Single Review: I Like Girls that Drink Beer – Toby Keith

13 years ago Liv Carter 3
Showdog Universal

Songwriters: Toby Keith, Bobby Pinson

There is a difference between releasing material geared toward an audience and pandering to it. While Toby Keith has been good at doing the former, he is often guilty of the latter. As such, he has been populating too many of his songs with beer-swilling ‘dudebros.’ And now, apparently, he is adding beer-swilling ‘chill girls’.

The character in ‘I Like Girls that Drink Beer’ announces he is leaving his rich girlfriend with what boils down to a petulant “well, I didn’t really like you anyway. So there.” He tells her to keep her mansion and her money, as he stomps off to a local bar where he presumes there are none of those uppity women:
I need a little down home lovin’
And a man ain’t gonna get it up here
I’ll find what I want in a honky tonk
I like girls that drink beer

I could write an entire PhD thesis on the treatment of women in songs like this. I don’t care that the loose production and the driving, barroom melody makes this sound great when the misogyny is so blatant. From experience, I know the retort usually comes in the form of: ‘”Oh no, we have nothing against women, just against those who don’t fit our narrow view of what women should act like, which is to say they should act, well, like us.”

But I really didn’t need to hear this song to know this is what it would be like, the title alone gives it away – “girls that” really should be “girls who“. Women are people, not objects. It is sad that this even needs to be pointed out (and you’ll notice I say ‘women’ because both Keith and Pinson are of an age where they really shouldn’t be picking up girls anymore.)

And finally, I will never get past the irony of highly successful, mansion-owning songwriters going on about how rich people just aren’t ‘country’ enough. Yeah…OK then.

Liv Carter

Liv Carter

Liv is a career coach for creatives, and the people who work with them.
She holds several certificates from Berklee College of Music, and a certificate in Positive Psychology from UC Berkeley.
Her main influences are coffee, cats, and Alexander Hamilton.
Liv Carter

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