A lot of people would love to be music stars. A lot of music stars love being other people.
There's no shortage of notable alter-egos throughout musical history. David Bowie glammed up to portray the interstellar Ziggy Stardust. Cross-dressing punk David Johansen turned on the cheese to become lounge singer Buster Poindexter. Miley Cyrus split time as Hannah Montana, and mined the musical double-life for kiddie sitcom hijinks. The list goes on and on. A current cog in that continuum is Earl Dibbles Jr., the redneck alter-ego of country singer Granger Smith.
On his own, Granger Smith has settled into a comfortable spot in the modern country landscape. The Texan's had five albums land on Billboard's country charts on the strength of relatively nondescript moderate hits like the love song "It Happens Like That" and the pickup truck-driving ode "Backroad Song." If there was a video game about country singers, Smith would be the generic default in the create-a-singer mode. So it's not shocking he'd look for a way to break out of that mold.
Earl Dibbles Jr. emerged in 2011 via a video Smith made titled "Country Boy (Part 1)." The documentary style follows Dibbles — Smith speaking in a slack-jaw drawl while adorned in overalls, a white tank top, and a trucker hat — during his daily routine of cracking cold ones, putting in dips of chewing tobacco, shooting his shotgun, etc. It's relatively mundane, but was enough of a YouTube hit that Smith decided to record a song as Dibbles, 2012's "Country Boy Song," which extols the virtues of the stereotypes laid out in his initial video. Sitting at 27 million views, the music video for the song is by far Smith's most-watched clip.
It led to a slew of Dibbles content: fake presidential campaigns, college football picks videos, and in-character songs on all of Smith's subsequent albums. Five of Smith's top-eight songs on Spotify are Dibbles tunes including the on-the-nose "Merica" and "Don't Tread on Me," the gas-guzzling "Diesel," and the Smith/Dibbles duet "Holler." If the Blue Collar Comedy tour had a musical opener, it would probably be Dibbles since he's essentially a living "You Might Be a Redneck" joke (except poorly written by a musician instead of a comedian) mixed with a somehow far less subtle Larry the Cable Guy (Dibbles even has a catchphrase, "Yee Yee," which Smith has adopted for his Yee Yee Apparel brand).
While alter-egos may seem like less of a fit in country than other pop genres, the trend actually predates the more familiar rock star touchstones. In 1953, Hank Wiliams released an album of songs as Luke the Drifter. The character dispensed temperate moralistic wisdom, essentially serving as the antithesis of Williams's real life persona centered on hard living, boozing and infidelity. One of the most-mocked alternate identities also emerged from country — Garth Brooks's moody, soul-patched rock persona Chris Gaines.
Comedic musical alter-egos are also nothing new. Digital Underground's Humpty Hump allowed rapper Shock G to tap into his sillier and raunchier side, and fans ate it up. Father John Misty started out as Josh Tillman's fabulously cutting satire on L.A. rockstar navel-gazing (though the humor of FJM flew over many folks' heads, who took it literally and found it unsufferable).
Scrolling back through YouTube, one can see that Dibbles isn't Smith's first attempt at comedy and character work, and isn't even his most cringey one. Granger also attempted to embody an awkward interviewer (Lionel), an obsessed female fan (Key), a magician (Criss Angel), and most troublingly, a mind-numbingly lazy, racist enchiladas peddler (Freddy). In an equally questionable call, he posted an edited version of the much-memed Nazi bunker scene from the movie Downfall to make it look like Granger Smith is Adolf Hitler's favorite artist (in fairness, David Bowie also courted facism during his Thin White Duke era).
But while Earl Dibbles Jr. is clearly presented in a comedic framing, it's hard to determine exactly what the joke is supposed to be. (For the record, the Inlander reached out for an interview with Smith to try to understand Dibbles, but received no response.) Self-described as a white trash man who needs to "practice [his] words" to get good at reading, it feels like it should be wildly insulting to Smith's rural-identifying country fans. If Saturday Night Live just aired Dibbles sketches sans context, there'd likely be Fox News segments the following week bemoaning how the coastal media elite is out of touch and offensive.
But instead, his fans eat it up, seemingly as a sort of "f—- you" to the imaginary city folks in their head. Dibbles has all the trappings of satire, but is presented with 90 percent earnestness. It seems more a way of Smith being allowed to embrace the 'Merica mindset and profit off the folks who like it without having to commit himself to it: Granger's not saying this stuff, Earl is. Smith has mostly steered away from making Dibbles overtly political besides being paranoid and defiant about not letting the government take his guns (Yee Yee Apparel completely sold out of its softshell jackets designed for concealed carry).
Dibbles's success seems emblematic of the race to the lowest common denominator of modern pop country. It's the rock-infused monotony of the Blake Shelton, Florida-Georgia Line and Luke Bryans of the world. It's people who'd cite rebel country as their inspiration only opining for keeping the status quo. In theory, Dibbles could be the shell for some humorous commentary, but when cracking the character open, it's mostly empty with the only substance being a gnarly cup of chew spit. ♦
Granger Smith featuring Earl Dibbles Jr. • Wed, Nov. 10 at 8 pm • $25-$27 • Knitting Factory • 919 W. Sprague Ave. • sp.knittingfactory.com • 509-244-3279
