If in the future my daughter develops some kind of Pavlovian response to the musical stylings of Pat McAfee, I'll blame the editors who "assigned" this review. But this outcome is unlikely. I almost wish it were a little more plausible. McAfee's debut album, though enticingly titled Diary of a Polarizing Figure, was not powerful enough to polarize any part of my household. If only it had been more stupid, or ugly, or idiosyncratic enough to spark emotion, because in the end it was the musical equivalent of A.J. Hawk's uncannily smooth face.
In the same way that McAfee the ESPN commentator has risen to meet the exact needs of the cultural moment—reddish men yapping indefinitely about sports, gambling, and vaccines, to the detriment of traditional journalism and neurons nationwide—McAfee the musician also meets listeners right where they are. Though the former NFL player has claimed that the album he released earlier this month was culled from 20 years of songwriting in private, it is music perfectly matched to the sound of the moment: a congealed country-trap, with skittering snares, gospel touches and autotuned vocals—the soundtrack of Reels America.
Sharp critics have tried to understand the genesis of this ubiquitous new genre, but thinking too hard about it makes me feel ill. I tend to see it as the algorithmic stream carving out the path of least resistance. It's music that does barely anything for anybody, but harmlessly rolls off everybody, and can be played anywhere across the land. It's the sound of getting heat stroke on someone's rented boat. It's the reason you know Jelly Roll as anything but a bakery treat. It's the music that's on in your pickup truck, but also at the pump where you stopped to get gas, and again inside the convenience store you entered to restock on Zyn, and then again as you resume driving on the interstate while swiping through short-form vertical video and betting the spread.
At its core, country-trap music is juiceless. Think about how compelling BigXthaPlug was as a pure rapper, then consider his lucrative and gruesome transition into country-trap, and it's difficult to fathom how the industry managed to remove so much juice from one large and charismatic man. McAfee is almost overqualified for this role, as he arrives already juiceless. For once, I genuinely hoped he was doing a little more. He opens this album a bit sluggish, as if emerging from a Whitlockian stupor, and his downtempo groaning on “Pitbull And A Mugshot" didn't really register on my daughter's face at all. That said, the guitar riff on the second track, “Blue Collar Symphony," got her head rocking from side to side, and even being seated in a high chair couldn't stop her from feeling the groove. She was soon distracted by her breakfast—we were listening to Pat McAfee before 9 a.m., in case this qualifies for workers' comp.
My wife tried to figure out what we were listening to and why, and I considered it a great point of pride that she did not have any flicker of recognition when offered the name "Pat McAfee." That point was deducted from the record a few minutes later, when she observed, "For not being a professional musician, he's good."
This chorus, on the song "Smokin," came on shortly before it was time to go to daycare, and I felt myself wanting to get out the door a little quicker:
I be smokin' just to get away
I be smokin' every night and day
I be smokin' silence what they say
I got a clear mind, yinz call it a haze
I'm going to stop delineating these tracks from one another, because they are impressively homogenous. In the evening I played the album again, and when track whatever came on, baby started bopping around a bit. I asked her if she liked the song; she said, still smiling, "No." But two tracks later, as McAfee drowsily described "whiskey in a smoky room" over a fiddle, she was fist-pumping to the beat while nursing, so results remained inconclusive. When it was bath time, I dutifully kept playing the album on the Bluetooth speaker in that room, keeping McAfee close with us as we progressed through our nightly routine. She had stopped dancing or even noticing the music by then, as if the crimson ex-punter's musical debut had already become the very fabric of her life, no longer worth remarking upon.
During the bath, she accidentally triggered the shower head, which she has done once or twice before. Because she is an enjoyer of bathwater but an avowed hater of overhead water, this made her quite upset. The sound of my daughter crying is a jolt to the nervous system, a sign to act decisively, which I had already done, snapping off the shower within a split-second of it turning on, but she kept crying, and the overlay of McAfee crooning ("I wanna be / rich as shit / before I die") atop the crying was intolerable in a way I couldn't have anticipated. My mind was coping with these two very powerful inputs at once: the distress call of my own flesh and blood, and a sports talk show host's jaunty musings about life under capitalism ("Looking up at everything is an interesting perspective / Kinda getting fucked, feels like that's the message"). Together they produced, with piercing clarity, the conclusion that I was not leading my life in an honorable way. I abandoned the speaker in the bathroom as I dried her off and got her ready for bed time.
