The Drive-By Truckers are the world's best rock 'n' roll band. And they just released an album you need to hear, especially if you self-identify as Southern. Especially if you're a white male Southerner who has always worked for a living.
It's called American Band. It's the sort of album that makes people like me want to write impassioned reviews about how it refreshes a tradition that many have forsaken now that digital music is cheaper than water and the music industry has devolved into a TV game show.
It may seem naive to suggest that any album of recording is important these days. Most people aren't familiar with the DBT, and some folks who are don't much care about engaging with them on any level deeper than guitar tone or backbeat. Politics is often the enemy of art, and it's not the artist's job to tell you how to feel, much less how to vote.
But American Band is extraordinary, and not just because it addresses any number of topical issues about the way we're living now, but because it does so in a way that reclaims the earnest purpose of rock 'n' roll, a peculiarly American cultural practice that these days often feels commoditized and morally spent--a decadent form best received in the spirit of patient irony or cynicism. (We humans are complicated animals; we can find all manner of ways to amuse ourselves.)
You never have to buy in, to believe what the voice driving through the speaker is telling you, and most of the time you'd be justified in not believing the singer believes it either. Mostly it's nonsense, syllables that occupy a certain pitch for a certain duration, then decay artfully into the mix.
Still, the DBT means it, and it's good to hear these boys charging at the nasty, petty dragons of American division--at the fear, insecurity and self-loathing that underpins a lot of the national nightmare. If you want to make America great again, maybe you can start by honestly listening to American Band. It's not hard.
Though not all their fans realize it, the members of DBT have always had political leanings. As far back as 1999 on their album Pizza Deliverance the band was railing against the hypocrisy of Washington. And if you paid attention to their brilliant double album Southern Rock Opera (2001) you knew they had a critique of prevailing Southern attitudes toward race and politics. But the DBT have never been as explicit--or as articulate--as on this new record, released six weeks before we vote in an election that sometimes seems as much about the country's soul as hiring a new boss.
"I wanted this to be a no-bones-about-it, in-your-face political album," singer and guitarist Mike Cooley wrote in press notes for the album. "I wanted to p off the ass**." (Which is what rock 'n' roll was supposed to do, before the unregenerative pose was commodified and the record labels figured out--in T Bone Burnett's phrase--"how to sell music to people who don't really like music.")
To that end, American Band is a record about the proliferation of guns in this country, and the romance so many have with them. It's about how we murder each other and justify it. It's about domestic terrorism, the lurid lures of remunerative theology, and how our attention is diverted by the vapid and the vain.
This isn't really meant to be a record review in which the trick is to suggest in words how the particular toss and tumult feels. You can make it easy on yourself by writing about song lyrics like they're English literature, but you're missing more than half the point. Maybe the DBT's "Kinky Hypocrite" is about the Duggars just like "Ramon Caisiano" is about the National Rifle Association leader who shifted the group's focus from gun safety to right-wing lobbying. But maybe it's better not to pull the wings off this butterfly--to rub off the powdery scales to demonstrate that it's not, after all, fairy dust.
The best rock songs are built on burial grounds, close to spirits remembered and forgotten, covert and celebrated. If you hear Buddy Holly in the Clash or Wilson Pickett in Bruce Springsteen, good for you, you're catching on.
I could talk about Muscle Shoals and the Allmans, about the ways Lynryd Skynyrd has been abused and misappropriated by folks who only thought they were giving them aid and comfort. I could talk about Mike Cooley's chords or the way the other front man, Patterson Hood, employs close rhymes and loose iambics that set off little plosions of recognition and satisfaction. I could talk about how you can tell he's not only listened to hip-hop but absorbed it.
It's more important to say I hear my racist uncles and their stunted superstitions in the DBT; I smell tobacco leaves and loam. They come from someplace near where I'm from in Alabama and Georgia. They look like me. They sound like me, at least when I'm someplace other than home, and I imagine that they've been discounted and misconstrued in some of the same ways that a lot of us have been discounted and misconstrued. And while while I think Americans have a common language and shared reservoir of collective symbols, I find their Southernness as comforting as their empathy and righteous anger.
It's something we need this season, in the midst of a campaign sorely bereft of poetry; the resurrection of the idea that art can impinge on the realer world. God bless the DBT.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 10/04/2016