From Dave Hickey’s “The Song in Coun­try Music,” in Greil Marcus and Werner Sol­lors’ A New Lit­er­ary His­tory of Amer­ica, quoted by Maud Newton:

When I asked Roger Miller what it was about Williams’s song­writ­ing that touched him, he said, “Metic­u­lous. They’re metic­u­lous and all hooked up.” When I asked him what this meant, he sang me two lines from one of his songs.

The moon is high and so am I.
The stars are out and so will I be pretty soon.

“That’s maybe a little too hooked-​up,” Miller said, and sang half a verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” a song by Kris Kristof­fer­son and Fred Foster that Miller had dis­cov­ered and recorded first.

Busted flat in Baton Rouge
Headed for the trains.
Feel­ing nearly faded as my jeans.

“That’s hooked up,” Miller said. “I love the ‘as’ that picks up ‘flat’ and bat.’”

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Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle,