Chicken Fried is a Postmodern Country Song

Recently I was at a bar with my girlfriend in sunny southern California enjoying some wings and casual conversation. As we were eating, various dive bar ballads were oscillating in and out of the chattering background ambience. The songs at hand were your usual grungy bar fare. Various hits from bands like Creed, Sum 41 or other mid 2000s to 2010s rock bands. While enjoying my meal one song in particular permeated my consciousness. This song affected me in a way that the others had not. The song in question was “Chicken Fried” by the Zac Brown Band. For those of you unaware, I recommend you take a quick listen. I have heard it described as a ballad to “simple country living” ( by some no name music review site I had found on my phone while at dinner ). Despite the song being over a decade old already, and a massive hit at the time of release, I only now realized something major. The song “Chicken Fried” isn’t just a painfully generic country song. It’s a postmodern country song. A country song so country that its very existence is a commentary on country music itself.

What do I mean by this?

Think about it like this. The song “Chicken Fried” leans so heavily into country tropes and cliches that it requires the listener to already enjoy country music. If you were completely unaware of the cultural touchstones of American country music, the song would make absolutely no sense.

You know I like my chicken fried
A cold beer on a Friday night
A pair of jeans that fit just right
And the radio up

Essentially its about a type of food, a drink and a pair of pants. Imagine hearing these non-sensical lyrics without any cultural context. The song isn’t really about anything. It’s just gesturing at things that it knows its audience already likes. It is a reaction to the genre it’s a participant in. To enjoy this song you need to already know that country people like fried chicken, beer and ass ( in blue jeans ).

I find this extremely interesting and unique. A listeners enjoyment of the song is predicated on their previous consumption of country music. To understand the tropes, you need to have already consumed them. For the emotional core of “Chicken Fried” to resonate, you must already have memories of other country songs. The tropes need to be buried deep in your psyche. Otherwise, I am fairly confident, the song will fail to elicit an emotional response.

This is, in a way, indicative of the current state of Country music. Country music has become so self-referential that the subculture’s tropes no longer follow from the organic life the participants lead. Modern country music often opts to hint at experiences the audience wants to have rather than ones they actually do have. The works are referential and derivative in a way that would be shocking in other genres.

The lyrics become even more surreal from here.

I thank God for my life
And for the stars and stripes
May freedom forever fly, let it ring
Salute the ones who died
The ones that give their lives
So we don’t have to sacrifice
All the things we love

If you are confused, welcome to the club. These lyrics are praising the sacrifice of soldiers, not during any particular conflict, but just more broadly. The author is just thanking the concept of freedom. All this in the middle of a song about chicken, blue jeans and beer. Even more interesting is that at this moment in the song the music changes to a slight militaristic drum roll. This is an auditory cue for the audience to emotionally react to. The author, being steeped in country culture, knows they can easily elicit a patriotic response from their audience. Once again the author is writing the song to play on a cultural touchstone that they know exists in their audience.

Simply put, “Chicken Fried” is a postmodern country song. It’s a vague gesture at various country tropes that the authors know will garner a response from their audience. It’s an amalgam of music that came before it. A distillation of the things that they already know are popular, compressed into a tidy unchallenging core.