The Top 30 Albums of 2008: # 16

The Drive-By Truckers
Brighter Than Creation's Dark

In that fantasy world where good turns are rewarded, where the corrupt meet their recompense, Drive-By Truckers are the soundtrack to the red and the blue meeting and agreeing to repair the schism between them hate created. Where the god-fearing and the atheist come together, acknowledge that they said a lot of things that they didn't mean, and they won't do it again. Where people admit that killing the hell out of each other isn't something that anybody should have to do. Where the government doesn't troll around in the small towns abandoned by the local factory so they can take the teenagers off to die in the fucking sand. Where the arguing slows down enough so that people can realize it's time to look after the pregnant girl before she throws her baby in a dumpster and everyone shows up to condemn her to the fiery pits. A place where the taste of bigotry doesn't haunt the minds of the scared, of the stupid, of the ashamed. A world where you don't slice off a portion of the population that grows up in the backwoods of nowheresville, where you don't shit down their throats with failing school systems, smother their attempts to unionize Wal-Mart in the cradle, where asshole liberals don't ridicule them for listening to Garth Brooks and not keeping up with the local hairstyle trends, where you offer them a grocery store that stocks something healthy before you point and laugh at their weight, where you give a mother a chance at cheap, affordable daycare before you tell her she's a lousy fucking parent, where you don't turn on the television to see the heroes that we made out of trust fund cocksuckers, where shit. can. be. fair.

That day will not come. That day can not come. Barack Obama and a Democratic majority can't give it to you, neither can Bono or the Gates Foundation, and anger, and hope, and rage, and a protest, and a love-in, and smoking pot, and getting tore up on Jager--no, you can't have it. No, you won't have it. No, it isn't going to be okay for everybody, and yes, you're going to die, and the best you can hope for is it to be at a time when you have someone there to hold your hand.

Doom and gloom and hate and sadness and fury and incontinence all around, the Truckers don't like it when you call them Southern Rock, but that is what they are--the South that Faulkner loved and hated, the one he called the Garden of Eden that slavery destroyed, it's the mythical South, it's the South of people so goddamn poor, so goddamn lost, so goddamn unimportant to anyone but themselves that they had to figure out a way to keep breathing and loving and dancing and singing and fucking their brains out, because they knew that you weren't coming down here again God, they knew you'd left them behind the second they opened those boats and put those chains on their brothers and sisters, they knew they'd fucked up forever, and even when they were supposed to put those chains away, they were too set in their ways, they were too goddamn prideful to admit how wrong they'd been, too goddamn lonely and angry, and they knew what was coming--they knew they'd have to pay that price and that price just looked and felt too goddamn high. They were right, and they got what they deserved, the Good Lord and justice wreaked it's wrath, and you gave them schools that weren't any good, and you gave them the fucking Klan, and you gave them their sound, their drawl that stood as a joke, as a mark of cain, as a way to turn their women into cartoon whores for the Yankee to laugh at and leave behind--but when it passed, and all that was left was a burned down house with nothing left inside but those fucking peaches and cotton, they had to figure out a way to live again. There'd be some still angry, there'd be plenty still full of hate, but the rest, the rest had to find a way to keep going.

Took some time.

It's a passion for storytelling that keeps it alive now. A love of that old time telling about what it looks like down here when you walk away from the airport and you see how they tore apart another swamp and built another strip mall, no matter that the old Richway is still abandoned. Another neighborhood of houses that cost too much and don't last long enough, another vinyl sided lie that would tell them they'd moved ahead. Where you get paid minimum wage, and that'll have to do because it's the best available, where the love you feel is the same as the love anyone feels, but you know that you'll never be able to give her the things she sees everybody else getting, because you've got nothing coming, you used it up when you were 18 and nobody else could throw like you. Where your best was only good enough to get you out of the house, but it couldn't take you further than that. Where you looked around and realized that the farthest the bootstraps went was the edge of town, no matter how many side gigs you took, no matter how many times you got those pants patched up, where the only way to get out was to leave who you were and who your people were behind and become something else, a liar everyday.

The Truckers stand there still, they travel around the world and have to stand there everyday, standing out there and looking at that chart and saying that I ain't changing my name, but I am changing what my name means, and I don't want nothing to do with what my people did back in those days, back in those bad old days where they looked at their brothers and took their brothers down, I don't want it, but if you're gonna lay that shit on me anyway, I'm gonna find some way to make you see I'm something else besides my kin, my name, my past, my town, my house. I'm not going to walk away from it, I'm not going to lie about my people, no, I'm gonna show you something about me that's true, and I'm gonna show you a taste of what got thrown away when we broke this land and broke our Creator's heart.

Most people that listen to these guys will tell you that they're the same kind of liar that Bob Dylan is, that his made-up stories about working as an engineer are on the same level of bullshit that it is when Patterson Hood tells the story of an alcoholic dad and a man who can't let go of what he did over there for the Army. They'll tell you that the Truckers are a spectacle, and that they like the charade but the charade ain't real, and then they'll talk about the triple axe attack. They'll sing along with a song that tells you that the only thing that matters is loving your wife and your tow-headed kids, and then they'll go home and tell you how it's "cool." They'll tell you that, and that's fine. That's a Yankee for you. Just smile and tell them thank you.

We know better anyway.

-Tucker Stone, 2008