Four days have passed since I was first afflicted by the fake Country-Christian song “Misbehavin'” from The Righteous Gemstones. Performed by the now-deceased Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles) and her brother Baby Billy (Walton Goggins), the song haunts me like the idea of a mosquito getting in your ear and living there forever. It’s an atrocity. It’s a crime against television and music. It’s perfect.
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Essentially, the brother-sister duo had one child-aged hit about “being little country kids,” and it’s the worst best track you’ve ever heard. The song came to be after show composer Joseph Stephens and stars Edi Patterson and Danny McBride presumably threw the opposite of holy water on a guitar and watched it come to life. Actually, according to Fast Company, the three of them orchestrated the song with a mixture of McBride’s concept and Patterson’s improv background. They created it over the course of three hours: the antichrist, masquerading as an innocently menacing song about children misbehaving.
But I’ve been stuck with it since Sunday night, and let me be the first to tell you that unconsciously whisper-singing “running through the house with a pickle in my mouth” doesn’t go over well on the New York City subway. Songs like "Misbehavin'" were my crack as a young Christian boy in the '90s South. The televised Christianity and the pastel TV sets and the strange reference to “the guy in the thorny crown”—it’s both a young Baptist’s drug and his greatest nightmare. That's what makes it so incredibly appealing because even though you've never heard "Misbehavin'," you've absolutely heard it before.
Please do not listen to this song, conveniently tempting you by the powers of Satan below:
That’s perhaps what Gemstones has done best in its inaugural season: created a world that is painfully accurate to televangelism and the hypnotizing, borderline creepy music that often accompanies religious awakening. Similar to the first three notes of MercyMe’s “I Can Only Imagine,” I will find myself triggered by “Misbehavin’” for the rest of my life. And yet, that will still be a step up because you can’t be triggered by something that won’t exit your brain to begin with.
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