RAMBLE ON: "wait in the truck" by HARDY ft. Lainey Wilson

Okay, so here’s my issue: Killing people is weird. I mean, yes, I know it’s wrong, that’s the main thing, but also, it’s weird, right? Have you ever thought about that? How weird killing people is? Most people don’t do that! I just did a Google search and the first site I read said that probably only about 48 people in a million have ever killed someone. That’s 0.000048 percent! Not a lot of people! This all goes to support my theory that murderers, for the most part, are just, like, total weirdos. Like, what the fuck.

Anyway, Hardy is part of the newer breed of country singers (he goes by a very-untraditional-for-country single name and he releases “mixtapes” that he calls “Hixtapes”), he likes trap beats and nu-metal (he does a pretty straight cover of “Blurry” by Puddle of Mudd), and if you’re not into modern country you might know him from his viral terrible performance at WrestleMania (these live sporting events, man, technical problems everywhere). Lainey Wilson is also new, her thing is that she dresses like Janis Joplin and if you’re not into modern country, you might know her song “Heart Like a Truck” from those Dodge Ram commercials. (She’s going to be associated with the word “truck” for a long time.) Their duet, “Wait in the Truck,” was a big hit country last year through this year. It seems to be a critical success too; Billboard listed it as one of the best singles of 2022. If you like your country music darker, then this cold tale of a man committing, maybe not justifiable but at least understandable homicide will probably do it for you. It certainly has for a lot of people. I think most people liked the narrative because they were either effectively chilled by the act of violence, or felt that justice was done. I mostly just get confused.

The story of the song is, Hardy is driving down the highway (in a truck, of course) when he sees a battered woman on the side of the road. She doesn’t really explain, but what happened is obvious. Hardy asks who did this to her and where he is. He drives to the abuser’s house (“Wait in the truck,” he tells her), bursts through the door, shoots the man dead, and then calmly waits to be taken to jail so that he can be punished for his crimes. In the final verse, he concedes that he might spend the rest of his life behind bars, but hey, the guy had it comin’. He rescued this poor woman and maybe what he did was wrong but it’s not that wrong.

You can attack the song for its medieval logic. After all, killing is wrong, vigilante justice is wrong, and even if we understand the violence this man committed to be brutal and horrifying, meeting abuse with murder is not a case where the punishment fits the crime. On some level the song knows this; “I don’t know if he’s an angel… because angels don’t do what he did,” sings Lainey. “Have mercy on me, lord,” wails a gospel choir in the outro. You can’t say that this song has no moral judgment on murder; our protagonist knows what he did and he willingly accepts his punishment. That’s a lot more than you can say for, say, “Coward of the County” where the title character avenges his wife’s gang-rape and it’s treated as a pure unalloyed act of righteousness, or for “Goodbye Earl,” which gets most of its charge from its blithe refusal to carry any moral weight whatsoever. This is simply not a thing we have to consider in country music. You can also criticize it for its patriarchal framing; the title line is a man telling his damsel in distress to sit pretty while he slays the monster. At no point does the woman have a lot of agency, at no point does he ask her what she wants or needs; her only role is to be grateful for her savior’s heroism. And of course, real life does not work like this; freeing a battered woman does not necessarily solve the problems that put her in that situation, and considering the way her life is tied to her abuser’s, there could be plenty of unforeseen consequences to her; there is no guarantee that her situation has improved.

Those criticisms are all boring to me. I guess they’re all true, but I don’t like to judge songs on whether they match my values. The best point to be made is that these criticisms are boring because the song is boring; it doesn’t really have a lot of perspective or try something particularly new. But if it were simply a matter of not reinventing the wheel, then it should still work; country music is all about tradition, after all. No, my biggest problem is: Huh? So he just decides to go find the dude and kill him? What? To me, this is not a logical progression of the story.

My problem is that killing a stranger on behalf of another stranger just strikes me as odd. I don’t understand his motivation. He doesn’t know this woman. He doesn’t know this man. He doesn’t have any backstory of his own. He doesn’t seem to have any feelings about the situation either before or after, he expresses no concern, no outrage, no sympathy, no painful memories triggered. He just takes it as given that a man who would do this to a woman deserves to be dead, and makes it so.

If I had to guess what inspired this song, I’d say probably Sling Blade, a movie about a backwoods simpleton who – spoilers here for a thirty-year-old movie – kills an abuser to save a mother and child he’s grown to love. He does it in cold blood and without remorse; his simplicity grants him the clarity to see what has to be done, the courage to do it and the strength to bear the consequences. Or, perhaps “courage” and “strength” aren’t the words. When Billy Bob Thornton’s Karl kills, it isn’t brave, because he has no moral compunctions about it. He has enough empathy to want to save this woman and her son, but he lacks the civilizing aspects of society that would stop him from killing; he’s done it before, he’s okay with it. And he was on the fringes of society anyway so returning to institutionalization causes him little harm; he knows what’s waiting for him and maybe it’s not the greatest situation in the world but it’s fine. The loss for him is small. My point is, his decision makes sense to him, and the movie walks us through every step of Karl’s cold, deadly logic.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what the deal is for Hardy’s character and his response doesn’t make any sense to me. Killing the abuser in this situation is just not something people do. It only makes sense if either the sight of this abuse victim causes him so much pain that he has to take matters into his own hands. But it doesn’t seem to be a hot-blooded crime of passion. Lainey sings “he was hellbent to find the man behind all the whiskey scars I hid,” but Hardy sure doesn’t seem hellbent. He seems more sympathetic to Lainey than outraged, and he stays calm and composed as both a character and a narrator when the deed is done. Even in the music video, where the act of murder gets more complicated than it does in the song, Hardy doesn’t seem especially angry. The act seems entirely cold-blooded, which makes Hardy a fucking freak with no place in a civilized world. And the song apparently just doesn’t see him that way, the guy described seems fairly normal, he’s functional enough to be driving a truck and have places to go, he has enough emotional intelligence to not ask this poor beaten woman too many questions. He’s just a normal guy! I don’t get it!

And so this song just doesn’t work for me. Hardy and Lainey wail “Have mercy, have mercy, have mercy on me, lord” with the backing of a gospel choir and I don’t buy it. This is not a song with any moral weight because they do not otherwise have any guilt; it rings hollow. Hardy’s victim had no humanity; Hardy says bluntly that that guy’s burning in hell where he belongs, and the woman he saved is doing fine now because of his actions, so I don’t know why he’s asking God for mercy. Hardy didn’t make a rash decision, he made the right call, with the only negative consequence being the loss of his personal freedom. He’s a martyr, if anything. So fuck off with this “I don’t know if he’s an angel, ‘cuz angels don’t do what he did” shit, clearly he is and clearly they do. The nod to morality feels entirely obligatory, and I much prefer “Goodbye Earl”’s decision to not pretend they even remotely give a shit. It’s like they feel like the killing won’t matter if they don’t make a nod to Christian piety, but it only makes the song’s weightlessness stand out even more.