BENSON BOONE - "Beautiful Things"

Part of the Patreon-exclusive set of posts looking at current No.1 hits, even though there's been another one since this.

My day job involves analysing advertising, and one of the ads I ended up seeing most - cos it performed very well on the metrics we were using - was Budweiser’s Super Bowl commercial from about 10 years ago with the dog and the horse making friends. This ad particularly cooked part of my brain because of its hellish soundtrack, Passenger’s nasal post-Mumford pseudo-folkie hit “Let Her Go”.

Time passed and I forgot the song, until I was naggingly reminded of it by the verse of Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things”, which shares some of its plaintive, wheedling qualities. This particular singing style irks me, it feels like a showy performance of sensitivity, a deeply limited instrument. Maybe this is how a previous generation felt hearing the early white rockers muscle the fine-lined emotional sketching of the crooners out the way with their hooting and howling, though that distaste too often hid racist motivations as well.

However! Benson Boone does not stay in this exact register for long, and the Passenger-esque verse turns out to be a feint, as it is now time to ROCK. As pals on Bluesky have pointed out, when people have talked about wishing rock would make a comeback, this probably wasn’t what they were thinking of. But it’s what they’ve got, rock refitted for the post-band era, a set of moves that can be pulled smoothly onto the singer like a DLC character skin. I think the ‘authenticity’ ship sailed long ago but it’s worth noting that Benson Boone’s facsimile of rock is a lot less texturally interesting than Olivia Rodrigo’s sly recreations of quite specific bits of 90s and 00s alternative. Boone’s sights sit no higher than doing a TikTok-friendly version of Nickelback, itself a photocopy of a photocopy. You do the quiet bit, you do the loud bit, that’s what rock is.

To string these pieces into some kind of narrative, I don’t think what “Beautiful Things” is doing is entirely different from what “Texas Hold ‘Em” was up to - deploying kinda obvious signifiers of a particular genre on top of a song. But that song is part of a record which goes off in lots of different directions around the idea of ‘country’ and, whether you find it exciting or exhausting, she’s making a point by using those sounds, trolling one part of the audience, flattering another. And I think the song bangs, which helps.

Benson Boone, to state the obvious, is not using rock with the same agility. In the gymnasium of discourse “Texas Hold ‘Em” is a triple somersault; this barely counts as a warm-up. In my listens to “Beautiful Things” I couldn’t get hold of the specifics of the situation Benson’s in - the emotion in the song is all in the prefab ebb and surge of the backing. Masculine pain sounds like a quiet bit and a loud bit and the details don’t really matter.

Paying attention to the lyrics makes the song a bit more interesting, gives a clue as to why it might be making a connection in the here and now. It’s a song about precarity - Boone hasn’t lost the girl, or his faith, but he’s terrified that he might: the waves of sound in the song aren’t some assertion of rage or despair, they’re more like a late night anxiety attack. And the song’s one structurally unexpected element, the fact it never returns to its plaintive start-point once it kicks off, works in that context too - these emotions, once loosed, are hard to get back under control. It’s easier to see why “Beautiful Things” is finding an audience, but it’s hard to get excited about something so sonically washed-out.