainment world where bad suggestions are made or bad role models win when they'd lose in real life, but most of them have some sort of suggestion of comedic overtone or at least set things up to show you it's not real. Underwood's song comes off as an outright suggestion of how to deal with cheating boyfriends. I hate to think of a woman that took this action and wound up being put in the hospital instead of getting to walk away satisfied like the protagonist in the song.