I’ve mentioned before that I am bound by a code of honor not to care much for Kenny Chesney. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t see the appeal. And he will be mentioned in a post coming up soon. So this week’s HCW will feature music by the country musician so thoroughly new country so as to be a self-caricature. More seriously, his music can be catchy or evocative in certain slants of light. We’ve got four videos here.

The first is why I am obligated to detest Chesney and all he stands for. If you want to listen to good country music, you can skip on by it (perhaps all the way to the last video). But it’s emblematic of what made Chesney’s career and why he is loved and loathed by so many:

The next song is one of his more catchy tunes that I admit that I do not detest. I actually kind of liked it, once upon a time. It’s sort of an ode to having lived the wild life and wanting to settle down.

This next one is about not wanting to settle down but being forced to by a pregnancy. Depending on your perspective, it’s either about rising to the occasion and embracing life or it’s a counterproductive celebration of teen pregnancy giving young rural woman an unrealistic notion of how their boyfriend might react to an oopsie and how contraception failure can lead to a happy ending.

This last one is the only one of the four that I really can’t help but like (and I’ve tried not to…). It’s about coming to terms with alcoholism. I used to like the video because of a sort of sincerity. But now I sort of like the site of Chesney laying down stomach first in a restroom while being stepped over… Kidding, actually. It may be schmaltzy, but it’s schmaltzy in a less tiresome way than a lot of schmaltz.