In general, Rob Thomas’ 2019 single “Can’t Help Me Now” works decently well, refreshing right away for just the simple boon of not being a sappy piece about a girlfriend, yet transmissible to grocery store playlists anyway. Here, Thomas favors almost a sort of little kid hissy fit: “I don’t wanna fight / I don’t wanna cry / I don’t wanna be here be here now / I got a bad taste in my mouth”; and it just comes across as refreshingly real, like more genuine and from-the-hip than your typical prefabricated love story.
Now, one interesting and ironic aspect of this tune, of course, is that, juxtaposed with this sort of lyrical temper tantrum, you’ve got this very steady, measured brand of music that plays, perennially, in grocery stores and other places, and effectively, at that. Pop music is entertainment, and so might not “mean” something to the listener in the way that, say, Korn, DMX or Aphex Twin might, just to name a small handful of artists catering to actual genres and hence unapproachable as regards the “pop” realm. When Jonathan Davis and DMX say something, that is, we take it as face value, more or less, contrasted starkly with, say, Fastball articulating the lines “It’s always sunny / They’ll never get cold / Never get hungry / Never get old and grey”. These are pop lyrics for grocery stores, sports bars and other public realms, and are constructed more as the subject of entertainment, like, say, a pro wrestler getting hit with a chair or a person being chased by a dinosaur in Jurassic Park, than anything meant to be taken as earnest truth. (Notice the replacement of Korn’s simile with a blank metaphor, suggesting a certain embellishment on the part of the songwriter.) Another line like “Ni**as wanna fight me / Fight these tears” might be a heavier load to carry, emotionally, while browsing brands of nutmeg.
By this logic, then, Thomas’ diatribe too should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, as in constructing a sort of idiot savant cartoon character, in a sense, to be mocked and probed for entertainment purposes, rather than a figure to garner the sort of intense sympathy which would be theoretically met by a serious listen. In these end times of music, that is, “pop” can still work as a sort of anti-genre, retrospective ode to the roots of rock and roll and gospel, and Thomas’ sort of generic persona here still draws the listener’s attention as a sort of satyr lamb of sacrifice, which is, in my opinion, exactly how he designed it from the start.
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