The New OK by Drive-By Truckers

Album: The New OK (2020)

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Songfacts®:

This is the title track to The New OK, an album released on October 2, 2020, just eight months after The Unraveling. The record mainly comprises songs recorded during the sessions for that project at Memphis' Sun Studios in Fall 2018. This is one of two new tracks written by Truckers co-founder Patterson Hood during the 2020 summer; "Watching the Orange Clouds" is the other.
The Drive-By Truckers only began discussing dropping another album in early August 2020. They recorded the two new songs remotely.
Hood wrote the song after attending a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in his home city of Portland on July 25, 2020. The killing of unarmed African American George Floyd by a white policeman sparked the marches, rallies and other demonstrations.
Okey-dokey for a broken fool
A new hand sign for your twisted ways
It's the new OK

Hood titled the song after the OK hand sign appropriated by White Supremacists.
The video features over five minutes of actual footage shot at peaceful protests in Portland throughout the summer of 2020. Before the music starts, the clip is prefaced by a statement from Hood saying,
"As I walked home, I couldn't help but notice the people who were walking in the other direction. They seemed to have a very different intent than the people I had been marching with all evening. I could hear the sounds of teargas canisters being launched against the protesters and a very different scene starting to take place... The New OK is not okay."

The Truckers released a similar video for their 2016 track "Surrender Under Protest," which also contains clips from Black Lives Matter protests in Portland.
It's summer in Portland and everything's fine
Black Lives Matter holding up the line
We've got mommy's and vets, taking fire
From the cops on the beat, and the occupiers

Uncut magazine asked Patterson Hood about the federal occupation of Portland that he details on "The New OK." He replied: "I wrote that song in August, the week after spending about six hours on the streets with thousands of protesters. I walked home just before midnight and could hear the feds launching their attack. Tear gassing those still on the streets. It got pretty ugly that night. I got so depressed that week. Darker than I probably been in nearly 30 years. Soul-crushing depression. I wrote 'The New OK' as I was trying to claw myself out of that."

Comments: 1

Outcasted from Dirty SouthThe OK sign was not appropriated by white supremacists nor is there any evidence of such. Even if it was, white supremacists are one of the smallest groupings in America as most whites are against such things (probably even Portlanders who look down on EVERYBODY). They probably make up the smallest minority group of all, even evidenced at the Charlottesville riot where out of 30 million plus Americans, only a couple hundred (or less) such people showed up to possibly promote white supremacy. You will easily meet many people who use the OK symbol to simply mean "OK" than you will meet someone using a white supremacist symbol. You will more easily find symbols of black power (Marxist fist) than you will white power. These tidbits of info are highly biased and easily accessible without a shred of fairness to them.

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