The Wilkinsons – “Nobody Died”
This is what a nostalgic song should sound like. No young pretty-boys waxing poetic about some imagined things that never happened a lot more recently than they realize, but a veteran trio starkly examining a past that is believable precisely because of its resemblance to the present. In this single, the children and parents of the present are not radically different from those of the past, but the world has gotten a lot meaner. In the past, everybody made mistakes, but “nobody died.” In an age when the news seems saturated with tragedies involving young people, this is a timely and compelling release.
Listen: The Wilkinsons – “Nobody Died”
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May 7, 2007 at 9:02 am Permalink
I don’t think this is representative of their strongest material, but definitely worth a listen.
May 17, 2007 at 7:58 pm Permalink
I feel that this is one of the best songs they have recorded since they debuted. Fast Car was a great cover, and Leavin’ Song was a very good song, but this one just hits the feel of their original material. I love it and hope it gets them the attention they deserve.
April 27, 2008 at 6:34 pm Permalink
I thought the song was absolutely fantastic. I always love it when country singers sing about real life issues and how they compare the past and the present. They can really allow people to picture what it was like and what the only difference is, and that is that nobody died. They really send out a message that we want to get back to that stage when nobody died.
April 27, 2008 at 8:30 pm Permalink
Its nice to hear a song that admits that things weren’t perfect “back when I went to school,” and its nice that the song recognizes that kids back then weren’t perfect angels, either.
But I object to the “nobody died” part of the lyrics. First of all, that is literally wrong. Kids have been dying at a young age for quite some time, and often because of their own irresponsibility. Problems such as teenage drunken driving are not new.
What’s especially troublesome to me is this couplet:
“How’d we get from there to here/From Shakespeare and Math and Science/To shots ringin’ in our ears”
1) Kids are studying Shakespeare (I use Shakespeare as a metaphor for literature in general) and Math far more today than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The high school graduation rate is higher today than in the 1940s and 1950s, and far more students in the 1940s and 1950s and even 1960s took watered down courses such as “Life Skills” than today. This is not to claim that our education system is great; there is much wrong with it.
2) The idea that today we have “shots ringin’ in our ears.” Gun violence remains a serious problem, but it is not a new problem. Murders are up in some areas, down in others, over the last thirty years. School shootings, tragic as they are, remain the exception, not the norm. In fact, college campuses tend to feature far less violent and non-violent crime than society at large. In other words, schools (at least college and above) are some of the safest places in society.
This paints an overly-rosy picture of the past and an overly negative picture of the present.
Finally, if the best that a nostalgic song can say for the past was that at least “nobody died,” it is selling a very strange kind of nostalgia indeed.
July 27, 2008 at 5:57 pm Permalink
I’m shocked to see thing song being reviewed on here. Sure it has some good lyrical truths to it, but the melody and overall feel is just boring and borderline awful. After hearing it once, you just don’t want to hear it again. This is a far cry from their first (and only) big single “26 Cents”, which actually had some redeeming qualities.
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