"simple times" by Kacey Musgraves, Wednesday, January 18, 2023
Following up a Grammy-winning record is a daunting task. Kacey Musgraves' fourth record Golden Hour was just a collection of simple pop songs with a twinge of country. For her fifth record, Musgraves attempted a concept record, chronicling her divorce and healing process on star-crossed. But fans and critics have responded to the record with mixed reviews. In his review of star- crossed in Pitchfork, Sam Sodomsky writes: "While Kacey Musgraves’ fourth album intends to guide you from the early stages of a marriage through the aftermath of a divorce, the East Texas songwriter barely mentions the other person at the heart of her story, and her narrator doesn’t seem all that surprised when things start heading south."
KICK IT AT THE MALL LIKE THERE'S NOTHING WRONG. While star-crossed may have missed the mark as the next great American divorce record, the songs on the album capture glimpses of what a divorce feels like. However, not every song is specifically about divorce. Some songs are just about general disappointment. Musgraves recorded the chorus of"simple times" while she was on tour in 2018, feeling burnt out and homesick. While the song originally may have not dealt with the theme of Kacey's dissolving marriage, the song fits into the nostalgia one feels when extremely stressed, whether on tour on when dealing with adult problems. Accompanying the album, Musgraves also released a film also titled star-crossed. The music videos Musgraves has released on YouTube, including today's song, are parts of the film. Rather than today's song being a simple meditation on the halcyon days of a long-past golden hour, deals with vengeance, though without seeing the larger work, the video is just extraordinarily fun revenge seeing the cast dressed up in rhinestoned masks and bearing medieval arms--a sword, a flail, an axe, maybe a javelin --destroying the wedding shop.
BEING GROWN UP KINDA SUCKS. The music video for "simple times" stars Kacey Musgraves as the queen bee similar to Rachel McAdams as Regina George in Mean Girls. The other girls--actress Victoria Pedretti, wrestler Princess Nokia, and drag queen Symone--steal the scene in synchronized walking in '90s/'00s mall nostalgia.
The girls themselves play into the nostalgia, although, we may relate to comedian Megan Stalter, never actually able to fit in with these these girls like this with their stone-cold faces, who never once break showing a contrite emotion underneath their cool pastel armor. I'm not sure if Musgraves in her "simple times" remembers being the queen bee, while others tried to penetrate her inner circle. I think about both being excluded from what the cooler kids were doing and excluding kids who were even less cool than me, so I won't be surprised if I'm remembered kind of as a jerk. Often January is a time when I think about my past, especially when I go home. I find myself looking at shelves of books I bought from the second-hand shop behind the dusty curtains, reading old journals, and cringing about how little I knew about the world. Thinking back on the simple times, I realize I didn't have a plan for the future, just followed the weekly schedule. School, homework, free time. And somehow, I thought that it would just transform into a time when I'd have my own kids, take them to school and make them do their homework. But it didn't happen that way at all.
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