An Open Letter to Trace Adkins, Piece of Shit

Dear Mr. Adkins,



To be quite honest, until very recently (this past Friday evening) I had never really given you much thought. Your music doesn't particularly appeal to me. That's not, in and of itself, a criticism. I don't much care for Schoenberg either, and he was a genius. But while I was watching television on Friday I saw the commercial that you made for the Wounded Warrior Project, which concludes with a snippit of your song "Til the Last Shot's Fired"--and I decided to start paying attention.

I will go in the ascending list of my problems with this, starting with the least serious and working my way up:

1. You're a terrible musician. Seriously.
2. You're doing that thing where you write a song about "the troops" which sells millions of copies because white, generally southern, Americans love "the troops." This makes me think that your love for "the troops" is directly proportional to the income you derive from singing out them. Get bent.
3. This one is the most serious, by far. You are a dangerous piece of shit.

Now, perhaps #3 deserves some elaboration. Because I was already a little disgusted with the portion of your song that I heard, I went back and looked up the full lyrics. Here is your first stanza:

"I was there in the winter of '64
When we camped in the ice at Nashville's door
Three hundred miles our trail had lead
We barely had time to bury our dead"

And I am thinking, "okay, well he is starting at the Battle of Nashville, it's an odd place to begin the American military story but I suppose Nashville is the seat of American Country Music, so I guess that makes sense. Besides, it was a solid Union victory."

But you continue:

"When the Yankees charged and the colors fell
Overton Hill was a living hell
When we called retreat, it was almost dark
I died with a grape shot in my heart"

Oh. This is a laud to the Confederacy. I wish that were more surprising. Now, there are problems in this world that are bigger than your stupid song or the Confederate battle flag. The flag is a symbol. Black men and women are killed every day, black churches are being burned, and American prisons are overflowing with black men and women who are existing in a state of ersatz slavery, and those situations have both symbolic AND pragmatic consequences. So sure, given the ability to hack at the total list of problems in the world, I'd start there and work down to flags, car roofs (TVLAND today pulled The Dukes of Hazzard from their line-up), t-shirts, mud-flaps, songs, etc. et al. But that doesn't mean your nostalgia for the halcyon days when you could own black people isn't messed up. And your conflation of Confederate soldiers fighting on behalf of that system of owning people with, for instance, American soldiers who fought the Nazis is gross, and your call throughout the song that we be "set free" rings hollow when that freedom is attributed to States whose sole desire for independence is predicated on the continuation of the institution of slavery.

Because these kinds of cultural symbols are dangerous. They normalize white supremacy. They promote anti-blackness.

At the start of every semester I tell my students the same story. It's about a man named Bonhoeffer who dropped out of law school to become a minister, who became a spy for the British against the Third Reich. He was captured and executed. His death warrant was signed by a judge named Thorbeck, who had been his classmate coming up. They had read all the same books, taken all the same classes, lived in the same places, known the same people. One died fighting Hitler, the other executed him. You can parse out the reason why from their diaries. Bonhoeffer and Thorbeck read differently. Bonhoeffer sought out, through books, contact with other human beings, with other minds and souls. Thorbeck viewed the precise same books as symbols of the rightness of German Nationalism. The way we approach symbols: songs, books, flags, etc. matters. It matters because how we approach these things seems to be largely determinative of how we will conduct our lives.

You make songs that stand as the symbols of a hateful agenda. You make the world a little bit worse every damn day.

Two days after hearing your song on that commercial I was driving from Kansas back to Michigan, when my Nina Simone Pandora station played "Sinnerman." Probably the biggest wrong that could ever be done to this song was the way it was used in The Thomas Crowne Affair as the background music of a clever white billionaire playing games with a hundred million dollar painting, because what the song is really about is the unjust man seeking solace on the Day of Judgment--fleeing from the face of a God who has come to sort out the world. The sinner in "Sinnerman" finds no refuge in a world where the rivers and seas have become boiling blood and the stones offer no hiding place. All that's left to do is stand before an outraged God who commands the sinner to "go to the devil." Listening to "Sinnerman," I reflected on my own sins--which are many. You should give it a listen.

Please rethink your life,

Dave

P.S. I wasn't really listening to your music before, and I won't be starting now. Also, you probably won't hear from me again.