“Kiss This”
Aaron Tippin
Written by Phillip Douglas, Aaron Tippin, and Thea Tippin
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
October 6, 2000
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
October 14 – October 21, 2000
We haven’t seen Aaron Tippin since he topped the charts with the somewhat out of character “That’s as Close as I’ll Get to Loving You.”
A new label and a couple of albums later, Tippin was very much back in character on “Kiss This,” his final single to top the charts to date. Tippin was an authentic working man in an era where that was becoming something put together by a stylist instead of being earned with your hard working hands. One can only imagine the contrasting hair care routines for Tippin compared to, say, Travis Tritt at their respective nineties peaks.
But because Tippin comes by his masculinity that authentic way, it’s fitting that he takes such palpable joy in watching a poser dude get chewed up and spit out by the woman he wronged, all while Tippin serves them drinks. It was a clever pivot that repositioned Tippin perfectly for that turn of the century girl power energy. Tough recognizes tough, and this woman has his respect for the way she’s handling her business.
Has he ever had as much fun as this on record? He’s gleefully giggly and growly in all the right places as this guy gets his comeuppance. Maybe his wife, who co-wrote the song, had him especially inspired.
Tippin would pivot again for his last big hit, penning “Where the Stars and Stripes and Eagles Fly” two days after the 9/11 attacks and taking the recording all the way to No. 2. His final top forty hit to date was a lovely duet with wife, “Love Like There’s No Tomorrow.”
His most high profile recent single, “All in the Same Boat,” was recorded in 2013 with fellow nineties touring buddies Sammy Kershaw and the late Joe Diffie. Tippin released 25 in 2015 to commemorate the anniversary of his major label debut. Tippin still tours actively, and he also has his own line of fine wines with names based on his hit songs, including Kiss This cherry wine.
“Kiss This” gets an A.
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If I am in a good mood I will give it a “C”. I think even that is generous. This is the time in the country genre where it just started to go slowly downhill and overly gimmicky.
I don’t come back to this one often, but I do like it and agree that Tippin has fun with it.
I also don’t mind Where the Stars and Stripes and the Eagle Fly. It’s perhaps a tad too patriotic for my taste, but it was recorded pre-9/11 so it’s not in direct response to terrorism and isn’t exactly negative in reaction.
Eek! And now for a different take….
I’m not instinctively amenable to Aaron Tippin’s vocals, but his blue-collar authenticity won me over on more songs than not in the course of his impressive chart run. When he got me, he really got me, most memorably on marginal hits like “I Got It Honest” and “Without Your Love”. And while there’s a long list of vocalists who I think would have done a better job on “My Blue Angel”, he still kinda nailed it. But then there’s the other side of Aaron Tippin…the one whose cringe novelty songs bring out everything about his voice that sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.
When you couple Tippin’s “most obnoxious drunk at the bar” novelty song shtick with lyrics that read like an outtake from “The Jerry Springer Show”, “Kiss This” is the radioactive love child. Few hit songs have sent my finger scrambling for my car radio’s “scan” button as reflexively or as vigorously as this sonic torture chamber.
The closest I can come to paying “Kiss This” a compliment is that it’s still not my least favorite song about fastening one’s lips to another’s posterior. That dubious honor goes to Rhett Akins/Blake Shelton’s “Kiss My Country Ass”.
Grade: F
Ughh, I shudder at the thought of that Blake Shelton/Rhett Akins song. Gee, thanks for the reminder just when I thought I’d forgotten it, lol (jk). I remember seeing Blake perform it on one of those lame new award shows and thinking mainstream country was officially going to a place I just didn’t like and couldn’t recognize anymore (as if I needed more evidence by that point).
Your welcome for the memory! :)
I think I may actually need a refresher hate-listen to it sometime today to see if it’s as bad as I remember.
At least Tippin had the grace to never verbally specify what part of the victim-turned-aggressor’s anatomy the unortunate protagonist was invited to kiss.
Yep. I miss the level of decency that mainstream country still maintained up until somewhere in the mid-late 2000s or the bro-country era. Tippin’s song is a good example of keeping that decency, despite it being pretty clear what body part he’s referring to.
Also the fact that he’s a man and he appears as merely an observer, quoting (approvingly) a woman using the line, rather than addressomg it at someone, himself.
I always thought a woman singer should have covered the song and modified the lyric so she’s the participant, and the listener hears the fiery character tell the cheater to “Kiss this” directly, in “real time,” rather than hearing the play-by-play recounted later by an observer . Probably not something Reba McEntire would have done, but I could hear Lorrie Morgan or Gretchen Wilson pulling it off.
This has always been squarely on the right side of “fun” for me. I could see what someone like Mark didn’t like in it, but I’ve been on both sides: songs I’ve found fun have been cringe to other people, and vice versa.
I also love Kevin’s line “tough recognizes tough”. (Seriously, this feature has resulted in some of Kevin’s best observations to date in my book.) Something like that shows how even a novelty song can still cut a little deeper than the surface. Another thing I notice is how Aaron’s voice is a little deeper and slightly less twangy than on his earlier novelties such as “There Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong with the Radio”. I can’t think of another song in his catalog where sings as low as the F#3 he repeatedly hits here.
Fun fact: in addition to co-writing this, Thea did the “see ya” at the very end of the song.
I’m more with Bobby on this one. I’m usually not as much into ultra macho, rockin’ country songs like this, and it’s not necessarily one of my top favorite Aaron Tippin songs, but as he said, this falls on the right side of fun novelty songs for me. I love the storytelling aspect, especially with Tippin’s lower register used to great effect on the verses and the humorous way he delivers lines like “I guess you think we’re just gonna kiss and make up, don’t ya?” and “She let him have it again, man!” lol Also, it’s pretty hard not to root for the woman telling the no good cheater to get lost. While I think mainstream country later became oversaturated with revenge/woman scorned songs and the theme soon became cliche, this one still works and stands out for me in that it’s being told from the perspective of a third party in the bartender. The fact that it’s a story being told by macho man, Aaron Tippin, makes it unique, and it’s a kind of song you wouldn’t normally expect a male artist to do today in mainstream country. It certainly stood out in 2000 when there weren’t as many songs like this coming out yet. “Tough recognizes tough” is such a perfect way to describe this song!
Sonically, I can see how some can point to this being an early example of what made country radio less desirable to listen to later in the decade. The loud pounding drums, the shouty vocals, and the in your face rockin’ arrangement make this sort of a foreshadowing of the kind of songs we would later expect to hear from people like Trace Adkins, Toby Keith, Jason Aldean, Big & Rich and even Gretchen Wilson by the mid-late 2000s. But unlike the more obnoxious offerings from those artists, which often felt more like they were loud chest thumpers for the sake of being loud chest thumpers, the rocking arrangement actually works here when combined with the song’s humorous story. Plus I think this one rocks just enough without becoming overly noisy and cluttered like other songs of its kind would be later on, and there’s some nice flaming fiddle licks throughout, as well.
When I first heard this song in 2000, I actually had the opposite reaction as Kevin. To me, this was more out of character for Tippin at the time because the last handful of releases I’d heard from him were more mellow, softer offerings like “That’s As Close As I’ll Get To Loving You,” “Without Your Love,” “For You I Will,” “I’m Leaving,” and “Her.” I especially noticed his voice had gotten deeper and much more mellow with the What This Country Needs era in 1998-1999, which is still one of my favorite eras in his career. Even his earlier, twangier uptempo songs that I remembered like “There Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong With The Radio,” “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way,” and “You’ve Got To Stand For Something” weren’t this aggressive or rocked this hard (I missed out on the rocking Call Of The Wild era while busy listening to oldies from 1993-1994). So it was kind of a shock to suddenly hear something like this coming from him. I really got to liking it more after seeing the song’s video on GAC a few times. I always liked the part when Tippin himself and the woman would drive off together.
My step dad definitely LOVED it! I remember one morning early into my freshman year in high school as he and I were waiting in the car in the parking lot in front of the school to let the students in, this song came on, and he got excited and cranked up the volume. And being as naive as I still was, he would later tell me what the “this” which she wanted him to kiss stood for, lol. He always seemed to have a special extra liking for Aaron Tippin because he was also from South Carolina. Another one of my favorite memories involving Aaron and my step dad is from 1992 not long after we moved into our current house. We had just gotten back home and we were sitting in our garage in the car as “I Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way” was playing on the radio. He and my mom were talking up front, and in the back I was very quietly singing along to the song, thinking they weren’t paying attention. After the song was done, he turned the car off and exclaimed back to me “Good job!!” I was SO embarrassed as we went inside the house because I was super shy about anyone hearing me sing, lol.
I really like the People Like Us album, along with 1998’s What This Country Needs because they both include material that showcase his “new” deeper, mellow voice very well, imo. On People Like Us, other cuts I like are “I’d Be Afraid Of Losing You,” “Always Was,” “And I Love You,” and “The Best Love We Ever Made” (another duet with his wife, Thea). I especially still wish “Always Was” had done better when it was a single in 2001. To me, it kind of sounds like what a John Conlee record might’ve sounded like in the early 2000s, and I hear Conlee’s influence in Tippin’s vocals. That was not long before 9/11, though, so I’m guessing that “Always Was” was pulled from rotation to make room for “Where The Stars And Stripes And The Eagle Fly.”
Overall, it’s pretty impressive how Tippin was still able to have hits during this time, considering how twangy and traditional he was at the beginning of his career and the pop leaning direction mainstream country had gone by then.
I had always liked Tippin and his odd sense of humor, but I really didn’t like the over-the-top sentiments of this song. I consider it a bit crass, but crass sometimes seems to be the new normal in country music. This is a bit of an earworm so I would give it a “B” but this is the point at which I started losing interest in Aaron Tippin
I have been wondering how fair the identification of Tippin’s character and his schtick are to his musical output. There is a tendency to impose a certain persona on Tip that the breadth of his singles discography does not actually bear out. Although largely identified with his working class message-songs, there is also a secondary association of him with novelty tunes like “Honky Tonk Superman” and “Call of the Wild.” Tippin actually released more straight-up love songs than anything else. Unfortunately, many of them did not chart well.”I Wonder How Far It Is Over You,” “Whole Lotta Love On the Line,” and “I’m Leaving” are just three examples of great songs he recorded that didn’t perform well.
Tippin’s adoption of a smoother singing style after breaking on to the scene with shockingly twangy and howling vocals immediately brings to mind Ray Price’s pivot to crooning in the mid-sixties after his earlier classic hard-country sound.
As for this Tippin hit, I love the conversational detail of the lyrics but agree it’s louder and punchier then it needs to be. I think Tippin saves it with his charisma and sense of humour.
I actually thought Tippin’s first CD, “You’ve Got To Stand for Something,” was sensational–not just for the title hit single, but for the cuts like “I Wonder How Far It Is Over You,” done in his unique moaning turbo-Hank style. He got progressively sillier and show-offy after that, but he still had a great voice, when he got serious.
For a guy who was never an automatic add at radio, Tippin managed to score a surprising three #1 hits.
“Kiss This” was a tad silly, but it was a good answer song to Faith Hill’s “This Kiss.”
Hah! I never consider Hill’s “This Kiss”as an answer song to Tippin’s “Kiss This!”
Tippens debut absolutely floored me with how raw and loose it was. It was sensational, and is overlooked and undervalued as a great album from that era.
I think Mark Chestnut was similar to Aaron Tippin in their easy ability to have fun without giving into mindless stupidity or full blown novelty.