Posted by Katherine St Asaph on 10/10/2011 at 5:25 PM News

The Popdust Files: country, toby keith, wtf

You know, some songs just defy review or commentary of any critical sort. Some songs just slip away from you, like liquid through a red Solo cup that Toby Keith is holding at an awfully precarious angle. We have no idea what we just watched. We know it’s an official release from an official album (Clancy’s Tavern); we don’t know why Toby Keith is essentially pursuing the same linkbaity strategy as Kreayshawn to promote it. And just to reiterate, we have no idea what we just watched.

- The red Solo cup is being redesigned. Does Toby Keith know this? Which model of cup is his friend, which is his frenemy, and which gets turned down at the door? These are important questions (in the world in which “Red Solo Cup” is a viable release, that is)!

- Vulture assesses “Red Solo Cup” as a rewrite of “King Herod’s Song” from Jesus Christ Superstar. This is accurate.

- A YouTube commenter says that everybody at Toby Keith’s red Solo cup-addled party is at least ten years younger than him and barely drinking age, if that. This is also accurate.

- There is one frame with the titular cup in the heavens, flanked by stars and ’80s-animation sunbeams. When we wrote that sentence, it was the pinnacle, or nadir, or weirdness. When we finished the song, it was not.

- Toby Keith appears to have made beaded curtains out of red Solo cups. It’s been a while since anyone here at Popdust has attended a party of the frat or off-campus apartment variety, so please help us out here: is this a thing? Will it become a thing? Does Toby Keith have enough thing-making clout?

- The song is terrible. But you gathered that already.