This song, which inexplicably reached Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 and then even more inexplicably sat there long enough to set a new record, apparently started as a memetic joke, and became only slightly less of one after Billy Ray Cyrus recorded a remix of it that at least filled it out to full song length. (For the record, I am aware that this abomination has received several other remixes, some of them featuring more talented artists, but it was the Billy Ray rendition that took it to Number One.)
It has apparently become the center of some idiotic debate among the political correctness types about racism in Country music or some such nonsense, but even that is really more attention than it deserves. I suppose I have heard worse Rap-Country hybrids, but I can still count them on one hand. The chorus sounds like Country cliches distilled into their most basic form and then delivered by someone who doesn’t actually understand them in the slightest.
On the verses, we get to watch Billy Ray Cyrus equally fail to comprehend the workings of Hip-Hop, managing to find whole new ways of embarrassing himself (something I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible at this point). Granted, this song is still not as bad as Billy Ray’s previous Pop hit, the legendarily awful “Achy Breaky Heart”, but the fact that it gave that bozo a second Number One hit is reason enough to hate it all by itself.
Verdict: I’m not sure this even qualifies as a song, but if it does, it’s definitely a bad one.