Old Crow Medicine Show cringeworthy song “Revolution Now”

I’ve never posted here, but I gotta bring attention to the new slop OCMS is putting out. Other than some songs on Remedy (2014), they haven’t put out anything interesting since Willy Watson left. I still check out their albums on release, though, and I was excited when I saw the title of their new album “Union Made”. I became even more excited when I saw a song titled “Revolution Now”; was I in for some modern folk revolution music?

Unfortunately, no. Just more uninspired slop performed by a band that has clearly no understanding of their musical inspirations or their regional history (or honestly even what a union is, it seems).

In the song, they call for “revolution right now”, but they clearly don’t have a fucking clue what that means, based on some other lyrics: one line, “Between extremes is where I walk the line”, is a denouncement of openly communist greats like Seger and Guthrie, but alone could be forgiven as the result of red scare propaganda and pathetic ignorance of history; another line, “Don’t know the path to go, is it left or right” shows that we are not just listening to the uninspired ramblings of an adult with the mind of a middle schooler, we are listening to the whines and ego stroking of a maliciously ignorant man who would like us to believe that there is valor in being so stupid as to not know which path, left or right, would lead to a better society.

I’m genuinely interested in hearing what their imagined revolution would look like; my best guess would be something akin to one of the ineffective, decentralized “revolutions” (like Occupy Wall Street) that Vincent Bevins analyzes in his recent book “If We Burn”. Real pathetic shit.