82. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - “Last Of My Kind”
I’ve mentioned before how I was raised on Country music and thus have an eternally infuriating yet wonderful soft spot for the genre. There’s just something about a slide guitar, simple chord progressions, and story-telling that wriggles its way into the rose-tinted halls of my nostalgia and makes me feel like a little kid again, as if I’m suddenly safe and happy without a care in the world. It’s a beautiful feeling, and one that I feel beyond blessed and privileged to have associated with my childhood. However, unfortunately for my nostalgia most Country music is pretty simple and predictable stuff. Like the majority of Pop music its a shallow genre with recycled lyrics and regurgitated sounds. That being said, it is possible to do the genre well, and when this occurs, it truly is something special.
Jason Isbell does it well (so well in fact that this album inspired me with a potential book idea). He stands apart from anyone else I know, defying stereotypes to create a new American archetype. Now I’m sure there’s plenty of people like him out there. However, cloistered away as I am in California I have no contact with such people, and thus am only spoon-fed regional and classist generalizations and biases. People are never as simple as other people would have you believe – or even as their actions and beliefs would have you believe, which is why I am a firm believer in the infinite complexities of humanity, but I digress.
What I mean by this is that Jason isbell is an American anomaly. Due to the nature of our times we’ve been convinced that there are only two types of people – Republicans and Democrats, and that within those confinements there is no wiggle room, no grey area, no acceptance, no overlap, no understanding, and most importantly no agreement. However, Isbell defies this. He’s what I imagine America could have been if World War I and II had never occurred and the worker’s movements and equity based politics of the turn of the century had been given an opportunity to truly flourish and expand.
Jason Isbell reminds me of an American Socialist – only in this alternate reality socialism isn’t a dirty word. It’s a word worn with pride, akin to being patriot or a cowboy, a word that means following America’s creed and extending liberty, freedom, and justice to all people. It’s imagining an America that takes pleasure and pride in extending the good life to all of its members, to doing something truly transcendent and leading the world into a brighter future, showing everyone else that it is possible to do the impossible, finally building Winthrop’s city on the hilltop, and being an example of what mankind is capable of when it truly seeks to embody positive change and solidarity with one another.
This is the archetype Isbell represents. He embodies the rugged individualism that makes Americans so unique, and yet he also represents the underlying empathy and solidarity that this country was built upon. He shows that its possible for the two to coexist, but more importantly, he shows that American values, when removed of politics, power, and greed, are not really in conflict with one another, but rather intertwined and supportive of one another, and that the conflict we perceive, just like everything else, is nothing but an illusion created by those who benefit from its existence. Much of America’s past horrors and current downward spiral has been birthed of divorcing these values from each other, of forgetting that individuals are inseparable from, and therefore only as strong the collective whole – that life is not a zero sum game and that words only mean something if they actually coexist with genuine thought, action, and feeling.
