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    On a recent road trip, I found myself scanning my XM radio channels. There’s really only so many times you can listen to the same songs over and over and XM offers such a wide variety you really can’t get bored. {mosimage}
    I found a channel that seemed to have some potential, and after a couple of songs, a new song (at least to me) caught my attention. The name Hank Williams Jr. flashed across the radio, but I knew that wasn’t Hank all by himself. My friend Becca and I thought it was a new duet featuring Hank and his good friend Kid Rock, but it wasn’t. It was Hank with the Georgia-based band Rehab, and the song, “The Bartender Song,” was hysterical.
    It’s right up there with the perfect Country and Western song. It talks about prison, Chevys, love lost in the trailer park and drowning your sorrows at the bar.
    “I’m sittin’ at a bar on the inside, waiting for my ride on the outside. She stole my heart in the trailer park, so I jacked the keys to her daddy’s car, then I crashed that Chevrolet and I stepped away.”
    After hearing the song, I had to learn more about the band, so I downloaded their 2008 re-release of Graffiti the World, and got a little more than I bargained for. Rehab’s music is a mix of southern rock, dirty south rap, reggae, alternative and rap/rock think Limp Bizkit. So there is a mix of music on the CD — a little rap, a little rock and a mixture of both; however, the lyrical melodies of “The Bartender Song” were replaced by-in-large by a booming rap beat on the majority of the tracks.
    Let me be upfront, I am not a huge rap fan, so I was a little taken aback; however, I stayed the course and listened to the whole CD, and I liked it. There were a number of tracks that made it worth the price of the download.
    Of particular note, “Red Water” tells the story of a kid who watches with envy his next door neighbor who seems to have a perfect life. That illusion is shattered when the man’s beautiful wife finds him sitting in a tub overflowing with red water. The song is about the overworked, overstressed, perfect lives that people seek to lead, and the truth that sometimes lurks underneath the pretty picture.
    The title track “Graffiti the World” is rap, but it kind of reminded me of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” It talks about the damage we do not only to our Earth, but to our children and our society. The song touches on just about every aspect of our lives from religion to pollution to politics to terrorism.
    The song “This Town” talks about the band’s roots in a small Georgia town, and how the way they were raised, and the people they grew up with remain with them wherever they go. It should make their home town proud.
    Other than “The Bartender Song,” my other favorite is “Last Tattoo.” Much like “The Bartender Song,” “The Last Tattoo” talks about love gone wrong, except in this case, rather than drowning his sorrows, the man decides to ink her memory away with you guessed it — “The Last Tattoo.”
    There are two versions of this CD available for download, the cleaned-up version and the explicit version. I downloaded the cleaned-up version, but they really didn’t do the best job cleaning it up. So keep that in mind if you want to listen to it and children are around.
    Also, after you listen to it, let me know if you found some of the raps a little too much — on a couple of songs I kept thinking about Brad from the movie Malibu’s Most Wanted. But maybe that’s just me.