Country Music For People Who Hate Country Music Part 3: Women Going Apeshitt (sic)

This segment was originally going to have a title related to utterly justified murder. However, right about then, Miranda Lambert stomped in, screaming “I am going to have a breakdown in public and NO ONE CAN STOP ME!” and I realized the rage ran a little deeper than mere murder. This is a return to the more modern sounds I’m fond of, and a lot of these songs are from the more recent span of the eras I’m into. This isn’t exactly a subgenre officially, but also, yes it is, and it’s a good one.

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Goodbye, Earl by The Chicks

You can’t beat an upbeat, feel-good tune about murder. This was one of the first music videos I ever saw, and that shot of zombified Earl wandering the crowd at the end is a weirdly powerful early memory of mine. Living Earl is still my imagination’s immediate idea of a stock douchebag. I don’t believe kindergarten-me really noticed the lesbian overtones in the narrative, but I certainly notice them now.

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Mama’s Broken Heart by Miranda Lambert

I namedropped this one in the intro, and here it is. Miranda Lambert plays a character that gets dumped and then says “screw being a proper lady” and has a nuclear level meltdown. This song has always struck me as a good soundtrack for a woman to go on a murderous rampage to. It also reminds me of one of my close friends in a way I kinda make fun of her for.

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Independence Day by Martina McBride

The list gets dark for a moment — this song is a young child’s recollection of her mother burning the house down around herself and her abusive husband, leaving the child in foster care. This is a deeply cathartic song. You can scream it in a car while drive-crying if you hear it in the right mood.

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Gunpowder and Lead by Miranda Lambert

            For some reason I thought this was by someone else but no, it’s Miranda Lambert revenge song again, so she’s going in here twice. The sound is similar to Mama’s Broken Heart, but this song is a lot more serious in its subject matter, refencing domestic violence rather than a mere breakup. I would say it lands somewhere between Goodbye Earl and Independence Day in its tone—it’s far darker than Earl, but a lot less reverent than Independence Day. This one seems to be happening in a very different part of the county than Lambert’s last song on the list. These aren’t even the only ones she has—Miranda Lambert loves a good revenge song I guess.

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Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood

This song came out when I was in 5^th grade and for a while it was everywhere. That experience made it, to me at least, kind of the go-to example of the Apeshitt (sic) subgenre. I don’t love Two Black Cadillacs enough to give Carrie Underwood a double entry as well, but I’ll give it a mention anyway. Like the Miranda Lambert pair above, they are two solid revenge songs, one about a meltdown, and one about a murder.

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The Night the Lights Went Out In Georgia by Vicki Lawrence (and Reba McEntire)

I suppose the fact that I put it in this section kind of spoils the plot twist, but since this song was released in the 70s, it probably no longer matters. I thought this song was a lot older than it turned out to be. Personally, I prefer the Reba McEntire version, mostly because it’s the more familiar to me; it’s more My Era, as we’ve covered.

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Man! I Feel Like A Woman by Shania Twain

Shania back at it again with the exclamation points. This one is more about partying down than violence, but it felt at home in this segment. This is one that many younger versions of me would never have admitted to liking, but they can go fuck themselves actually. 

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Sin Wagon by The Chicks

And so we come full circle, back where we started, with The Chicks. They aren’t committing a murder this time, but this song may well be what they’re referring to when they say party like its 1999. I mean, it’s super not, but if the Shania Twain song made the list then this one needs to as well.

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NEXT TIME: Songs That Didn’t Have To Go This Hard But Did, which is about songs of protest and political tilt that challenge the genre’s conservative reputation. Woody Guthrie makes another appearance.