Country Radio’s Decade With No Ditties

In the week leading into Country Radio Seminar, I took a break from my radio listening and began shuffling the Country songs on my phone.

I know you’re wondering what those songs are. In the first hour or so of music, these were just a few of the songs I came across, some for the first time since they were new:

• Lady A, “Love Don’t Live Here”
• John Conlee, “I Don’t Remember Loving You”—one of two Conlee songs, in fact
• Luke Bryan, “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”
• Tim McGraw, “Felt Good on My Lips”
• Trisha Yearwood, “That’s What I Like About You”
• Dean Brody, “Dirt”
• Johnny Rodriguez, “What’ll I Tell Virginia”—an early ‘80s lost country fave
• Kane Brown, “Heaven”
• Miranda Lambert, “Fastest Girl in Town”—there was a Pistol Annies song as well
• Tanya Tucker & T. Graham Brown, “Don’t Go Out”

Then there was Toby Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.” When CRS 2012 convened on March 12, “Red Solo Cup” had peaked a month earlier at No. 9, four months after its release. “Red Solo Cup” would go double platinum. Over the next decade, it would generate 62 million YouTube views. But without the full ratification of Country radio, it still read as “not quite a hit” at a time when Billboard hadn’t yet split off airplay into a separate chart from one that acknowledged our evolving metrics.

“Red Solo Cup” has undoubtedly come up on shuffle once or twice since then, but I’ve never heard it on the radio. At the time, I thought it might be like “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” a song that was too polarizing for power rotation as a current, but became one of Country’s most reliable gold titles. Instead, on the few occasions when I saw a radio station put “Red Solo Cup” in research, it had stayed burnt. We didn’t have the word for it a decade ago; now it seems “extra,” even compared to other reaction songs.

BDSRadio shows “Red Solo Cup” with 16 monitored spins last week, but only five of those are from current-based Country chart reporting stations. Since “Red Solo Cup” was the No. 53 Country song of 2012, dividing its chart points (48) by the number of spins gives that song a “Lost Factor” of 3.0, not as big as you might expect given the controversy the song generated at the time, but still well on the other side of the 1.0 dividing line between lost and enduring.

For those reasons, encountering “Red Solo Cup” now was like hearing it for the first time in a decade. I let it play to the end, and I can now say:

• It’s still provocative enough that one would be surprised by hearing it on the radio for the first time even now;
• I still laughed throughout, or almost throughout because . . .
• It’s way too long. At 3:45, I remember thinking it went on forever back then, but in an era where the A&R process focuses on streaming, it would undoubtedly be 2:40 now, and better for it.

The other difference, of course, is that if “Red Solo Cup” came out now, it would have likely been a multi-week No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. The gap between “song that listeners clearly want” and “polarizing novelty that PDs are compelled to deal with” probably would have been more clearly exposed, and that might have pushed the song past No. 9 airplay. It would have been “Fancy Like.”

When “Red Solo Cup” came along, Keith was at the tail end of his more-than-a-decade run as one of the first artists on Country radio stations’ homepage. In 1999, “How Do You Like Me Now?” hit in the middle of a doldrums and established Keith as one of the few artists who could have reaction records and quasi-novelties that were still hits.

By the mid ‘00s, when “Save a Horse” and Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Women” came along, reaction records were again a significant part of the format. By 2012, there was another generation of male hitmakers who pushed the edges of Country radio in the way that Keith had a decade earlier. “Red Solo Cup” followed Keith’s last No. 1 hit, “Made in America.” The follow-up, “Beers Ago” was his last top 10 song, although CRS 2022 finds Keith parked just outside the top 30 with “Old School,” a song that, ironically, arrived just around the same time as “Fancy Like.”

In the decade between “Red Solo Cup” and “Fancy Like,” there have been a handful of other controversy-generating songs in Country. Those include almost anything even touched by Hip-Hop, even though we had already gotten past “Dirt Road Anthem” at the time and were about to “Cruise” our way into Country radio’s best year of the last decade. When “Fancy Like” came along, it prompted some of those same discussions. I was surprised because Sam Hunt has the No. 2 most played gold title at Country radio. I thought we’d settled that one.

“Fancy Like” didn’t strike me as particularly rap-inflected compared to, say, “Boys ‘Round Here.” It was down the format’s thematic center lane. I didn’t understand why programmers were divided about it at all. I did hear “Fancy Like” as a “ditty.” And when I looked at the last decade of the format, I realized that there hadn’t been many ditties at Country radio. I asked Facebook friends if they could come up with any hit song that had been fun, but polarizing in the same way. The only one they offered was “Buy Me a Boat.”

During Country’s early-to-mid ‘90s boom, I remember CRS sessions where programmers complained about all those ditties—songs that were fun, lightweight, glib, and, the implication was, disposable. Five years later, we knew that the lack of such songs was a bigger problem. In the years that immediately followed “Red Solo Cup,” there was enough musical excitement in Country radio that nobody had to stop and discuss whether there was also a fun factor. At this point, the only current Country hit that can really be called “fun” in the same way is “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home).”

When I discuss songs with radio people, I can still count on “you can’t get hurt by what you don’t play” coming up as a stopper. But there is now among PDs a seeming understanding that in Country, a format with a default setting to “songs-that-don’t-polarize,” that might no longer be the right strategy, because the corollary, “listeners have nowhere else to go” no longer applies. In the world of 2022, “fun” is undoubtedly not what artists and programmers are feeling now, which only makes the songs that provide it more valuable.