Monday Music: The Banality of Execution
A New Country Song Pretends at Depth, but Ignores the Important Questions
Thomas Rhett says his visit to a Tennessee prison was a life-changing experience. So he wrote a song about.
“Death Row” purports to tell a tale about redemption, set atop a strummed guitar and anodyne country production. Rhett, who visited death row with fellow musicians Tyler Hubbard and Russell Dickerson in 2019 to “minister” to the condemned, says the song is about redemption and forgiveness, that his eyes were opened and he learned these men were not monsters. They were men. Like Rhett himself.
The song, however, is not about the incarcerated who await death. Yes, the are there, but they serve more as plot device, symbols whose main purpose is to teach the singer about the fragility of life.
The singer and the condemned talk hunting and fishing, “Like I do with boys back home,” and Jesus, forgiveness, and heaven. “I learned a lot 'bout livin' from them boys down on death row.”
The song’s focus is the singer, and the singer’s growth. He feels sympathy for these men, but not empathy. And he tacitly accepts capital punishment in his failure to raise any questions.
His lens is a religious one, his concern the soul of these men, and not whether the state should engage in the killing of men convicted of capital crimes.
One inmate sings “Amazing Grace,”
With one hand raised and one foot chained to the ground
Yeah, he sang it like he knew; he'd just been found
Yeah, that next week, they laid him six feet down
He won’t speculate as to whether he’s “in Heaven,” admitting he couldn’t judge, but he leaves it there, in Jesus’ hands, as if the state — as if he, as a part of this state — plays no roll in this man’s death.
The song ultimately ends up an exercise in solipsism, asking nothing of its characters and listeners, neither intellectually nor emotionally, and offering less.