by Jared Bier
About three minutes into “What It Means,” an especially provocative song on their 2016 album American Band, Drive-By Truckers’ front-man Patterson Hood falters. If interviews, his contributions to various publications (namely but not merely his 2015 New York Times op-ed) and the rich oeuvre of agitating and pointed songs he has penned over the previous two decades serve as indication, Hood probably does not often find himself short for words. Yet right there at the 3:05 mark, as the deceptively jaunty riff and simple drumbeat continue uninterrupted, after recounting in relatively straightforward terms the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, he stops singing. In fact, in accord with the previous two verses of the song, an actual line is missing.
This momentary reticence is, of course, intentional. The details of Hood’s retelling – that of Martin “laying in the ground/With a pocket full of Skittles” – underscores that much more the tragedy of Martin’s killing: shortly before George Zimmerman, against the recommendation of the dispatcher with whom he was speaking on the phone regarding Martin’s allegedly “suspicious” activity, decided to pursue him. Martin had purchased juice and some candy from a neighborhood convenience store. Hood’s image recalls the quotidian modesty of this act: Martin, like most seventeen-year-old kids, probably had some fairly low-key aspirations for the evening. Perhaps, after the imagery he had conjured up to that point in the song, Hood thought that the most appropriate or outright genuine response to the senselessness of Martin’s death, preceded by the senselessness of Zimmerman’s choices, was dumbstruck silence. Perhaps Hood recognized that no words could effectively annotate this abrupt deprivation of even the simple pleasure of enjoying a bag of Skittles, let alone all of the essential freedoms with which Martin was supposedly endowed.
Then again, even our recent history might argue that he was never practically endowed with those rights at all. If this is the case, Martin was not so much a victim when Zimmerman pulled the trigger or presumed a degree of authority reserved for agents of the state, but rather when he decided Martin was not entitled to the benefit of the doubt, a privilege that the writer Bryan Washington unpacked in a piece for The New Yorker one week after the murder of George Floyd.
The allusion to his killing, in addition to that of Michael Brown’s the following year, is offered by Hood as a case study in his inquiry into America’s enduring legacy of racism and racial politics and the perpetual injustice this dynamic reliably incurs. While Zimmerman was ultimately acquitted by a jury of his peers and the Department of Justice later declined to charge him with a violation of Martin’s civil rights, Hood cannot concede the service of justice. Rather, he excoriates with a sarcastic barb the official interpretation of Zimmerman’s actions and highlights the absurdity of his ultimate vindication: “And that guy who killed that kid/Down in Florida standing ground/Is free to beat up on his girlfriend/And wave his brand new gun around.” Given Zimmerman’s subsequent antics, even beyond the allegations of domestic abuse to which Hood refers, the injustice of Martin’s killing has since assumed an even more infuriating tenor: after enthusiastically embracing his newfound notoriety to indulge especially the alt-right but also various other subreddits full of similarly deplorable ilk, Zimmerman sold that same gun at auction in 2016 as “an American Firearm Icon,” claiming he used it to “defend [his] life and end the brutal attack from Trayvon Martin.”
Hood could have sung anything where that last line would have otherwise occurred, but it certainly would not have provided any more closure than does his lingering image of a kid who was denied the freedom to just be a kid. This abject lack of resolution is of course the point. What resolution could anybody – foremost, Martin’s loved ones and Black Americans especially, but even the Drive-By Truckers themselves and really anybody now listening to the song eleven years later – expect? And yet a cursory survey of even the past decade shows that Brown’s and Martin’s killings are not unique, a fact that is not only tragic but also tragically self-evident. Hood acknowledges this: “In some town in Missouri/But it could be anywhere/It could be right here on Ruth Street/In fact it’s happened here.” That reference to Ruth Street pertains to another racially biased shooting to which Hood himself bore witness while living in Athens, Georgia, in the mid-nineties; one day, his neighbor, a young, Black, mentally challenged man named Edward Wright, left his house under a delusion. Reflecting upon the incident, Hood wrote for The Bitter Southerner, “[Wright’s] mother was rightly concerned about her boy and called 911 to see if the police could bring Edward home. Instead, they shot him multiple times. He was unarmed and naked, but a cop perceived him as a lethal threat and shot him – in full view of some school children in the neighborhood, no less. The officers involved were cleared by the district attorney’s office. There was never a trial.” The regularity with which such murders occur prompts the only assertion Hood can conclusively offer: “And it happened where you’re sitting/Wherever that might be/And it happened last weekend/And it will happen again next week.”
In the aftermath of Martin’s, Floyd’s and other especially high-profile murders, a handful of reliable aphorisms tend to punctuate our rhetoric, the collective reckoning with such incidents generally recalling something pertaining to the condemnation of future generations, history proving unkind, and, always, the doom of the past repeating itself. Such statements in essence attest to a sensibility that recognizes the potentially devastating ramifications of whatever trajectory our present actions might commence. That is, forewarning ourselves of history’s eventual judgment of our actions or inaction or injustices or systemic problems or whatever implies an understanding that, ultimately, things are not as they should be. It is also an act of hope: the claim that history will prove unkind to someone or something requires the presumption that things will eventually become what they should, that some future society will have progressed to the point where they will recognize but no longer perpetuate our present shortcomings. To foresee this possibility entails some degree of optimism for things to come, a sentiment that is, if anything, at least admirable.
But the pervasiveness of such statements should probably occasion some introspect as well. Theoretically, if these sentiments represent some expectation we would place upon a future generation, should we not similarly serve as the progressive heirs to some previous forebears? If so, then what shortcomings of that generation can we claim to have unanimously condemned, or what ills that characterize their history can we self-assuredly declare we have progressed beyond?
In this light, things get complicated. To live in America in the twenty-first century demands the firm and recurring acknowledgement that a so-called post-racial society, is laughably theoretical and embarrassingly unrealistic. This is not to dismiss or undermine the progress for which luminaries within the Black community and other historically marginalized peoples have struggled and suffered: their contributions resonate throughout our collective history as exemplars who, in their recognition that things were not as they should be, moved to see things as they ought to be. But understanding the work of these individuals demands an assessment of the present for evidence of that progress they worked toward. At present, then, one might reasonably question whether or not these same individuals we have canonized as revolutionaries might still very well retain that designation for our time as well. Beyond the abolition of codified institutions, what authentic and underlying progress might future generations ultimately pinpoint when they examine the socio-cultural zeitgeist of twenty-first century America? History perhaps may not prove kind, but arguably, given our current trajectory, history has not proven objectively unkind either.
“What It Means” is devastatingly aware of this irony. Hood sings, “I mean, we try to be politically correct when we call names/But what’s the point of post-racial/When old prejudices remain?” Toward the end of the song, he broadens his scope to further illustrate the paradox of institutional racism marking an otherwise consistently progressing society: “Astrophysics at our fingertips/We’re standing at the summit/And some man with a joystick/Lands a rocket on a comet/We’re living in an age/Where limitations are forgotten/The outer edges move and dazzle us/But the core is something rotten.” Just as he could not in regards to Martin’s killing, Hood offers no rationalization because the unspoken, frustratingly indisputable truth is that there is none to be offered.
The irresolution informing the song is pervasive and manifest. In the aforementioned essay, Hood affirms just as much: “I wasn’t thinking in terms of writing a protest song, and I certainly did not think I had written a song for my band, Drive-By Truckers. I was just trying to make some sense of what was happening… The song doesn’t offer any answers; I have none. It just poses a bunch of questions.” Hood’s assessment, especially in light of America’s deep-rooted tradition of protest music, is honest: his observations stimulate the listener only so far as to (hopefully) ask the same questions Hood is asking. Even so, just as a protest song – having been written during and in response to a particular moment – serves to encapsulate some cultural undercurrent of sentiment, “What It Means” functions similarly as an inextricably contextual documentation of our time. Granted, there were no answers when, say, Sam Cooke was singing “A Change is Gonna Come” in 1964 either, but “What It Means” bears none of the resolve with which Cooke sang his anthem. The terrible implication of “What It Means” is that, despite all of those warnings regarding the terrible prospect of history repeating itself, we are indeed repeating history.
Three years ago this past Memorial Day, with the assistance of three fellow patrolmen, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin subdued and then proceeded to kneel on Floyd’s neck for an interminably long eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Allegedly, Floyd resisted arrest; evidence suggests otherwise. Like Philando Castile and Eric Garner and a host of other Black men who in recent years, having found themselves in similar, impossibly helpless situations, Floyd pleaded his case – and then for his life – before he died under Chauvin’s pin while the other three stood and watched: the despicable nature of the officers’ actions is overshadowed only by their devastating culmination. Even apart from the spate of similar incidents in recent years, the circumstances of this killing substantiate, once again, the senselessness with which Hood grapples: whatever progress we think we have made, as if Floyd’s murder is a step up from, say, any one of the previous century’s lynchings and not just another hideous iteration of the same problem, the core is still “something rotten.”
Fortunately, the stark reality of his killing incited nationwide an expression of just and vehement disapprobation. Protesters amassed in seemingly greater scale and urgency than the responses that prior, similar tragedies provoked. In fact, this was so much the case that everyone from journalists to politicians and economists to sociologists were claiming it to be a tipping point of sorts. And Floyd’s killers, as well as the simpletons who decided to grab their guns and chase down and ultimately murder Ahmaud Arbery just a few months prior, have since stood trial; in each case, some semblance of justice was served.
But Hood’s assertion that “it will happen again next week.” Sooner or later, some cop or would-be vigilante, perceiving the need to intervene in a situation that probably does not need to be addressed with the use of force, much less a loaded gun, will end up perpetuating America’s long-standing custom of denying Black men and women the benefit of the doubt and, tragically, as Hood predicts, irrevocably deny somebody those rights we all love to claim are inalienable and God-given. If Hood is correct, whenever “next week” rolls around, the same thoughts and prayers will be offered and the same slacktivism and virtue signaling will overrun whatever social media feed you happen to favor, and the tired ritual of hand-wringing and warning ourselves about the doom of the past repeating itself will commence all over again. This, perhaps not in practice but certainly in effect, is also the outcome Hood foresees: “So we can shrug and let it happen/Without asking what it means.”
Jared Bier is a high school English teacher. His writing has appeared in various publications, including Bridge Eight, PopMatters, and Trails. He may be contacted via email at jaredbier3@.gmail.com.
