Todd over at Roll Bama Roll thinks we’re cracking on the state of Alabama a bit unfairly. We concur; the state of Alabama did, as he rightly points out, produce Hank Williams, who made every awesome song ever written before the age of 29, when he died from congestive heart failure induced by being ten men crammed into the body of one. It’s just too much for one system to handle.

We would point out in the latest chapter of “Fightin’ Music” that Florida has not one single musical act to claim in the name of quality. Popularity, yes; Creed sold a zillion fucking records in the late ’90s/early ’00s, a time when we were too busy selling our plasma and giving handjobs for rent money visionquesting and temping to prevent such an atrocity from happening. They did, however, provide the soundtrack for countless teen pregnancies between fundy kids who took virginity pledges, so we have to thank them for the unending dark comedy there.

Florida is a musical Namibia. Sadly, our supplemental football fight music doesn’t change that. If anything, think of “Gator Steve” as a kind of sonic defoliant, killing the happy green thoughts in your mind like Agent Orange sprayed on a Vietnamese hillside. We sometimes forget that there are quarters of this world where men wear tanktops, listen to country music, and watch CSI because they find the murder scenes sexy without apology. You forget there are people who annoy you almost as much as NPR-listening fauxhemians who find Sarah Vowell “droll.”*

And then you hear this:

Bull Gator Steve!

MP3 File

*If you use this word and are not British, you will be punched in the teeth.