By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

Come on you troubadours, you modern psalmists. It’s time to sing.

Sometimes the events of the day make such little sense, or are so filled with evil, more rhetoric brings little understanding. Sometimes we need art.

Although nothing in the song specifically references last weekend’s white-supremacist rally and ensuing violence in Charlottesville, Va., Wilco’s “All Lives, You Say?” was released this week in direct response to the fear and hatred that was on display in that city. Proceeds from sales of the song are being donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“All Lives, You Say?” pointedly recalls Wilco’s earliest Americana days, as well as lead singer Jeff Tweedy’s previous band, Uncle Tupelo, with its lilting country shuffle, twangy atmosphere, and melancholy melody. It also offers up a sentiment that, at times, feels pretty biblical.

All lives, all lives, you say?

I can see you are afraid

Your skin is so thin

Your heart has escaped

All lives, all lives, you say

Tweedy presents his rebuke with a mumbled tone of resignation, but it cuts nonetheless. That phrase, “all lives matter,” despite its underlying truthfulness, arose in repudiation of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in that context is a cop-out. There’s an implied “too” at the end of “black lives matter,” but too many can’t hear it. We need to be reminded that black lives matter and we need to say with our own mouths that black lives matter, because far too often the available evidence suggests that they do not.

In a few short, prophetic lines, Tweedy nails the festering insecurity, the fear of a loss of privilege, and the desire to equivocate that lies at the heart of outright racism and that too-often simmers between the syllables of a phrase like “all lives matter.” He calls it out for the heartless cancer that it is, even while humanizing those who say it. It’s a subtle bit of brilliance that convicts and challenges.

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