Jellyroll's Politics

There's a whole huge third class of people who are being ignored

I’m not a big fan of the Daily, the New York Times’ podcast. Too dry! Too pretentious! Not critical enough, IMO (drop better recommendations below if you’ve got em).

But I had a long drive recently, and I was bored, so I tuned into an interview they did with the hip-hop-country crossover star Jellyroll, who comes from rural Tennessee and spent half a decade of his early life in juvenile detention and prison.

Not to be too annoying for anyone who already knows this, but Jellyroll has become very famous and beloved A. for his beautiful and relatable poetry, and B. for his Cinderella story (he struggled with addiction) before becoming a musical sensation. He comes from a town in Tennessee that is sorta JD Vance-Hillbilly Elegy kind place, but for him it’s not an act at all. He’s extremely credible as someone who struggled. In the interview, they talk about how his wife was just recently able to quit working as a sex worker.

It was weird to hear Jellyroll interviewed by the New York Times guy, David Marchese, is his name. This is going to make me sound conservative, but it really was sorta this culture clash, of this guy who was very well educated (Marchese’s bio says studied journalism in the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University) and from a different class and worldview interviewing this other guy who had this completely different life and upbringing.

Marchese asking Jellyroll about his face tattoos in his whole Oxford comma King’s English — both guys, you can tell, feel awkward. But of course, Jellyroll was very charismatic and down to earth and came off well.

There was one part of the interview that was especially painful. Marchese sort of pressured Jellyroll to describe his politics and, I think, sort of weigh in on Trump and presidential politics. Marchese seemed to be unsatisfied with it, but Jellyroll basically said he didn’t care and doesn’t vote and wouldn’t vote even if he had the right to (he doesn’t because he’s a felon). In fact, Jellyroll, sort of mocked Marchese for even believing his vote would matter. Like he couldn’t believe how gullible he was.

And Marchese, you could tell, was horrified by this response from Jellyroll. I imagine he wanted him to say like he voted Democrat and all the working class white guys from forgotten places should rise up against Trump, IDK what he expected. Probably if he wasn’t world famous and the contrast wasn’t so obvious, Marchese woulda just dismissed him as a dummy or a bad person or something.

I used to be sorta like Marchese myself. I’m making some assumptions here, but I kinda know one when I see one: a true believer. I used to ride the bus around Cleveland trying to register people to vote. That was back in the Obama days, when everything made a little more sense for me.

And all the time on the bus people would say to me, “oh you don’t really believe that matters, do you?” It was frustrating. But I think back on that now, and I think differently about it.

I think those folks — many of the folks riding Cleveland’s transit are very, very, very poor — had learned the lesson that nobody in power cared about them the hard way. They came by it honestly.

I think for people who are really immersed in to partisan politics, it’s just a totally different mindset. It’s this really straightforward struggle between Good and Evil. Many of those people, if they’re a little privileged like Marchese — I’m generalizing here but he’s not really the point, anyway — maybe they always had a reasonable expectation that government agencies and powerful people would basically work for them. And they were mostly right about that; their life experience bore that out. They feel confident their voice would be heard and respected and that they would be treated fairly.

And some people, like Jellyroll who spent time as a teenager in prison, just had a wildly different experience with authority figures and institutions and government power.

I used to be more like Marchese, and by that I just mean in my worldview. My background is still more like his.

But I’ve come, in the last few years, to identify more and more with people like Jellyroll, who just feel disgusted by the whole thing. Because we have this two-party system, everything gets treated as being binary. But we have a whole third class of people who are just disengaged from politics. And if they were to vote, they would carry the day: people who aren’t enamored with either Democrats or Republicans.

I raised some complaints about the Democratic Party during the pandemic and a lot of people kinda turned to me and said “well, you’re conservative.” But that’s not really accurate. What happened is I went from being more of a Democrat kinda person, to a little more in Jellyroll’s category, relating more to the third kind of person.

I think the tendency for guys like Marchese, someone a little more privileged, like me on the bus back in the day, is to look down on people like Jellyroll. Like he’s too stupid to know what’s best for him. And those people would look back at me and just couldn’t believe I had faith in this system that had failed them.

One thing that changed my view a little bit was a scandal called HB6 In Ohio a few years back. Many of the leaders of the Ohio Republican Party from that period of about a decade ago, when I was registering voters, now in prison or have committed suicide (at least two of them) following an enormous racketeering/bribery scandal. They accepted $60 million in bribes from First Energy to gouge Ohio ratepayers on our energy bills. I never liked any of them, but I truly did not imagine they were that horrible until the FBI swooped in and saved the day. It’s nuts.

People on the bus used to say things to me like “they’re all crooks,” and after HB6 I realized, those guys sorta had a point.

Now some people will say, “yeah but that’s Republicans.” Like a Democrat from New Jersey didn’t just get caught with gold bars in his closet, part of a corruption scheme involving the government of Egypt.

Another experience that really changed by worldview a little bit is my experience during the pandemic with Cleveland public schools. Keeping the urban public schools closed for months longer than the suburban schools, 3-9 months in the case of the Cleveland metro region. The way that was justified, or outright ignored by influential people, I will never forget that. We could all see the suburban schools and the catholic schools functioning fine while ours remained closed. And as much as they tried to rationalize it, I am not stupid. I have heard all the rationalizations and they are embarrassing. It was a disgrace. The district — and every urban school district in the country — is still reeling, and nobody seems to be able to get very worked up about it. It’s telling. We’re kinda fine with these schools failing the vulnerable kids and communities they serve year after year.

Before someone says I’m BOTH SIDESING — mortal sin of Twitter — I still like Democrats more on balance. I agree with what they say for the most part. I’m rooting for Kamala. But I also can’t see eye to eye with the people who are fangirling Tim Walz either (and maybe he really is a great guy, I hope so). I’ve always liked Kamala. Waaaaay back in 2020, she was my top pick in the primary (lol! and every time I said anything positive about her on Twitter some person would like yell WHY DO YOU HATE TRANS PEOPLE?!, I’m not exaggerating.)

While I like Kamala, I think I’m like a lot of Americans where I don’t 100% trust her either. She comes from the Bay Area and I’ve been watching their politics for a while and it’s insane. The biggest debate in politics there is whether they should allow houses to be built so tens of thousands of people won’t be homeless. It’s so stupid and they’re constantly at each other’s throats about it.

Even Nick Christoff is like “uh hey guys, reality check here?” I genuinely like Kamala as a person. I like that she has a wide easy smile. That being said, it would make me feel a lot better if she would promise she’s not going to ban algebra, like they did in the San Francisco public school system.

I don’t know if really trust her/Democrats to do anything about the issues that matter most to me: Things like childcare. I knocked doors and registered voters in many past elections hoping things like that would happen. It’s just been too many years of promises without progress.

In some ways, things are getting worse on that front. As my kids graduated out of daycare into K-12 schools, those started collapsing also. Nobody has a solution for school districts like Rochester and Columbus and Seattle, which are going to have to close, combined, literally dozens of schools.

I was just down in Kentucky for a work thing. And I was just blown away about how down-to-earth and friendly people are in the state. We carry these stereotypes of what people are like, and they just aren’t that accurate. The truth is more complicated. Morality is more complicated. Not everyone fits into these two weirdo boxes. A lot of people aren’t very well served by it.

I like ordinary people more than I like either political party. And they are right to be upset sometimes. And disengagement from the whole thing, is its own kind of response to failure and hypocrisy.

I’m not saying, people shouldn’t vote, of course. I just think the standard response, which is sort of lecture-y and holier-than-thou, pleading with people to vote, is a poor excuse for engaging with why people lost faith/tuned out in the first place.

Basically, I think Marchese has more to learn from Jellyroll than vice versa.