I am slowly losing faith in country music (not that I was placing it high on a pedestal to begin with). I’ve already written posts that discuss what’s wrong with such songs as “Everybody’s Got Somebody But Me” and “Follow Your Arrow”. I hate to sound like an old man who’s anti-secular music and hates everything and everybody, but I simply can’t keep quiet about what I think about the song “Beat of the Music” by Brett Eldredge.

At first the song seems rather harmless and extremely catchy. The chorus goes “You’ve got the soul and you know how to use it. Put your hand on my hips cuz you know that I’ll lose it. Got my heart beatin like there’s nothing to it. Falling in love to the beat of the music.” Sounds fine, not nearly as bad as some other songs. It’s easy to tap your toes to and the listener is swept away into a world of fantasies. But watch the music video and listen to the other lyrics in the song and you’ll start to see that the message behind this song is anything but harmless.

The song starts out with the singer admitting “I just met you a couple hours ago. My last night in town hey what do you know. Might get hooked on a girl with blue diamond eyes down here in Mexico.” In the music video four macho guys begin to follow a group of four bikini-clad women like a pack of lions stalking their prey into a corner. When the chorus begins, the singer and his buddies ride a boat out to a yacht where one girl is standing on the edge in her bikini. The singer uses his hand to pretend like his heart’s beating to match up with the words in the chorus, “falling in love to the beat of the music”.

After meeting her that night and asking her to dance (by the way, how does he always know where she is? Creep), they begin kissing after only knowing each other for two seconds. We’re led to believe that they had a one-night-stand and the next day he gets ready to leave her, as the opening lyrics suggest. The girl hands him a note that says “Wish you could stay”. He then surprises the poor lady by staying presumably “one more night”, as though he’s doing her a favor by extending their romantic one-day fling in Mexico to two whole days.

So much of what goes on in this song and accompanying music video has become the norm to us so we don’t even recognize anything seriously wrong with it. One-night-stands? Happens all the time. Kissing after only knowing the person for two seconds? That’s “spontaneous romance”. Falling in love in one night? Fairytale love.

The problem with this song, like many recent songs and TV sitcoms and movies and books, is that it confuses sexual attraction with love. If “falling in love” means being sexually attracted to someone, then just about every guy (and many girls) has fallen in love with naked people they view in pornographic images. If getting butterflies in your stomach when someone walks into the room is “falling in love”, then I fell in love with a lot of girls in high school and college. When we see someone who is sexually attractive for our preferences, most of us can’t help but have some sort of reaction (internal and/or external). The human body is a beautiful creation and having sexual desires is not a bad thing. But that is not “love”.

In the words of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, “Love is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure associated with love, or what is today called sex, is the frosting on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it.”

Think you love that girl, Brett Eldredge? Would you lay your life down to save hers if someone were to bring a gun out onto the dance floor? If she had been paralyzed from the waist down but just as beautiful would you still have gone up and talked to her?

Fulton Sheen continues, “As soon as the glands cease to react with their pristine force, couples who identified emotionalism and love claim they no longer love one another. If such is the case they never loved the other person in the first place; they only loved being loved, which is the highest form of egotism. Marriage founded on sex passion alone lasts only as long as the animal passion lasts.”

Think you love that girl, Brett? Could you see yourself still being in love with her when she was ninety years old; wrinkly, crusty, legally blind, frail? If she got in a car accident and could no longer make love, would you still stay with her until death do you part?

Nope. You just want a selfish one-night thrill in Mexico at the expense of any object, sorry, woman you can find.

This song will continue to linger around the top of the charts and be downloaded by those who fell in love to the beat of this song. Yet most of the people who hear it are actually just investing their time, money, and fantasies into the same garbage they can get anywhere else in the popular media; namely that it’s romantic to go down to Mexico, “fall in love” after catching sight of a beautiful blue-eyed girl, stalk her, kiss her after knowing her for two seconds, and talking her into a one-night stand. Apparently it’s also heroic to not leave the next morning after you’ve gotten your thrill, but to stay one more night.

Ladies, don’t buy into this kind of crap and settle for this kind of modern-day “romance”. Guys, be real men and uphold the dignity of women even if it means being counter-cultural. We are made for a love much deeper than this.