Chris Lane’s “Fix” Is Like A Meth Lab Trailer Fire

Down with Pop Country 68 Comments

chris-lane-fix

“I’ll be your smooth ride, that late night, your Walter White high…”

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Warning: Some language

Like a solely synthetic, man-made stimulant meant to target the central nervous system with the most cataclysmically corrosive toxins that are able to be ingested into the human body for the sole purpose of eliciting a short-term physiological boost, but result in diabolically negative outcomes like the sinking of cheeks, the rotting of teeth, and the presence of sores on the skin, until ultimately a portal of hell on earth opens up for the individual where they find themselves estranged from friends, unemployed, stealing from family, and slouched over in a dank alley giving some street boss a hummer just to secure their next score, pop artist Chris Lane, and specifically his song “Fix” are like a scourge of society—a contagion—eroding all propriety and eating away at scruples until a palpable infectious malaise runs rampant throughout all the peoples of the Earth, and inhumane discord settles over our collective experience like a debilitating pall, addled by the overwhelming outcome of an unfortunate addiction.

If “Fix” was a batch of meth, it would have spontaneously exploding in the face of Chris Lane, shooting him out of his singlewide and across the trailer park, giving him first-degree chemical burns all over his pretty, pretty face.

One of a set of twins who once tried out for American Idol as dueling white rappers while they were banging the same chick (they got bounced in the tryouts of course), apparently Lane’s label Big Loud Mountain played eenie meenie miney moe with the two twin morons and ended up with Tweedle Dumb.

What would fall and hit the ground faster in the vacuum left where Chris Lane’s self-awareness is supposed to be, a dense pound of his excessive ego, or a pound of air from his vacuous cranium? The answer is “Fix”—an abhorrent effort to assemble any and all obvious and transparent pandering mechanisms known to pop music’s collective brain trust for the sole purpose of launching a new Music Row record label that the world needs about as much as another affiliate of ISIS.

The story of “Fix” is not one of a songwriter gripped with inspiration, scribbling down eloquent poetry in the throes of passion, meandering past coffee stains on a messy legal pad. The story of “Fix” starts with two professional Music Row “songwriters” Abe Stoklasa and Jesse Frasure screwing around on Macbooks with what they self-describe as “music beds” until they came up with the stupid music, and then ringing up Sarah Buxton, best known recently for crafting lines like “Stick the pink umbrella in your drink” from Florida Georgia Line’s godawful hit “Sun Daze” to clothe the completely inorganic audio track with idiotic buzzwords meant to excite the genitals of the uncleen masses latched on the sauce of mainstream country radio like pups on a bulbous teat.

Meanwhile the underlying point of “Fix” is not to make an entertaining tune, or even launch the music career of Chris Lane. The sole purpose of “Fix” is to create the foundation for this stupid record label Big Loud Mountain, and make the men behind the venture millions of dollars before they lose their asses on their imbecilic investment.

As you enter the Music Row corridor of Nashville on 16th Avenue from the south, there is a massive image of Chris Lane in the window of the Big Loud Mountain offices. They have squandered who knows how much capital taking their collective penises out and swinging them around, trying to get anyone’s and everyone’s attention, while “Fix” continues to falter outside the Top 10 where it’s meandered since being released all the way back in October of 2015.

Cozy relationships with radio have been called upon, seeing how the head honcho of Big Loud Mountain is a guy named Clay Hunnicutt who left a high-level programming job at iHeartMedia to take the spot. Big Loud Mountain had already been in the management business, and with delusions of launching the next Big Machine, they signed Chris Lane, and specifically crafted “Fix” to be the super hit (a la FGL’s “Cruise”) to launch the label upon.

“Fix” is an abomination of the public airwaves and is unfit for country radio in its overt promotion of the recreational use of hard drugs, furtively attempting to shield itself behind the thinly-veiled “love as a drug” parallel, which is a cliche and embarrassing overused trope of modern country all unto itself. Songwriter Sarah Buxton attempted to say the right things when speaking to Billboard about it. “The song gets pretty druggy,” admitted Buxton, “but it’s not about that. It’s ‘I want to be your addiction.”

But this attitude is rebuffed in the same article by songwriter Abe Stoklasa, who is the originator of “Fix,” when he says “It was never supposed to end up anywhere except my record … We were writing for me, so we didn’t care. If I’ll say it, we can say it. You know, it’s not a big deal.”

The Billboard article goes on to say,

By the time they finished it, “Fix” incorporated images of cocaine lines at a nightclub and the phrase “good shit,” all of which was considered OK because, after all, it wasn’t supposed to be a family-friendly country song.

But that is exactly where the song has landed—what is supposed to be family friendly country radio. They went on to edit “good shit” to “good ish,” and undoubtedly the lyrics do try to paint love as addiction. But the song also undoubtedly pushes a fascination with methamphetamine to the easily-influenced boobs that mainstream country radio panders to.

Later in the same Billboard article, the songwriters try to cover their tracks some more, saying that the obvious drug lines in the song are supposed to be supportive of weed—seen as more PC than meth.

“I think I had weed on the mind,” says songwriter Abe Stoklasa.

Fucking bullshit Abe, you mention Walter White in the damn chorus—the meth-cooking main character of Breaking Bad, along with lines like “I’m more than recreational.” You must think we’re fucking stupid.

Saving Country Music has found itself pushing positive perspectives on songs that mention drug use many times before, but 90% of that time those drugs are referenced in the cautionary tale style of classic country—songs like Johnny Cash’s “Cocaine Blues.” But even some of those songs are never meant for radio, especially country radio, like songwriter Abe Stoklasa admits himself “Fix” wasn’t. I was almost okay at overlooking the drug references in “Fix” until Stoklasa fessed up to his motivations, and then tried to cover them up like a coward by mentioning marijuana.

Where does Chris Lane come in with all of this? He’s nothing more than a pretty face with a novice enough proficiency at falsetto to allow the Auto-Tune machine to recognize the signal and spit out studio magic. To even call Chris Lane a puppet would be to assign him a modicum of free will he likely does not possess. His job is to spend two hours a day in the gym, get his hair cut three times a week, and otherwise shut the fuck up while the men in suits behind-the-scenes make him a superstar so they can pay off their bass boats and bloated mortgages in Nashville’s swanky Belle Meade neighborhood, and make their dreams of becoming the next Scott Borchetta a reality.

Chris Lane, “Fix,” Big Loud Mountain, Sarah Buxton’s stupid lyrics, and Abe Stoklasa’s dumbass explanations are like a bathtub batch of meth blowing up the neighborhood and making a crime scene disaster area of country music.

Fuck this song.

Two Guns Way Down! (0/10)

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