Peachy

• 21.01.2022 22:47 UTC+01:00
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Counting down his choice of The Top Ten Worst Hit Songs of 2021, Todd in the Shadows muses on the banality of Justin Bieber's Peaches, ft. Daniel Caesar and Giveon.

…there's nothing to it, except for the one maddeningly catchy line that gets in your head. I get what it's supposed to mean, like he only gets the primo shit from the best places. But it just got more and more inane every time I heard it. “I got my peaches out in Georgia”, like what are you talking about? Do you, do you travel to Georgia for peaches? Do you import them? Also who fucking cares? “I got my peaches out in Georgia”, do you eat more than two peaches in a year? And if you do, are you like ‘well these better be genuine Georgia peaches, or I'm not touching them!’ What does it matter? It's like singing ‘I get my potatoes out of Idaho’. Who cares? Locally grown is probably fine. I know this sounds like nitpicking, but there's just nothing else to the song.

Todd in the Shadows, The Top Ten Worst Hit Songs of 2021

It's possible that Todd was deliberately being obtuse for effect. But I didn't get the feeling that he was.

Did it not occur to him that, rather than being a paean to Prunus persica, the line might refer to mooning—getting one's peaches out—in the Peach State?

Or it might refer to peaches of the variety so admired by The Stranglers: Walking on the beaches lookin' at the peaches. And, if that is indeed the case, then transporting them across state lines, as Todd suggests, could be in contravention of the Mann Act.

On the other hand, it may be as banal as Todd assumes, and Bieber really is singing about sourcing fruit from Georgia. Worse things have happened. Besides, if I condemned every song for the sake of one meaningless line, I'd lose a lot of my favourites.

Anyway, I hate to admit it, but I quite like Peaches. Perhaps I haven't heard it as much as Todd has though.