Corey Smith "Carolina" There’s nothing inherently wrong with the placedrop. A placedrop is a namedrop of a specific place, and it’s spoken to garner a specific reaction. At a live show, the placedrop is a simple but effective way for a performer to connect with his listeners—“Hey, Murfreesboro! How you doing tonight?!” You may have just moved to Tennessee last week, but if you’re enjoying the performer’s show, you really should hoot. More dubious is when artists use the placedrop in studio recordings. Many artists do it: Johnny Cash. Pitbull and J.Lo. Lady GaGa’s “Yoü and I” features the lyric “So put up your drinks for Nebraska, / Nebraska, Nebraska, I love you!” After the song was released, the word “Nebraska” was changed locally to reflect wherever the listener lived just so that listener could give an appropriate whoop: “New Jersey, New Jersey, I love you!” Petey Pablo drops several places in “Raise Up (All Cities Remix).” Petey is from North Carolina, fair enough—there’s nothing wrong with repping your state or cit’—and had originally written the song for his home state. But then he was pressured to create an “All Cities” remix, with Pablo herniating himself to get all the cities in there. These placedrops exist to get a canned reaction from a club crowd, an easy Pavlovian response: If a) He said "The Bay Area," and b) I’m from The Bay Area, ergo c) Woooo! Corey Smith is the placedrop’s lowest common denominator. He makes the placedrop his one and only weapon, and he wields it like a nude knight. Smith is the Dave Matthews of the South, who looks like the white Pitbull, and he wants you to know he’s from the South as much as he can. He’s a very simple man, who’s never one to reject turning a face-palming or obvious sentiment into a whole tedious song (weeping on behalf of Cherokee Indians, “crunk[ing] up the radio”, stating the fact that technology exists). His songs sound like they've been written by a robotic lyric generator (cf. "Where's the Love" opens with "Poor man is beggin' on a crowded street / Doesn't have a dime with which his children to feed"). His writing m.o. seems to be 1) Take the most obvious topics and 2) Write about them in the most obvious way. He comes off as a confused man assiduously mimicking country music—he’d be a fraud if he actually knew what he was doing. I also have to share this gem with you: “Yeah, he looked so cool and clean / But he gave her the worst case of Herpes that she’d ever seen. / Now they call her the STD Queen.” (from “Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover”) Though Smith is originally from Georgia, he really likes South Carolina. Smith mentions South Carolina’s towns and cities throughout "Carolina," each name falling like birdshit from his mouth. He uses the placedrop as naked baiting: I say a name, you cheer it, or else (see also "Every Dawg," "Twenty-One," "If I Could Do It Again," and "In Love with a Memory"). Watching a Corey Smith concert is like watching a behavioral study with no control group, or a dictator’s military training academy. His eyes widen in knowing expectation whenever he drops one of his places: Yes, cheer that word. That’s correct. Thinking there’s a correct reaction to any song is the root of all evil. This might be ignorable—might!—if Corey had anything else going on here. But just as white noise might be used in the behavior study, or patriotic trumpets might be used to punctuate the dictator’s speech, musically Smith is nothing. Or rather, he’s a eunuch and a thief, with the habit of stealing lite-rock melodies (best heard on Columbia’s home for lite rock, WORG 100.3!) and making them even more harmless, with choruses that are just empty and bare (like the land between Georgetown and Summerville). The tossed-off quality of Smith's songs reveals them for what they really are: vain, thrown-together excuses for saying a bunch of proper nouns in order to win the adoration of a predictable, doltish audience (let me hear you, Myrtle Beach!). Because really, all the blame can’t be placed on Bad Ol’ Mr. Smith. The audience plays its role in this symbiotic hellgame too. Corey Smith could be playing guitar in his parents’ basement (in CHARLESTON) if it weren’t for his audience. If Smith is the prostitute proffering easy tricks, the audience is the slavering john paying for the privilege, responding to all the pro’s time-honored techniques and by-the-script pillow talk. These two shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near each other (concert tonight at Hilton Head!!!). Luckily, Smith’s geographic obsession keeps him mostly quarantined in the South, though an outbreak occasionally leaks across the Mason-Dixon. Given that, he’s easy enough to avoid—the next time you’re invited to the Charleston County Pig Fair, Boot Scootch, and Roller Dollop, just say no.
