My 31st Favorite Song of All-Time

is:

“This Train” by the Indigo Girls

“This Train Revised” by the Indigo Girls is an absolute masterpiece of music, literature, and culture.  In order to fully grasp the gravity of the song, first you must become familiar with “This Train”, a traditional American spiritual song that the Indigos are “revising”.  The Girls’ version takes the spiritual song to Hitler’s Holocaust, where a train is not just a train; it is a train packed with human bodies on their way to extermination camps.  Another way of seeing this train ride, in the eyes of the Indigo Girls, is “this train is bound for glory”; Dachau may not seem like “glory” to many, but considering the very few ways that the trip could end, one can’t help but see their meaning.

The song is laden with lyrical flourishes that don’t so much excite the listener as they effectively compound the vicarious misery an empathetic observer must feel anytime we aggressively confront the Holocaust.  From the simple list of the various “types” of people who were lost in the Holocaust and the human toll their loss incurred (“here is a dancer/ who has no legs/ here is a teacher/ who has no face”) to the more complex image of how the camp “doctor” covers “our eyes with clear blue skies”, the Indigo Girls attack the Holocaust head-on, but in a fashion I’ve never seen before. 

This all comes to a thematic head when the Girls compare the countless dead bodies of the emaciated exterminated to “answers, stacked like wood”.  Finally, in the ultimate analysis, the only way for us to comprehend what happened in those places is to remove the dead from their humanity, just as their tormenters did.  That many bodies “stacked”  (here we’ll assume most of us have seen enough of the gruesome photographic evidence of the concentration camps that we have a basic, accurate picture in our minds of what the mass graves actually looked like) is incomprehensible; cords of wood, however, we can at least begin to grasp.  “Here are the questions.  Here are the answers, stacked like wood,” the Indigo Girls tell us, leaving us, essentially, where we began when contemplating the Holocaust:  it is all nonsense, and any answers are not come by easily.

(unfortunately, the only video of this song on YouTube has some political messages attached, but I’m not sure I disagree with them)

It’s a fish white belly lump in the throat razor on the wire skin and bone piss and blood in a railroad car 100 people gypsies queers and David’s star this train is bound for glory measure the bones count the face pull out the teeth do you belong to the human race doctor doctor are you unkind do you shock the monkeys cover our eyes with clear blue skies this train is bound for glory here is a dancer who has no legs here is a teacher who has no face here is a runner who has no feet here is a healer who has no hands here is a builder who has no back here is a thinker who has no head here is a writer who has no voice these are the questions these are the answers stacked like wood this train is bound for glory these are the questions stacked like wood these are the answers here is potential gone for good