Taelyn Elizabeth (left) and Maddie Marlow (right) of the country duo Maddie and Tae. Still from “Meet Maddie and Tae.”

Since its release in August, 2012, the song “Cruise,” by the pop-country duo Florida Georgia Line, has become the best-selling digital country song of all time—with well over six million downloads—and has remained a dominant anthem of the male-fantasy endless summer. The song crossed over to the pop charts on its own, and a remixed version, featuring the hip-hop artist Nelly, went all the way to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. For two years, it has been the biggest and most influential song in country music—a genre that itself remains big and influential, thanks in large part to the fact that its audience continues to do the seemingly unthinkable, which is to buy music.

Musically, “Cruise” is forward-thinking, combining traditional country harmonies and a banjo backing with rock and roll stadium-show guitars and drums. It has the hint of a dance-music drop in there, too. Lyrically, it’s ass-backwards. The chorus goes like this:

Baby you a song

You make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise

Down a back road blowin’ stop signs through the middle

Every little farm town with you

In this brand new Chevy with a lift kit

Would look a hell of a lot better with you up in it

The song’s unnamed woman arrives on the scene drinking Southern Comfort, wearing a bikini top, showing off “them long tanned legs,” before jumping into the narrator’s truck and proclaiming, like some backwoods Lauren Bacall, “Fire it up, let’s go get this thing stuck.” (She means, of course, to get the truck stuck in the mud, right?)

So far, so good: woman located and obtained. They drive off to the woods, where the singer turns soulful: “I put it in park and / grabbed my guitar / And strummed a couple chords / And sang from the heart.” Good family fun after all. By this point, you might imagine the woman looking on a bit skeptically as her date croons at the stars. Big talk for just a little strumming. Anyway, the song’s sexual implications are a bit muddled, becoming perhaps accidentally progressive. In the (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PvebsWcpto), the guys ride in the truck together.

“Cruise” represents a new subgenre that’s been named “bro country,” sung by beefy men who, with their carefully distressed looks, bear not even a passing resemblance to either George Jones or George Strait. Among the general party atmosphere of their songs is a very specific scene: girl (never woman, often “baby”), car, and booze. Cole Swindell’s “Just Chillin’ It”: “I got my shades on, top back / Rollin’ with the music jacked / One on the wheel, one around you baby.” Chase Rice’s “Ready Set Roll”: “Damn pretty girl, you went done it again / You’ve gone and turned your sexy all the way up to ten / I’ve never seen a side-ride seat looking so hot.” (Ah yes, the dream of every young girl: to one day become a hot “side-ride seat.”) Jason Aldean’s “Night Train” hits all the bases: “What you say I pick you up after work? / Slide over, we’ll slip out to the outskirts of town / Got a blanket and a fifth of Comfort, a little something to knock off the edge.” Luke Bryan’s “That’s My Kind of Night” may be studied at some later date as the sad apotheosis of the genre:

I got that real good feel good stuff

Up under the seat of my big black jacked up truck.

Rollin’ on 35s

Pretty girl by my side

The trifecta of drinking, objectifying women, and driving is not exactly breaking the mold in terms of pop- or country-music tropes. Ever since the first manufacture of the automobile, young men have been trying to convince young women to take rides with them. And, according to pop music, at least, it’s a pretty easy sell. Jan and Dean managed, without explanation, to insure a ratio of “two girls for every boy” on their way to Surf City. Springsteen had little trouble getting young women to run across their daddies’ porches and into the passenger seats of his beat-up cars. The country hero Hank Williams, in 1951, put one of the original offers on the table, in “Hey Good Lookin’ ”: “I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.” Dating, in this mode, becomes a little sinister, like entrapment or abduction.

Many of the modern country singers in the bro mode name-drop old country legends, namely Conway Twitty, whose 1980 hit “I’d Love to Lay You Down” has, unfortunately, become something of a sacred script. But while that song is not going to win any accolades for displaying modern sensibilities, it is nonetheless about mature and mutual love; Twitty, after all, admires his wife’s hair in curlers, which is surely no one’s idea of adolescent sexual fantasy. Regardless, a few things have changed since 1980 or 1951, or since the days when the first model-T rolled off the lines, whether Nashville’s songwriters have noticed or not. A woman may not be enticed by mere evidence of transportation and a few small bills. (Imagine the OK Cupid self-summary: “Have beer and truck with really big wheels.”) This woman may have a name. She may be wearing something other than a bathing-suit top. And she may already have plans that night, sadly making a spontaneous late-night ride to the woods out of the question. She may, more simply, prefer not to be enticed at all.

Country music has plenty of powerful, talented, and savvy female performers, but it has fallen to a pair of eighteen-year-old rookies to offer the first riposte to the bromancers. In the new single “Girl in a Country Song,” Maddie and Tae, a duo consisting of Maddie Marlow, from Texas, and Taelyn Elizabeth, from Oklahoma, lament the anonymity and limited utility of the babe muses in some of Nashville’s biggest hits: “We used to get a little respect / Now we’re lucky if we even get / to climb up in your truck, keep our mouths shut and ride along.” They don’t quite call for a truck of one’s own—but the implication is clear and, because of the two women’s youth, the rebuke is especially pointed: guys, they seem to say, the kids think you’re creepy.