Blame it on the gravity? Oh I could blame everything on the gravity, every sagging body, every airplane crash, even my last fall in October while jogging, ….. but can we really blame anything on the gravity? It’s a natural law, kind of unavoidable, it would be like not taking any responsibility and going with the idea of determinism and fate. Call me crazy, but I even take some responsibility in my last fall!
With a whipping Johnny-Cash-rhythm that runs all over the song, ‘No Baby I’ by Old 97’s, precisely asks this question with energy, bright guitars and Rhett Miller’s clear voice. It’s not completely country, more like country with a pop twist, but these roaring guitars are rooted enough in western music tradition.
The song comes from their 2008 and 7th studio album ‘Blame it on Gravity’, a line that comes back in this song, while depicting a scene in a bar ‘The room was full of undertakers/Movers and martini shakers gone’, that may well be a break-up:’ No baby I don’t want to see you hurt/You got them tears they fall like pearls/Blame it on gravity, yeah/Blame it on being a girl’.
Interesting chorus, and definitively a sort of compassionate sexism, which does not even get noticed because of the fun enthusiasm of the delivery. But it may be this kind of lyrics a little bit more profound than they appear first.
Blame it on the gravity? Ha! We are humans, the only mammals able to put the blame on a law of physics