I don’t get grossed out easily, if I’m honest. I grew up with a best friend who was making “sophisticated” sex jokes at an age way too early to have even known some of that terminology, but when you grow up in a small village, the unfortunately reality is that sometimes certain information spreads just way too fast.
One type of thing that gross me out now, though, are when people go out of their way to interpret something as sexual when it was absolutely, perfectly innocent, and sweet. Such is the case with some of the lyrics of the Alan Jackson song “Chattahoochee,” a song best-known to my friends and I growing up as the song that would prevent rain from spoiling your party. We had a single superstition, and this was it.
A part of the internet has gone very “if you know, you know” about these lyrics in the song:
Well, we fogged up the windows in my old Chevy
I was willing but she wasn’t ready
So I settled for a burger and a grape snow cone
Dropped her off early but I didn’t go home
A song from the 90s by a country singer that is at least somewhat about respect and consent? Seriously cool, and it makes me love this song more. When something I enjoyed as a kid (less and less ironically as I got older, in this case) not only holds up but illustrates a bit of kindness, I don’t take that for granted. Of course, parts of the internet have misconstrued this as some sort of sex code to mean “we did mouth stuff but nothing else,” and, Jesus fuck if that doesn’t exhaust me, because every explanation is strained, sweaty, and winking where winking doesn’t even belong. It reminds me of Zach Galifianakis’s “Pretentious Illiterate” character, but in real life.
It’s a sweet song, and that’s why this very silly drawing I made exists. Because Alan Jackson – at the very least the character he portrays in this song – is a fucking gentleman.