“Mayberry”
Rascal Flatts
Written by Arlos Smith
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
May 14, 2004
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
May 22, 2004
“Mayberry” perfectly illustrates the suburbanization of country music that defined this decade.
There was always a romanticism in country music nostalgia, evoking the good old days that were more old than good, as Dolly Parton once sang. The idea that modern life is more complicated than it was then we were kids is felt by every successive generation because adulthood is more complicated than childhood. The rose colored glasses through which we often view the past is nothing new.
But what was new with “Mayberry” was giving up on reality entirely and being nostalgic for the way the world was on a television show. The Flatts boys are longing for the good old days of a fictional place, singing ineffectually over a pop-flavored arrangement that has about as much depth and grit as Mayberry itself. It’s as constructed an illusion as the sets that Andy Griffith and Don Knotts performed on.
Look, life is hard. The cost of living right now is the worst I’ve ever seen. I may long for the days of affordable groceries, but I’m not going to wax nostalgic about that time back in the day when kids my age found a lost pirate ship and saved their family homes because The Goonies wasn’t real.
The 2000s overall hold up better than I expected them to, as the contrast with the 2010s helped rehabilitate a decade that grew up in the shadows of the 1990s. But one thing remains the same. Going from the Chicks to Rascal Flatts was the biggest downgrade of the 21st century, as this terrible, terrible record demonstrates.
“Mayberry” gets a D.
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