The song "Automatic" by Miranda Lambert infuriates me.
It's a song whining about how technology is evil and how it seemed better "back before everything became automatic". Supposedly, according to her, navigating to Dallas with four-on-the-floor and an atlas is supposed to be "better" somehow. Writing handwritten letters to a pen-pal, and not hearing for days because of the speed of snail mail, is supposed to be "better" somehow. I don't think it argues its case well at all.
Part of it is because I was fascinated by constant advances in technology. I was blown away when I found out that the Game Boy Advance I owned over a decade ago had more processing power than the Macintosh I had when I was 5. When I was a kid, I used to spend hours upon hours perusing road maps and atlases, and imagining the places that were on the map. I never dreamed that something like Google Street View would come along and literally let me see what nearly any place on the planet looks like. I actually did have pen pals as a kid, and I never dreamed that the Internet would make it trivially easy to contact nearly anyone instantly.
The worst part is, the song can't even keep its intended moral straight, because the second verse strays off topic into "Staying married was the only way to work your problems out" (which itself is very hypocritical, since Miranda divorced Blake Shelton less than a year after the song came out). Also, why is the first line of the song "Quarter in a payphone" when that is in no way connected to the rest of the first verse?
Yes, nostalgia is a powerful emotion. There are some great songs, inside and outside country music, that deal with it very well. But this one just infuriates me because of how badly it handles it, and how it shits on technology while it's at it. (Also, it's barely worth mentioning at this point, but the production is atrocious as well. But that's par for the course for her.)
