You can lie to your mama. You can lie to your race.
But you can’t lie to nobody with that cold steel in your face
And the same God you were so afraid was gonna send you to Hell
Is the same one you’re gonna answer to when the pin hits the shell……Me and you we liked our pills and our whiskey.
But you don’t want your head full of either one when the house gets quiet and dark.
Feeling good used to come some damn easy, racing trains from 2nd Street to AvalonTake a trip down memory lane; you don’t see no friendly faces
All the houses have been painted, and nobody knows your name
It’s enough to make a man not wanna be nobody’s daddy
If all he thinks he’s got left to hand down is guilt and shameBut I ain’t gonna climb up on no high horse cuz I got thrown off one
When I was young; and I ain’t no cowboy, so I ain’t going where I don’t belong.
Wouldn’t do you no good to let you know that it damn near killed me, too,
So I ain’t gonna mourn for you, man, now that you’re gone.— From “When the Pin Hits the Shell,” Mike Cooley, Drive-by Truckers
Every now and then, a profound piece of data illuminates how I see my country like night lightning filling a cloud. It’s happened to me before through prohibition era murder rates; the relation of elderly white voting patterns to “Keep your government out of my Medicare”; and the human scale interaction of incarceration rate and murder rate in the last 40 years.
Now it’s happened again. And frankly, this may be the most important. It informs all of the insights above, I think.
Death rates for white Americans ages 45 to 54 climbed half a percent each year between 1999 and 2013, researchers at Princeton University found using mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the previous two decades, the death rate for this group had dropped by 2% each year. Middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to see a 2% annual decline between 1999 and 2013.
Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case calculate that if the death rate among middle-aged whites had continued to decline at the rate it fell between 1979 and 1998, half a million deaths would have been avoided over the years from 1999 through 2013. That, they note, is about the same number of deaths as those caused by AIDS through 2015.
And.
The major causes of the excess deaths are suicides, drug abuse and alcoholism. (For once, obesity is not on the list as a major player.) But while deaths from these causes have increased among middle-aged whites, they actually decreased for blacks and Hispanics. In the past, drug abuse deaths were more common in middle-aged blacks than in middle-aged whites. Now they are more common in whites. The same pattern holds for deaths from alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. The suicide rate for whites was four times that of blacks.
Look at this graphic.
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Something about the modern white American condition leads to profound middle-aged self-loathing and violent, self-destructive despair. White despair is a disease as demographically rapacious as AIDS. Its political power dwarfs even that. A massive portion of American politics involves pandering to the fantasies of a nihilistic, racially-distinct death cult. That’s extraordinary.
With this data in mind, I think you have to understand conservative politics during the last couple decades as a profound act of white self-mutiliation designed to take everybody with it — a sort of national murder-suicide. If we can’t have America, you can’t have it either, bitch. This so transcends party or ideology as to make a mockery of electoral politics. This is dark, intractable national psychology. We will be fighting it for decades to come. We may not survive it.
I have good, historically sound ideas about how to change the incentives toward nihilism among some young men, of all races. But I’m at a loss for mitigating middle-aged white-on-white misery, whose survivors become old white-on-white misery hoarding all resources, clinging to their Medicare, despising the futures of other people’s grandchildren, and lapping up Grady Judd’s malignant messaging talent.
How do we middle-aged white people toughen ourselves up and commit ourselves to the future? I don’t know. If you could convince us to walk away from guns and prescription drugs and Wild Turkey, it would make a difference. But everything I’ve learned about addiction suggests that addiction itself tends be a secondary cause and effect. Something else underlies it, some sort of unhappiness.
We white people have already lived with a massive aggregate advantage in generational happiness capital — both economic and social. The folklore that informs the decisions of state power has always been our folklore. State power makes its decisions on our behalf first. If that’s not enough to keep us from killing ourselves…maybe the advantage itself can be as lethal to us as to the disadvantaged.
We are the same people, by the way, who complain righteously about youth sports leagues giving participation trophies. Such a spectacle: suicidal assholes on third marriages lecturing 9-year-olds about perseverance and life’s hard lessons.
Life and death
It’s now clear that Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz — the Fox Lake, Illinois, police officer whose death captured national headlines in September — was not a hero gunned down in the line of duty. Investigators revealed this week that he had been stealing and laundering public money from a youth mentor program for seven years, and took his own life in what they called a “carefully staged suicide” because he feared his scheme would be discovered…
…This puts a number of pundits and politicians in an awkward spot. Immediately after Gliniewicz’s death, many seized on reports that he’d been brutally ambushed, Radley Balko points out in The Washington Post. They took to the airwaves and Internet to blame the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups calling for police reform, arguing that Gliniewicz — a loving husband and father of four who was revered in his community — was the latest tragic casualty of a so-called “war on cops.”
If you just listen to it, Generation Suicide today is clear that it despises three concepts more than anything else: Mexican immigration, black criticism of police power, and any effort to regulate the guns it fantasizes about using to the shoot people of the first two. In truth, as this data shows, it shoots itself with those guns far more often than any of its fears.
Gliniewicz knew this in his bones; he was part of it. His entire late career made logical sense in America: Shave your head. Look the part. Bully people and call it tough love. Steal from children. Put out a hit on the bitch trying to stop you. Concoct a scheme to get your family paid. Off yourself to avoid judgement and justice. Let a hashtag take the blame. Count on state-sanctioned racial folklore to make you a hero.
It damn near worked.
Now look at white conservative politics — as dominated by Donald Trump’s Mexican hate and “winning” and Ben Carson’s star turn as a black guy who believes black people are the problem. Of course Generation Suicide lines up behind them. Who else would be the authors of all their pain, as Ernst Blofeld might say? And yes, it’s as absurd as Bond villainy. It’s as absurd as pyramids filled with grain. That’s what self-loathing does. It shackles a person to indignity and self-mutilation. Every time you swallow one of these grifter fables it’s like cutting your soul with a razor.
When you think about it for half a second, immigration and #blacklivesmatter are both expressions of life. They represent human beings choosing life. Stop killing us, state power. Let us pick your vegetables so our kids have a better future. They believe in a future. The conservative white backlash does not. Argue about details, tone, or the right policies all you want. But the human instinct to live animates these forces. Remember when choosing life supposedly mattered to conservative white people? You were obviously lying.
Yes, Officer Gliniewicz is an extreme case. But how extreme, really? There’s no real delicate way to say this, so I’ll just say it. Veteran American police officers, like Gliniewicz, overwhelmingly come not just from Generation Suicide, but from Generation Suicide’s most at-risk cohort — culturally blue collar white men. The aggregate self-pity and self-loathing of that cohort is deadly today. Like white people generally, American police face a much more lethal threat from their own hands and weapons than anyone they police.
Cops are more likely to commit suicide than they are to die in an inner-city gun battle, by a targeted assassination or by a car crash from a high speed chase.
In most years, more police officers kill themselves than every other cause of death combined. While police departments closely guard statistics of officers who commit suicide, conservative numbers have consistently hovered at between 125-150 per year. The Officer Down Memorial page currently lists 31 police officers who’ve been shot and killed so far in 2015 and 101 from all forms of death (except suicide) combined.
The shame of squandered whiteness
In early 2008, I was in a rather bad way, at least for me. I didn’t feel like I was succeeding at any of things I cared about: as a husband and father; as a reporter; or as a citizen. The idea of a newspaper career path was falling apart. Even more than that, I had always considered honest reporting a sacred mission. Now I was learning, unequivocally, that I actually helped create a commoditized commercial product for living. Its owners did not much care about my sense of mission. If the profane provided better return on capital, my sense of the sacred was irrelevant.
I feared I was squandering the investments of parents and my country in my education and well-being. I felt these advantages themselves as a burden. Today, I might say I was squandering my whiteness. And my whiteness is pretty broad and deep. It would take a lot to fully squander it. Those few months weren’t nearly enough to do it. But they were the closest I’ve ever come to chronic unhappiness. How much I could blame on myself and how much I could blame on the world didn’t really matter to the feeling.
I wish I could say I powered through it and overcame. But that’s not really what happened. Basically, I got a new, easier job. I was able to stop doing the profane things too many reporters have to do to keep health insurance for their kids. I got paid a lot more money; and in my spare time, I got to write more meaningfully and honestly about my world. Shocking how all that will improve life.
But I only got the job because a former co-worker called me out of the blue one day, at a very low moment. And before that happened, top Tampa Tribune news executives twice saved me from myself when I did stupid and morally desperate things. I am eternally grateful.
In other words, I had dense social resources available and sympathetic to me. Some looked out for me without me even asking them to. Yes, I seized my opportunity pretty skillfully when it found me. But without my dense social resources, my accumulated whiteness at work, I could have very easily been unemployed and lost heading into the financial crash of later 2008. I would have very little tangible to show for my expensive and coddled existence. The shit I talk today would be very different. After all, we nice white liberals are as much a part of Generation Suicide as Office Gliniewicz. And, in truth, I could fall right back into that place tomorrow. The world is cold and capricious — even for people with great advantages. I possess no special brilliance or talent or property that grants me immunity.
The healing power of North Alabama’s loudest existentialists
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I had one other tremendous resource available to me during this time.
Massive luck, some amount of skill, and the money that flows from that combination changed the core of my condition in 2008. But a band I love made me feel better when I needed to. They treated my symptoms and got me through the day, more often than not. When I could talk to no one else about what I was squandering, I could listen to them. We had been to the same places and knew the same people. And when life got better, as it did fairly quickly, they helped me celebrate. I still hang out with them on my headphones all the time. Together, we have the luxury of worrying mostly about other people — at least for now.
I’ve written about the Drive-by Truckers before. But I’m specifically talking about their three key songwriters: Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell. Isbell left the band in 2006 for a solo career that exploded with his most recent, instantly classic albums, Southeastern and Something More than Free. But I still think of all three guys as manifestations of the same force for good.
DBT’s career matches almost perfectly the rise of Generation Suicide. And you can hear it in their music. Death, as a character, dominates their songs in a million creative ways. They have more to say about living fully under the specter of death than any American artists that I know. The central theme of their work is that it’s fucking hard to live honestly and find joy in life. But it’s also our duty. It’s what we owe to whatever we call our gods; to the people who love us; and to all the people we survive. And they manage to make all of this fun. Really. Their best concerts are like church for the secular.
Two of their most raucous sing-along songs have soaring joyful refrains that shout: “Hell no, I ain’t happy,” and “Sometimes I feel like shit.”
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus wrote:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
It’s the fundamental question of art, too.
I don’t know if any of the DBT songwriters have read Camus. But it wouldn’t surprise me. These three sensitive, supersmart, small-town, North Alabama country boys understand existentialism as deeply and humanely as philosophy’s favorite matinee idol. And the creative, dramatic world they’ve created that breathes human life into these ideas rivals The Plague as a sad, defiant, honest, joyful work of art.
Relatively easy
I quoted Mike Cooley’s beautiful “When the Pin Hits the Shell” to open of this piece. He wrote it for DBT’s 2003 album Decoration Day. It’s one of two songs about rejecting suicide on Decoration Day, which is itself a reference to marking death.
Mike Cooley packs more artistic power, honesty, and wisdom per syllable into his work than any writer I’ve ever read, in any form. You can lie to your mama. You can lie to your race. But you can’t lie to nobody with that cold steel in your face. Lines that viscerally honest hang off his songs like bunches of fruit on trees. Another one, from a different song: My daddy didn’t pull out, but he never apologized. Rock and roll means well, but it can’t help telling young boys lies. I could quote him for hours. Cooley’s a genius, which is not a word I often dole out.
Isbell, a recovering alcoholic, isn’t far behind, if he’s behind at all. This is from his song, “Relatively Easy,” on Southeastern.
I lost a good friend
Christmas time when folks go off the deep end
His woman took the kids and he took klonopin
Enough to kill a man of twice his sizeNot for me to understand
Remember him when he was still a proud man
A vandal’s smile a baseball in his right hand
Nothing but the blue sky in his eyeStill compared to those
A stone’s throw away from you
Our lives have both been relatively easy
Take a year and make a break
There ain’t that much at stake
The answers could be relatively easy
In the aftermath of the George Zimmerman verdict, I wrote this about the art of the “Zimmertarian,” the word I invented to describe the men of Generation Suicide, before I realized that’s who I was describing:
Black America’s art and culture and politics talk, imperfectly, of a collective responsibility for behavior. The Zimmertarian doesn’t even acknowledge white dysfunction. He celebrates it as freedom. Doubt me? Where’s the Kendrick Lamar of white dysfunction? Zimmertarian art and culture produces Ted Nugent and Toby Keith.
It wasn’t always that way. From Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen to Nirvana, the struggles of the troubled white (man’s) soul always had mass audience musical champions — or at least since the moment white America stole rock and roll from the Blues.
Cash reconciled human darkness with God. Bruce showed us we’re the stars of a difficult, but hopeful epic. Nirvana, I think, looked for grace in ear-splitting ennui. Then Kurt Cobain killed himself — and nothing replaced him. For some reason, the mass audience for humane, smart, empathetic, cathartic white American music that kids and adults alike could love died at almost exactly the same moment Generation Suicide started killing itself in mass numbers. (You might throw Nine Inch Nails at me, but I don’t think so.) The mass market for music that loved the people who listened to it died.
If you add Johnny Cash to Bruce Springsteen to Nirvana, you get the Drive-by Truckers. Go listen to “Where the Devil Don’t Stay” or “Lookout Mountain” or “The Day John Henry Died” and tell me I’m wrong. Because they sing with accents in southern settings, music critics tend to regionalize them. But “Zip City” is no more regional than “Thunder Road” — and every bit its equal. “Guitar Man Upstairs” is as punk as anything on Nirvana’s Bleach.
Maybe Cobain’s suicide was a harbinger. Or maybe it was just a coincidence that the defining moral struggle of American whiteness, starting in 1998, became whether to live. The Drive-by Truckers seem like the only artists who realized it — or cared enough about their friends and communities to sing about it. And they kept singing about it, no matter their commercial success. For most of their career, no one wanted to hear it. They barely stayed afloat for years, despite cranking out breathtaking song after breathtaking song. No, no, play “Sweet Home Alabama” again.
DBT could have been the Kendrick Lamar of white self-destruction. How many lives might they have saved? But white (mostly) men writ large, the people DBT write about, didn’t want to hear those songs. That’s still true. Even if you don’t like DBT’s type of music. Find someone else really getting at modern America’s crisis of whiteness in mass popular art. Who is talking to Generation Suicide in its own idiom? Who will Generation Suicide listen to? There’s no one.
American white people are in denial about our dysfunction. Our popular art — or lack of it — proves it. Politics is our popular art, at least on the conservative side. Check out this excerpt from an essay on this exact same topic by a reasonably famous college professor and “conservative” writer named Victor Davis Hanson. I’m sure you’ll find it linked on lots of Facebook pages.
Clearly the sloganeering and slurs of President Obama and his subordinates (typical white person, clingers, punish our enemies, my people, nation of cowards, get in their face, etc.) have been useful over the last eight years in ginning up racial solidarity, just as quite improper presidential commentary on ongoing hot-button legal cases (Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, etc.) reinforced racial polarization and grievance. Hillary Clinton’s campaign — in its embrace of illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, Black Lives Matter, the fable of one in four campus women being sexually assaulted, etc. — is desperate to ensure that Obama’s community-organizing, separatist formula can be transferred to a mature white lady. Hillary is now aiming at the “hands up, don’t shoot,” Jorge Ramos, Sandra Fluke, Lena Dunham set, not the Duck Dynasty bunch or a dazed Jim Webb.
Still, white working-class psychological despair is not alone attributable to lack of good jobs, or affirmative action, or the constant slur of so-called white privilege. There is a class element at the heart of the nihilism — or, rather, the furor at the prevailing hypocrisy. Whites who really do enjoy privilege, whether defined by income, capital, tony Ivy League degrees, or family connections and influence, are the worst purveyors of ridicule of the white working class.
Contrast that to DBT’s Patterson Hood on his song, “Do it yourself:”
Who’s to blame for the loveless marriage, who’s to blame for the broken band.
You ran from life and all of its pleasures, your own teeth marks on your own damned hand.
Thrown out before the date’s expired, you’d rather die than let anyone help,
You’d rather die than take a stab at living.
Nothing would kill you so you do it yourself.Everyone has those times when the night’s so long
The dead-end life just drags you down
You lean back under the microphone
and turn your demons into walls of goddamned noise and sound.
Popular white music reckons with no demons. And even on high quality artistic TV, we’ve made our demons into zombies or white walkers. Everywhere else, for years, Generation Suicide has turned its demons into whoever the Trayvon Martin or Hillary Clinton or Jorge Ramos of-the-day happens to be. I know of at least one guy who turned his demons into me.
That might not matter if Generation Suicide’s actual demons weren’t consuming it.
Cultural genocide: the blood on Big Nashville’s hands
Mike Cooley wrote a straight-up country song called “Daddy’s Cup” that ought to have been a modern smash. It’s as conventionally “conservative” a song as any serious artist has ever written. It’s about building and racing cars, working to the earn the money to do it, honoring a dead father, and never quitting. Has this classic, laconic Cooley line about the racer’s first car: “A V8 on a go-cart, easy terms, no money down.”
Key passage:
The first time that I raced my qualifying was a shame
I started out way in the back and came back about the same
I pulled her in the pit, couldn’t look my Daddy in the eye
He said “If you quit now son, it’s gonna haunt you all your life”“See, it ain’t about the money or even being #1
You gotta know when it’s all over you did the best you could’ve done
Knowing that it’s in you and you never let it out
Is worse than blowing any engine or any wreck you’ll ever have.”
Knowing that its in you and you never let it out. Why didn’t Big Nashville market that with everything it could muster for Generation Suicide?
Probably because it came out in 2004, on an amazing album called The Dirty South. Big Nashville had just ex-communicated its brightest stars, The Dixie Chicks, for an off-hand remark about George W. Bush and his Iraq invasion. Dirty South makes the Dixie Chicks look like Anita Bryant. It takes the bootleggers’ side against Buford T. Pusser. It has a song called “Carl Perkins Cadillac” that ain’t terribly flattering to Big Nashville. Another song — about the 80s — growls: “Goddamn Reagan’s in the White House and nobody gives a damn.”
I do not pretend to know the details of Big Nashville’s business models. But every indication I have suggests those models do not care for social critiques. Nor do they give a rat’s ass about the lives of the flesh and blood human beings they market to.
I find it darkly hilarious listening to elements Generation Suicide go on and on about “cultural genocide” because the rest of the country wants to take down the Confederate battle flag and rethink our monuments. You know what’s actually cultural genocide? Florida-Georgia Line. And you can blame American white people’s chief popular art industry for it.
“I thought everyone like me was dead”
So the emergence of what you might call Little Nashville is really intriguing and encouraging. Again, I’m far from an expert. I only know anything about it because I love Jason Isbell’s work. I mentioned the success of his last two — post sobriety — records. They have made him, arguably, the number one star of what’s come to be called “Americana” music.
Isbell and his new wife Amanda Shires, a hugely talented musician and writer in her own right, live in Nashville. They seem to have become, from my poorly informed reading, the president and first lady of Little Nashville. They represent an ascendant movement of rich and meaningful white music that Big Nashville can’t ignore or excommunicate anymore. Little Nashville’s artistic meritocracy is cracking whatever-kind-of-ocracy Big Nashville is.
The distinction between Big Nashville’s Country and Little Nashville’s Americana is stupid. It’s purely cultural and political. Americana is just country music that actually gives a shit about human struggle. It is country music that actually cares about the people it sings about and to. That makes it “liberal” compared to the “conservative” dudedro and warrior music that has dominated Big Nashville.
Indeed, Isbell’s most recent album, Something More Than Free spent some time as both the number one country and rock album. That doesn’t mean as much as it once did because of changes in how people buy music. But it’s still encouraging. And judging from reaction to CMA awards a few days ago, it’s influencing the direction of Big Nashville.
Isbell himself, who of course won nothing, tweeted:
I’ve never agreed with so many #CMAawards before, and I know my tastes haven’t changed over the years. Good things are happening right now.
— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) November 5, 2015
Isbell ends Something More Than Free with a song called “To a Band that I Loved.”
You were singing that night by yourself,
And I thought I was only one left
From an old southern town
New ideas bouncing round in my headAnd I thought everyone like me was dead.
Somehow you put down my fears on a page
when I still had nothing to say
How I miss you today
May you find what you gave, all that hope
somewhere down at the end of your rope.
As I understand it, Isbell is singing there about a band called Centro-matic, which toured with DBT quite a bit and recently broke up. But the sentiment is universal.
Art, when it works, tells a person: “you are not alone.” That can be a life-changing, life-saving recognition. I won’t be so dramatic as to say it saved my life. That’s not close to true. But it made me happier. My life was better for having DBT in it.
Politics does much the same thing. But it uses that sacred power to harm as often as it saves. Fox News, which went on the air in late 1996, and Big Nashville marketed “you are not alone” to Generation Suicide. They put down its fears on a page; and then they turned those fears into lucrative villains — demons — that Generation Suicide could blame for its misery. But they didn’t give a shit about the misery itself. Indeed, Big Nashville and Fox pretend like there is no body count of white misery. That’s because white misery pays — if you can blame it on somebody else.
May they all find what they gave somewhere down at the end of their rope.
Straight Outta…Anywhere
When a girl broke my heart in high school, I didn’t seek solace in some emo tune. I went looking for what I mistook as power. NWA. Straight Outta Compton. Bitches. Hos. Can’t hurt me. Head held high.
Why would I indulge misogynistic and violent art I knew was “wrong” as a teenager? It made me feel better. Simple as that.
So I’m not surprised the recent NWA biopic made a lot of money; or that they whitewashed all the theatrical woman-hating. It’s embarrassing now. In the moment, for me, it was vital. Defiance in the face of hurt is meaningful. It’s life-affirming, even when it takes indefensible forms. That’s a lesson we would all do well to acknowledge, I think. Or maybe just I need to. You’ll have to decide for yourself.
Anyway, NWA did not set out to make sensitive small town white boys feel better about their romantic lives. I’m not totally sure what they set out to do. Most likely, they set out to get paid by providing affirmation to the people they knew and loved — or even hated. They set out to portray themselves and the people they knew in a defiant and familiar way, rendered in an idiom that white art and business could never, ever produce.
Fuck you, white man. This is how we talk. What you gonna do about it?
Well, cheat them out of a lot of money for one thing. But man, did NWA ever find an audience. Whether they intended to or not, I think NWA provided an visceral antidote to pain and weakness. It was so powerful, in fact, that it became meaningful in my world, which rarely intersected with their world, even though I grew up around real class and racial integration.
It created an entirely new genre of popular art by rendering an entirely new creative world that was also thoroughly American. NWA let me visit as a happy tourist, like Italy lets me visit as a happy tourist. But I didn’t live there. So I can’t know this for certain. But I suspect that the rise of hip-hop, in all its forms, from defiant to thoughtful to silly to political gave black Americans of all kinds a life-affirming, authentic conversation about every aspect of their lives — from sex to love to violence to religion to disagreement. I don’t think white American popular art has authentically represented Generation Suicide’s world for a long, long time. And Big Nashville and Fox allow for no honest conversations. The world they create for Generation Suicide is fantasy. It’s Straight Outta Nowhere, brittle pride built on lethal bullshit.
Compare Generation Suicide’s world to the mass incarceration/Drug War world Dr. Dre and Ice Cube and Eazy E rapped about, which itself rests on slavery and the terrorism of Jim Crow. There’s not much doubt which is harder to survive and thrive in. It’s pretty remarkable that black Americans have endured everything they’ve endured and are still bringing it in middle age — still choosing to live in an America relentlessly hostile to most black Americans it doesn’t know personally.
Generation Suicide’s carceral state and vicious approach to the Drug War — which it should be waging against itself — ought to create outsized levels of middle-aged black suicide. But it doesn’t. It seems to create it for itself, at four times the rate of black America.
Why? That’s a pretty important question to answer. But it’s more urgent for Generation Suicide than anybody else.
Ice Cube and Dre are rich, respected elder statesmen today. Lovable, gruff almost grandfatherly figures. Time will do that to thugs and dangerous “revolutionaries.” And I wonder how much their lewd, violent rap music — its couplets of showy defiance — kept people alive. How many people did it make feel strong when they weren’t? How many people did it drag to and maybe through middle age? How many people learned they were not alone?
Certainly, from viral emails to overwrought Facebook posts to American Sniper (as a work of art), Generation Suicide has no shortage of ways to experience and express cultural defiance and solidarity. But it doesn’t hear much honesty about itself from itself. It’s too busy talking shit about thugs, Mexicans, and Muslims. Maybe that’s the problem; maybe not. But it’s a simple statistical fact that whatever artistic and cultural influences Generation Suicide is consuming in mass quantities are not meaningfully life-affirming.
Music for the mourners, not yet for the mourned
I think the Big Nashville/Little Nashville dichotomy is really a metaphor for the “conservative” rural and suburban white South versus and the “liberal” urban white South. Patterson Hood wrote a cool essay about this for an online magazine called “The Bitter Southerner.” (Also, Nashville itself, with Jack White and the Black Keys calling it home, is way more complex and vibrant than the County/Americana split. All metaphors have limits.)
One of Jason Isbell’s newer songs “Palmetto Rose,” about Charleston’s unique brew of class, race, history, and love, could serve as national anthem of this new urban south. Written before the Charleston shootings, but released not long after, “Palmetto Rose” comes with the grisly benefit of exquisite timing. It sort of combines three perspective-jumbling songs into one, each stylistically different and deeper than the next.
But this simple, rapturous chorus of lefty southern nationalism is awesome:
This war that I wage to get up every day
It’s a fiberglass boat; it’s azaleas in May
It’s the women I love and the law that I hate
Lord let me die in the Iodine state
Like me, DBT and Isbell grew up in the rural, small-town south, but now belong culturally to the urban south. Cooley lives in Birmingham; Hood lives in Athens, Ga.; and Isbell lives in Nashville. Isbell’s new song “Speed Trap Town” is about making that transition, or at least leaving behind the rural south.
Because of that subtle inversion of perspective, the people they sing about, by and large, still aren’t their audience. I doubt they ever will be. I’m more or less their audience. They write to me about many of the people I grew up with. They write to me about people I love — and fight with pointlessly on social media about damn near everything.
Sadly, Generation Suicide’s victims, like white despair generally, are well represented in the small town south. DBT knows it. I know it. I also know it’s kind of an unforgivable insult to say it. If only it wasn’t.
When Mike Cooley sings, “I ain’t gonna mourn for you, man, now that you’re gone,” it’s one of the very few lies you’ll ever hear in a DBT song. Loud, raucous mourning is as central to what they do as the jazz funeral is to the mythology of New Orleans. They are mourners and monument builders. They have mourned and built moving musical monuments to more white lives than Fox News and Big Nashville and Victor Davis Hanson combined. I think that’s a big reason why their fellow mourners love them. I know it’s a big part of why I do.
It ain’t too late
I suspect politics matters both deeply and not at all to Generation Suicide. Electing Bernie Sanders or Ben Carson won’t dent despair, at least not immediately. It has built up over time, for many reasons. Income inequality. Robots. Austerity. Global trade. Prescription drugs. Fear of a diverse future. Elite indifference. Spite. All relate both to white misery and to politics. None of them are easily addressed with a single vote — or even multiple votes. No policy equation fixes them. That is not the same thing as saying we shouldn’t try to fix them. In fact, trying to fix things is one of life’s great undertakings. Honestly, what else is there?
But we should understand there is no winning. There is only the option to keep playing until we can’t. That is the victory. That is where we can celebrate moments and find happiness. In one of Hood’s finest songs, a guitar player he knew that was dying of AIDS declares: “I can’t die now, cuz I got another show to do.”
Every time Hood plays that song today, he ends it with that guy’s name: Gregory Dean Smalley. For years, he’s played Smalley’s story and punctuated it with his name. Not just a song. A person. He lived. We honor him and each other by exploring the possibilities of life still available to us — and by finding beauty and happiness where we can.
When we forget that, art is a great place to remember it. And you could do much morse than DBT and Jason Isbell.
If you’re unfamiliar with them, I’d recommend starting with Isbell’s newest record: Something More Than Free. It stands on its own and doesn’t really need context. It opens with a simple, lovely song called “If it takes a lifetime.”
A man is a product of, all the people that he ever loved
And it don’t make a difference how it ended up
If I loved you once my friend, I can do it all again
If it takes a lifetimeWe got too far from our raising and we fought ’til we went numb
You were running up a mountain in your own mind
And I thought that I was running too but I was running from
Oh, our day will come, if it takes a lifetime
Our day will come, if it takes a lifetime
For DBT itself, I’d recommend a new live album they just put out called It’s Great to Be Alive. It’s a pretty good 35-song sample of a much deeper career. When they call it quits one day and do the box set, there will probably be 120 songs worth including on it, of which at least 75 are essential.
(Many of them sing beautifully about women, a fact I’ve largely ignored in this piece, even though women are dying at terrible rates, too. But their mortality seems less something they’re doing to themselves than something living is doing to them. And that’s a whole different essay. And frankly, as a man, I don’t think I understand the pain and suffering of women as well as I do men. I need to do more thinking rather than go off half-cocked.)
The album title It’s Great to be Alive refers to a sort of half-song, half-monologue called “A World of Hurt.”
Patterson Hood wrote and recorded “A World of Hurt” for 2006’sA Blessing and A Curse, the last record with Isbell as part of the band. Various accounts say Isbell’s substance abuse and behavior was out-of-control then; and I gather it was a particular low point for everybody involved.
On its face, “A World of Hurt” is a full-throated exhortation to work at marriage (written by a guy who was divorced and remarried). But it becomes a full-throated exhortation to work at anything that requires trying — or that requires suffering. In other words, it’s a full-throated exhortation to live.
Because it’s not exactly a song, the lyrics are a little fluid depending on how Hood performs it. But it basically opens like this:
Once upon a time my advice to you would have been to go out and find yourself a whore
But I guess I’ve grown up
Cuz I don’t give that kind of advice any more.I was 27 when I figured out that blowing my brains out wasn’t the answer
So I decided maybe I should try to find a way to make this world work for me
My good friend Paul was 83-years-old when he told me that to love is to feel pain
I thought about that a lot back then
And I think about that, again and again…
Ends like this:
It’s a wonderful world if you can put away the sadness
And hang on to every ounce of beauty upon you
Better take the time to know it, if you feel anything at all
It’s gonna be a world of hurtSo if what you’ve got is working for you,
or you think that it stands a reasonable chance
If whatever’s broken seems fixable and nothing’s beyond repair
If you still think about each other and smile
before you remember how screwed up its gotten
Or maybe you still dream about a time less rottenRemember, it ain’t too late to take a deep breath
And throw yourself into it with everything you gotIt’s fucking great to be alive.