#84, “Great, America (2017),” Shovels & Rope (2017)

150 Favorite Songs, #84, “Great, America (2017),” Shovels & Rope (2017)

One of the myths you could find people comforting themselves with in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election was that, in the face of a frightening and repressive administration, music was going to get really good. It’s a comforting idea, even if that comfort is a bit cold—that great art is a miniature rebellion, and so when the institutions that govern us need to be rebelled against, artists will rise up to meet the moment.

I never found that myth particularly compelling, for a few reasons. One of them was that so much the art that came out of the relative calm of the Obama years was already such powerful work of exploratory protest—I think most artists need some degree of peace in order to imagine how the world can be different, and to reflect on the intersection of the political and the personal that defines the most affecting protest music. We got To Pimp A Butterfly and Lemonade in 2015 and 2016. Did we really need some new anthem about how Donald Trump sucks? Was that going to be affirming for those suffering under the Muslim ban, or for families separated at the border? Would that feel like progress?

There was plenty of great music that came out after 2016, of course, but I never did hear the epic protest anthem that felt like spitting in the face of everything that felt so upsetting about living through those years*. But “Great, America (2017)” by Shovels & Rope, which came out right at the end of that first year, did an impressive job of capturing the chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety of that time. It’s not a protest song—chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety can be such overwhelming feelings that rising beyond them to defiance isn’t always possible—but it really did an amazing job of encapsulating what 2017 felt like to live through.

The song is built off the simplest acoustic guitar riff, just two notes strummed at a frenetic pace, like your pulse when you’re busy worrying what the future will look like. It’s filled out with occasional bursts of percussion and discordant, almost random piano notes interspersed throughout. And the duo who comprise Shovels & Rope, which is not a band I know a whole lot about or think about very much, sing together with a tremble in their voices that feels very earned, not an affectation but the way we all sort of sounded in 2017. Lyrically, it’s full of references to the circumstances of 2017, artfully rendered. ”There’s a hurricane swinging at a lowly shack,” they sing in the first verse, which could be a metaphor except that 2017 was also the year of Hurricane Harvey; “there’s a dog with a nuclear bomb in its mouth” felt about right; so does “everybody’s scared, everybody’s inspired / the world is underwater, it’s also on fire,” which captures the terrifying contradictions of that time better than most I can think of.

The years since 2017 didn’t get more normal. 2020 might have been the high-water mark for unusual years, but you could sing about the chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety of contemporary life at any point in the last seven years, and—even though it’s only April—I’m confident to say that of 2024, as well. I think what makes “Great, America” such a powerful song is that it doesn’t get bogged down in details. It’s coming from a place of conviction and moral authority—it doesn’t pretend that the issue is simply that we don’t all come together or whatever, and it identifies both heroes (“a brave man takes a stand by dropping to his knee”) and villains (“it says ‘go back home’ on your welcome mat”)—but it’s not preachy or self-righteous. Instead, it really is about the feeling of being here, in that time, and acknowledging the tremble in our own voices.

I haven’t made a lot of time for this band, but I found two and a half minutes for this one many times in 2018, and beyond, and it still sounds like the way it feels around here. I wish it didn’t.

*(The closest I came to finding it, I think, was the border wall protest song “If You Build It, We’ll Break It” by the El Paso all-star team of The Chamanas, Jim Ward, and Kiko Rodriguez, a combo last seen here.)