What does it mean, anyway?
With a few notable exceptions, topical songs have a best-before date. Listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” nearly 20 years later, it’s hard to recall the trauma and uncertainty of the post 9/11 environment in which it first appeared; it’s still anthemic, but the intervening years have sapped it of its urgency and immediacy.
Neil Young’s “Ohio” remains an FM radio mainstay, but its association with the 1970 Kent State University shootings that inspired it has largely been forgotten.
Heartbreakingly, frustratingly — fucking unfathomably — the Drive-By Truckers’ “What it Means,” is still as relevant today as it was when it was first introduced in 2016. Its writer Patterson Hood once introduced the song on an episode of NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert by saying: “I’d honestly be really happy if it was outdated and something we could leave in the past.”
It’s now June of 2020, and we haven’t. Not even close.
To the uninitiated, the Drive-By Truckers’ goofy name and three-guitar attack might suggest nothing more than a bunch of good ol’ boys with a fondness for drinkin’, fightin’ and, well, you know.
But Hood, one of the band’s two principal songwriters, is a master of chronicling the indignities and desperation — and sometimes even the little victories — of the everyman. His songs are direct and to the point, eschewing metaphor and allusion in favour of blunt assertions and sometimes uncomfortable questions.
“What it Means” is arguably the centrepiece of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2016 album American Band. Detailing subjects like racial injustice and gun violence, the album is simultaneously a document and a rebuke of contemporary America.
Perhaps not surprisingly, it alienated a large group of fans who had somehow failed to grasp that the Truckers (as they’re known to fans) had possessed a political bent from the very beginning.
Set to a lilting, mostly acoustic backing, “What It Means” is musically unremarkable. Actually, let me rephrase that: It’s a gorgeous piece of music, but for me it derives its power from its astonishingly evocative lyrics.
In 421 succinct words, Hood addresses the egregious acts of injustice perpetrated against America’s people of colour by its citizens and its law enforcement — from the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, to the countless police killings committed in the name of law and order. More importantly, they chronicle the indifference of a society that lets it keep happening. Over and over and over.
It’s simultaneously an indictment of the country’s political and legal systems, a media unable to resist the allure of the sensational, and a public that has become largely inured to the senseless death of yet another innocent Black man (or boy).
But to hear, really hear, a lyric like “while some kid is dead and buried/and laying in the ground/with a pocket full of Skittles,” a reference to the candy the 17-year-old Martin had purchased minutes before being shot in the chest, is to feel both profound sadness and fury at the injustice of it all.
I’ve been listening to “What it Means” a lot in the wake of the senseless killing of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. It still brings me to tears. Music possesses the ability to move me like no other art-form. Has ever since I was a kid. And this is a potent piece of music.
I’m glad this song exists, but I’m also profoundly sad that it remains relevant half a decade later. And despite what’s happening right now, both in America and around the world, I can’t shake the nagging fear that even now, we’re no closer to really knowing what it means.
Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash