“Men working hard for not enough, at best / Women working just as hard for less”: The Drive-By Truckers’ New Record ‘The Unraveling’

Over at The Ringer, I wrote about the startling new Drive-By Truckers LP ‘The Unraveling’: a scary, funny and mesmerizing howl of dissent which seeks to light a path to personal redemption amidst the roiling, septic sea of contemporary American corruption.

DBT is dedication to work personified. They belong to a pre-boomer mentality that believes in the sometimes complicated virtues but ultimately democratic prospects of collectivism, pluralism, and something like a level playing field. The unraveling referred to in the album’s title is the systematic decades-long dismantling of those ideals, orchestrated by a feckless and cruel political and corporate class whose belligerence is based on nothing short of their own blinkered self-regard. Forty years of financial deregulation, unfunded foreign wars, and tax cuts for the rich, all culminating in Donald Trump’s xenophobic shamelessness. Don Henley’s 1984 classic “The Boys of Summer” predicted the fractious psychology and rise of an angry investor class coming out of the largely failed social experiments of the 1960s: disillusioned, acquisitive, and out to find and harm the first person who slightly disorders their wounded psyche. This is how you get Bill Clinton’s senselessly punitive “welfare reform.” This is how you get a Senate preoccupied with stripping away fractionally costly health care options for the working poor on the laughable pretext of budgetary concerns. This is rocking in the free world. This is hell.

Check it out!