Men Whose Triggers Pull Their Fingers

When Drive-By Truckers released American Band in 2016, the phrase “they’ve always been political” became a refrain among righteous fans. Meanwhile, other longtime “fans” — who clearly never understood the agenda — abandoned the band in droves. We happily bid them and their confederate flags farewell.

Alienating fans on the wrong side of history is a proud tradition that DBT shares with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and — remarkably — Rage Against the Machine, which routinely has to weed out fans for whom the band name is too subtle. (In 2022, Tom Morello posted on X: “if you’re a white supremacist or a proto-fascist, that music isn’t written for you — it’s written against you.”)