Election season is ramping up and many commentators are pointing to 2010 as a pivotal year for women in politics, what with Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Sharron Angle and Carly Fiorina, and that one from South Carolina that was accused of having an affair but couldn’t possibly have had an affair because she’s, like, totally married and stuff and her husband is totally hot. Haters just be jealous. Miranda Lambert is taking notice with the fourth single off her latest album Revolution. As a former Nashville Star finalist (she placed third in the show’s debut season), Lambert has certainly experienced her fair share of the vicissitudes of the Amer’can voting public. “Only Prettier” is a gloriously old-school country rocker, a stomping celebration of catty girl politics loaded up with adorably venomous one-liners and winking, semi-sincere appeals to hatchet burial, echoing the same promises politicians trot out every election season – “oh, let’s shake hands and reach across those party lines.” Oh yes, let’s do. And let’s spike the punch while we’re at it. The song’s perfectly complimentary video finds Lambert and her band on stage playing at a 50s era high school prom where two rival cliques – the debutantes and the bad girls, both played by the same quartet of actresses led by Lambert herself – go head to head (under a gymnasium arc d’ballon) in a battle for social supremacy. And as it turns out, they’re all just two sides of the same coin.
