Honey I'm Good

Songs like this make me want to track down the inventor of Auto-Tune and slap him silly.



Mediocre lyrics, bubblegum tune, and voice obscured by technology -- it should have been just as forgettable as most of today's pop songs. But instead it became hugely popular.

The story is simple. A guy is drinking in a bar, chatting with an attractive woman. When she indicates that she'd like to go home with him, he tells her no thanks because he's committed to someone else. (Which makes me wonder why he's alone in a bar flirting with women in the first place.) He won't have another drink because he knows that alcohol can lead to trouble. He likes her anatomy, but he bids her adieu. This song (which usually inspires me to change the channel) is a big hit. People sing it, they dance to it, they have it on their T-shirts.

Maybe fans are enamored of the double meaning in the hook: "I'm good" in both the colloquial sense of "No thanks" and the traditional sense of "I'm virtuous." Or maybe this piece resonated with people because there are very few pop songs that support the idea of remaining faithful in the face of temptation. There are songs about suspicion, songs about the heartbreak of being cheated on, songs about cheating to get back at someone who cheated, songs about pretending not to have cheated, songs about feeling regretful and apologizing for having cheated, and songs about not regretting it at all. Songs about refusing to cheat are rare, and that may be why so many people latched onto this one.

Still, not everyone is thrilled. Many critics complain that the song spends plenty of time focused on how attractive the woman in the bar is, while saying almost nothing about the narrator's relationship with his wife. Others are dismayed that he has willingly placed himself in a risky situation where he has to make a decision that he could have easily avoided. And some have noticed that it just isn't a great song, either musically or lyrically. What it seems to come down to is that when choices are limited, people take what they can get. Apparently a lot of people wanted a song that said: Even in the face of temptation, "Ooh, ooh, I will stay true." This is what they got.