999,900: Kenny Chesney - Living in Fast forward

Recently, I saw a movie called "The Butterfly Effect." It was the worst movie I'd ever seen. It's about time travel, or magic powers, or something - I couldn't really tell. This guy keeps travelling back and forward in time every time he reads his old diary. At one point, he ends up in an alternate universe where his hands have been blown off and for some reason he needs a wheel chair. Because that's what they give you when you don't have any hands. A wheel chair.

Interestingly enough, a year before "The Butterfly Effect" came out, Kenny Chesney released the song "Living In Fast Forward," which deals with a very similar concept. You see, the character in the song has been traveling through space-time in a forward direction along the continuum, and now needs to somehow reverse the flow of time or "rewind real slow." Unlike Ashton Kutcher's character in "The Butterfly Effect," Kenny Chesney hasn't been forced to give himself stigmata to avoid fellating neo-nazi prisoners, but he has filled his body with "greasy cheeseburgers and cheap cigarettes" and done a lot of "runnin' and son-of-a gunnin'." Either way, both of them need to "rewind," although Kutcher needed to rewind real fast, because he was about to get killed in a prison riot.

Like the theme of the Butterfly Effect, which suggests that by trying to go back in time to perfect the present, you can end up destroying the future, "Living in Fast Forward" is also awash in bitter irony. The song, with a catchy, chant-along chorus, honky-tonk fiddlin' and salutes to being a "hillbilly rockstar," practically dares you to take another shot of whiskey. It's a song about a guy who has to stop partying before he kills himself with his bad habits that seems designed to encourage those habits. Perhaps Kenny can read his lyric sheets and travel backwards through time to before he started partying so hard, but we can't, and this song isn't going to help at all. It's "The Butterfly Effect" of music, except it makes you want to pump your fist into the air, not into your own face.