{"id":406,"date":"2010-12-03T08:21:46","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T14:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2010\/12\/03\/101203_tobykeith_rek\/"},"modified":"2023-10-10T12:41:51","modified_gmt":"2023-10-10T17:41:51","slug":"101203_tobykeith_rek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/12\/03\/101203_tobykeith_rek\/","title":{"rendered":"Say, that song sounds vaguely familiar&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I made this observation on Facebook yesterday, but I&#8217;m obsessive-compulsive enough to feel a need to expand it here. My Facebook comment got zero responses and so I don&#8217;t expect that this post will garner much discussion, but I&#8217;m doing it anyway, out of principle.<\/p>\n<p>Toby Keith has a relatively new song that&#8217;s getting some airplay on local radio stations. It&#8217;s called <i>Bullets in the Gun<\/i> and it&#8217;s one of those catchy nihilistic outlaw ballads that sounds sort of edgy and dangerous and features ill-fated lovers and guns. It also sounds dangerously similar &#8211; in attitude and melody and cadence &#8211; to a song written by Robert Earl Keen, Jr. and popularized by Joe Ely called <i>The Road Goes on Forever<\/i>. Watch these two YouTube vids below and judge for yourself.<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DkS5H3Of4-E?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>If you scroll through some of the comments on Keith&#8217;s video, you&#8217;ll see that I&#8217;m not the only one who&#8217;s noticed the similarity. (Not that that&#8217;s necessarily cause for rejoicing; YouTube comments tend to not fall toward the thoughtful end of the spectrum, although there is a subset that&#8217;s noticeably superior in terms of insight and sophistication, aka &#8220;Those Who Agree With Me.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong; I like Toby Keith and a lot of his music. And there&#8217;s really nothing new under the sun, especially in the music world. But I find it hard to believe that Keith wasn&#8217;t strongly influenced by Keen&#8217;s song, which was written decades earlier, and which any serious fan of modern country music will be familiar with. It would have been great if Keith had at least sent a nod in the direction of Keen\/Ely when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Bullets-Gun-Deluxe-Toby-Keith\/dp\/B003XOSSMW\">he described how his version came to be<\/a> (scroll down to Product Description). After all, he&#8217;ll make about a thousand times more money on it than either of those guys did.<\/p>\n<p>I also don&#8217;t subscribe to the Everything That Comes Out of Nashville is Crap theory of country music. But things like this do tend to foster an us-vs-them attitude.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and in case you&#8217;re interested, here&#8217;s REK performing the song his own self:<\/p>\n<div align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7lTjsU-iJyM\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I made this observation on Facebook yesterday, but I&#8217;m obsessive-compulsive enough to feel a need to expand it here. My Facebook comment got zero responses and so I don&#8217;t expect that this post will garner much discussion, but I&#8217;m doing it anyway, out of principle. Toby Keith has a relatively new song that&#8217;s getting some&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/12\/03\/101203_tobykeith_rek\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Say, that song sounds vaguely familiar&#8230;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12587,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/12587"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}