Please stand and salute the squirrel.
Wednesday…. otherwise known as the day the music died. Not that the music wasn’t already starting to rot from the inside and getting a little smelly and maybe full of maggots. It’s time for the next entry in The Nest’s Top 30 Iconic Songs I Can’t Stand countdown! Wow, we’re all the way up to the penultimate spot in our playlist from hell! The creme de la crap… the songs so incredibly shitty and overplayed, that just digging up the YouTube videos for them makes my cochleas cringe. Well, let’s run our #2 up the flagpole and see who salutes it… don’t mind me, I’ll be taking a knee for this earworm…
#2. “God Bless the U.S.A.” – Lee Greenwood
It feels real petty of me to skewer a song that became the healing anthem of a nation after one of the worst tragedies in its history… but I’ve never let my lack of empathy stop me before from taking people’s sacred cows to the butcher so I can have some damned steak. We got bombarded with this song for most of the previous decade, and while it might bear an uplifting message to some people, it sounds more like Freddy Krueger running the nails of his glove over the chalkboard…
From the days after the September 11th attacks through much of the GWB Administration, this song was almost unavoidable… getting overplayed and overused by people who wanted to show how much they cared about our country, and of course…. our Veterans, who are taken advantage of in almost criminal ways by self-serving ribbon pointers who want to put on a good public face. Home loyalty is a concept I’ve never been able to grasp. I never supported my school’s sports teams… I don’t root for (and sometimes actively root against) the home teams in professional sports… and I don’t get why I should have some smug sense of superiority because I’m from America. It’s a great country that just happens to be my home, but it’s also not all that…
No other country on Earth would tolerate idiots who selfie with squirrels like we do.
And besides all that, the song is just terrible. Amazingly, “God Bless the USA” was written way back in 1984, with its author Lee Greenwood inspired to regurgitate his patriotism by another epic disaster. I knew it preceded 9/11, but wasn’t aware this piece of star spangled schlock had been dragged out for patriotic reasons even before then… like at the start of the first Persian Gulf War or when Monica Lewinsky stained her dress. And since The Boss wouldn’t let Ronnie Reagan use “Born in the USA” for his ’84 Presidential campaign, apparently the Gipper opted for this piece of shit instead. And somehow, he still won….
Those 13 electoral votes for Mondale must have been anti-Greenwood votes.
Thankfully, this song’s mostly gone back into deep, deep hiding…. just waiting for the next moment Americans need something to thump their chests over to emerge again and assault our good tastes. But it was quite ahead of its time now that every third country song on the radio is some flag waving, Bible thumping piece of shit that would make Roy Rogers roll over in Trigger’s grave. The next time we need to celebrate Amurrica, could we at least find something a little better than a goddamn country and western song to show that we bleed red, white and blue?
Here’s a suggestion that never gets old…
And so…. there are the 29 songs that were bad, but not quite terrible enough to be crowned as my most hated iconic song of all time. Do you know what it is? You should. The biggest piece of popular musical shit will be revealed for all, next Wednesday!
Evil Squirrel's Nest 
Oh I am so glad someone else hates this garbage. I, for one am not wild about any flag waving “patriot” songs. I get people mad all the time for hating God Bless America.
This Greenwood song is so awful I can’t imagine what the “top” song will be!
I fucking HATE God Bless America, and they need to get it the hell out of baseball (especially since they’re so concerned about “pace of play!”) I am pretty sure you will also HATE my #1 song…. in fact, I know you will hate it, but I have to keep up the suspense!
Yes, it is very suspenseful. What could be worse than those two? I never knew anyone else who hated those two songs. Sniff sniff
I never liked this one either…..I did NOT know that it was an oldie when Greenwood started life support on it after 9/11 though. That was a tough enough time without having to listen to this. I guess he got his ten minutes (or less?) of fame by reanimating it.
Pam
The song was apparently popular enough to re-record two different times… once after the Gulf War, and then again after 9/11. It never gets any better, though. I hope he will never have another reason to drag it out of the closet again…
I agree…..not just because I never want another “event” like that to happen but also because some things should definitely stay IN the closet! 🙂
Yep, like the yahoos who ride around in their monster trucks with the tattered flag waving in the back because they’re too damn lazy to remove it or replace it, this song gets on my nerves. I will stand up to a lot of songs but this is not one of them.
Baseball season is here, and so are San Francisco Giants games. Yes, Metallica night is coming soon, but I don’t think they’re up for the #1 choice at ESN. No we’re not going off to Never Never Land. There is another band, another song, that is ALWAYS played at the games in the city by the bay. I’m pretty sure we all believe what song will be #1. Damn, I’m going to miss this Wednesday bit of overplayed fun.
LOL…. we shall see!
This song always gets muted when any radio station plays it because it SUCKS!
34 years of major suck. I can’t even get myself to listen to it here…
That’s because it’s a piece of shit. Almost as bad as death metal…
Almost. We need to make a chart or something…
ody N biskit; we agreez N wood listen ta James Brown’s song til we knew it back werdz side wayz and a combo oh both…..now that dad’z all most done; purrhapz him will give a think bout de top iconic songz he… CAN stand !! ??? 🙂 ♥♥
I don’t know if that would be as fun as trashing the songs everyone else seems to like that I hate! The only other type of music countdown I had considered was just the opposite… my favorite guilty pleasures that everyone else seems to hate. But I think most of the songs in that list would give the FSG a heart attack!
You may not hear it much anymore, but unfortunately I cannot say the same. It’s been a long time, I’ll admit, since I started the radio career at a little local station where this record was requested on a daily basis, but I have not managed to escape its assault on my ears since the last day I spun a stack o’ wax. Living in close proximity to a racetrack, we are “treated” weekly to every redneck anthem in history during warmups, between races. Then you have 4th of July fireworks, which inevitably includes this in its accompanying playlist..and then there’s, worst of all, the county fair, which always features a karaoke setup, audible to us unless we are inside with the windows closed and AC running, or the tv on at a decent volume. EVERY single day there are at least 2 or 3 vocally challenged “patriots” who get the idea after a couple of brewskis that they’re the second coming of Willie Nelson, and decide to inspire everyone with their musical tribute to Amurrica. This is not pleasant and leads me to believe that I have not been as decent a man as I thought and have wound up in at least the 5th level of hell. I truly love my country and consider myself very lucky to have been born here instead of in a place where complete poverty would be a step UP the ladder. But I do bristle at overly “America love it or leave it” or jingoistic attitudes. I find it obnoxious at international sporting events when the inevitable “USA, USA” chants break out. Have a little dignity/sportsmanship. This song, while well intentioned I am sure, just strikes me as pandering to that mindset..at least it seems that the masses are employing it that way. At any rate, the formulaic nature of the music and lyrics come off hokey as hell, as if there was a checklist of cliches to throw in there…or maybe it’s just its ubiquity every summer at that darn racetrack lol.
I think you used more words than I did to trash this piece of garbage! It’s funny you mention the racing connection, because it was my (and my familiy’s) brief mid-90’s obsession with NASCAR (thanks to one Dick Trickle) that first introduced me to Greenwood and his magnum crapus. I remember not liking it then (nor Lee’s version of the National Anthem he sang), and that was five years before 9/11 made me truly loathe this song…
Another one I didn’t see coming! I had completely forgotten this song existed until I went to my niece’s bridal shower last summer and she revealed it as her favorite song in one of the games. I’m not not sure what was more shocking – that I actually went to a bridal shower or that God Bless the USA is anyone’s favorite song, let alone a non-religious millennial. Life is full of surprises.
That is definitely a weird song to have as a favorite… but I’d guess she’s around the age where she heard it a lot as a kid, and even the stupidest things we liked as children have a way of worming their way into our hearts. I don’t think I’d be caught dead at any kind of shower. I have to be dragged along against my will to weddings and funerals…
I liked this when it first came out, but talk about overplayed. After a while, it was just SO annoying I would turn off the radio. Eventually, I just plain turned off the radio and played CDs all the time.
I have a really bad cold and a cough and I feel like total shit. So if you don’t hear much from me, there’s a reason. I really feel like total shit and I’m trying hard to feel better. Sadly, I think it’s just going to be whatever time it takes until I feel better.
Well, you don’t need to be listening to any of this crappy music in your condition. Take care and get better…
Another one I had to play through Alexa. You realise Amazon is flagging all this garbage as “stuff I like”?
Well, I’m not an American so I didn’t feel that patriotic thrill that I’m sure everyone else did. I expect you were all moved to tears. I certainly was.
“Born in the USA” wasn’t written to be patriotic though… Never mind, I guess there are alway some people too thick to recognise sarcasm when they hear it, and so you end up with stuff like this instead.
Right on with this one! I despise that song and the clowns that parade it at political events as if it’s some sort of douchebag anthem. Oh wait, it is. 😈