Are you familiar with the term cheap pop? A cheap pop is what country music artist Justin Moore was going for at the end of his show at the Rockingham County Fair Thursday night.
“Since we’re so close to Washington, D.C.,” Moore started to tell the crowd, after performing his hit song, “I Could Kick Your Ass.”
He had a message for two people in particular, he said, and then the band started playing a tune.
The song was an anthem that it seems clear he performs regularly, with the refrain a challenge to President Obama and Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton: you’re not going to take our guns.
Now to the term, cheap pop. I once did some work (writing, business side) in the pro wrestling industry, and pop is an insider term used to describe what a babyface (the “good guy”) sometimes does on the mic to a live crowd to get a positive reaction. Faces are always on the hunt for pops; heels (the “bad guys”) are always trying to generate heat, a negative reaction.
When desperate, the faces and heels go the cheap route, saying something good (the faces do this) or bad (the heels do this) about the town that they’re performing in, along the lines of, “Hey, what a great night to be here in Scranton, Pennsylvania,” or alternatively, “These folks here in Clemson, South Carolina, sure do smell awful.”
So when you’re Justin Moore, at the county fair in Rockingham County, which routinely votes 70 percent-plus in statewide and national elections, and you end your show (pre-encore, anyway) with a ditty about how Obama and Hillary want to take folks’ guns away, that’s going for the cheap pop, because, come on, really.
Now, to me being there, and not popping: I’m sure I was one of just a handful of people in the audience who isn’t dead-red Republican. I’d been looking forward to the concert for months, with naivete, as it turns out, to Moore’s interest in going political in the show, because Moore makes no secret his political views, as I’ve discovered in doing a quick Google search while writing this piece.
I happened upon his music because my Slacker music service started injecting his songs into my playlists for Tim McGraw, Florida-Georgia Line and Luke Bryan, and I’d come to enjoy the light, witty lyrics that mark his songs, which for the most part are about growing up in a small town, being young and dumb, drinking too much, and having a redneck trigger temper.
(Which is to say, he reminds me of most of the fine people with whom I share DNA similarities, though I still harbor the fading illusion that I was switched at birth from my real family, a doctor and a teacher, who can’t understand how the little boy they took home from the hospital grew up to be a dirt-track stock-car racer. But I digress.)
I wouldn’t think I’d have to research the politics of the band before going to a concert, because of the obvious: I don’t go to concerts to get politicked to. There’s enough of that politics crap (confession: I’m a politics junkie, so I don’t call it “crap” lightly) everywhere else. You can’t open up your Facebook page to see what your cousin had for breakfast or how your friend from high school is doing fighting cancer without being inundated with the bile that passes for discourse in the political sphere these days.
I work in the news media, for chrissakes, so I get it 100 times worse than the rest of you. In addition to being a politics junkie, it’s also my job to keep up with what’s going on and then update folks about the various happenings.
Lucky for me, I happen to enjoy the job, but there’s work, there’s interest, and then there’s getting away from it to have a couple of hard ciders (OK, four, but I wasn’t driving) and jammin’ out to loud country music for a couple of hours.
As the concert went on, my wife turned to me to ask me when I thought my favorite song, the one about kicking ass, was going to come up, and I told her that if I had to guess, he might have retired it, since that song was one of his early hits, and it seemed like the set list was heavy on the more radio-friendly fare on his later albums, which I understood.
When the first guitar riff from “I Could Kick Your Ass” hit the speakers, yeah, I marked out, sang along, in my best twang.
That made my night; I could go home happy.
Then we get the political message. Obama and Hillary want to take your guns.
It’s loud, and we’re well back from the stage, 200-level, in a section of empty seats (the fairgrounds were well below half-capacity), but I’m saying out loud, “Good news for you, Justin. They don’t want your guns.”
As the band continues, a group of teens starts parading around with a Donald Trump yard sign, with self-congratulatory looks on their faces.
The 100 level, in front of the stage, which was just about at capacity, was reaching a fever pitch.
The concert became a political rally, and, hey, that’s fine. I mean, again, shame on me for not researching the guy ahead of time, though I should point out that I’ve done several different Google searches with keywords “Justin Moore,” “concert review” and “Obama” and “Hillary,” and I haven’t yet found one that mentions the showstopper referencing the political rhetoric.
Which means, I’m probably the idiot who cares, right? I mean, how many progressive Southern Democrats go to country music concerts in general, and Justin Moore concerts in particular?
I’m an odd bird, no doubt, a Dem who can’t wait to see Justin Moore in concert when he’s in town, is engrossed in pro wrestling, another right-leaning diversion, and is at least conversant in NASCAR, whose brain trust endorsed Trump during the Republican primaries.
I had my first NASCAR experience last year covering a weekend of racing at Richmond International Raceway. After the endorsement announcement, I skipped out on the 2016 spring races, fully realizing that NASCAR is a lot bigger than me, and doesn’t care what I think.
But then again, given the scads of empty seats the powers-that-be there try to divert our attention from seeing most race weekends, maybe they should be thinking about doing what they can do to be more inclusive in terms of adding to the fan base.
I dunno. It’s none of my business. I get that. I’m not telling NASCAR to endorse Hillary Clinton for president as a way to draw more fans; not telling Justin Moore to cut that idiotic song about Obama and Hillary trying to take your guns away from his set list.
Justin Moore knows how he got to the top of the game in Nashville, and it wasn’t because he cared what people like me think.
That cheap pop at the expense of President Obama and Hillary Clinton solidified his standing among the vast majority of the 1,500 or so people at the show last night.
He did lose me, but life goes on, and let me just say, on another note, what a thrill it is for me in my life to be able to be able to write columns for such intelligent, engaging, and no doubt physically appealing readers as yourself.
(Yeah, that’s me grasping for a cheap pop.)
Column by Chris Graham
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