Here’s what I have to say about irony: I think it’s important. It animates nearly all of Plato and Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, huge swaths of the Bible, most of the really heart-stopping parts of Shakespeare, and innumerable strands of modern literature. It has given artists the ability to create characters that comment upon their own worlds in genuine ways, characters that are more than phony replicas of the author’s perspective. It has given intellectuals the breathing room to hold their own ideas up to challenge, and it has given us all the tools to understand other people with other worldviews, to be able to grudgingly love a world in which terrible things happen constantly, and, maybe most importantly, to not take ourselves so fucking seriously all the time. A world without irony would be joyless, cruel, oppressive and brutally boring. It would look a lot like the Middle Ages, and you would probably be a peasant. This capacity for irony is one of our most graceful qualities and unfortunately we’ve diminished it terribly with overuse and lazy thought, turned it into a shabby little synonym for ‘sarcasm’ or ‘insincerity’. Worse, we’ve been told by lots of people in politics and the media that certain, exceptionally tragic events require that we adopt a new cultural demeanor of “seriousness” and discard irony in the 20th Century dust-heap along with things like blow jobs and the Welfare State. Now, while detachment and cynicism and lack of seriousness may be grave problems in our culture, they are not the fault of irony, properly understood. And I’d like to hold Will Oldham up as an example of what I mean.
Throughout his career, Oldham has been accused of the kind of irony that really means ‘insincerity’. It has been said that his lyrics are a put-on and that he hides behind his various aliases (Bonnie Prince Billy, Palace Music, Push,) while expressing nothing of himself in what he sings. The reasons for this are that his records—particularly early on—were enigmatic and obscure: he referenced the Bible in extremely un-modern ways; he assumed a folk-hermit guise and a country tradition that just seemed wrong for a child of the 90’s Louisville post-rock scene; he spun little riddles in an archaic-sounding vernacular; he made a lot of strange jokes about animals and sex. And his work is indeed ironic in attitude, but it’s also incredibly honest in the way that only that attitude can evoke. For example, in 1999 he released a record called I See A Darkness. It is a terrifying and beyond-gorgeous look into the faces of loneliness and insanity and death and many people consider it his masterpiece. He followed that up in 2001 with Ease Down the Road, a hysterically bawdy dose of sing-songy, pastoral folk. This is the hallmark of genuine ironic sensibility: it recognizes that the world can be horrifying and tragic, and its response is to create a character who expresses that horror as well as the irreverence and joy that are essential to survive within it.
Superwolf, Oldham’s latest record, a collaboration with former Chavez and Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney, is one of the finest records Will Oldham has ever made under any alias. It is joyful and angry, brooding and raucous, and is the most dynamic of his records to date. One of Oldham’s strengths has always been the sparse simplicity of his musical arrangements, but it is unbelievably rewarding to hear him collaborate with an instrumentalist like Matt Sweeney who matches his lyricism and playful intensity every step of the way. The songs, accompanied by whispery, far-off drums and the occasional organ, are structured entirely by the two men’s delicate voices and Sweeney’s moody, intricate guitar figures. The tone shifts easily from sparse minimalism to ballsy swagger, from near-silence, barely adorned by delicate finger-picking, to wild, roaring crescendos. Songs begin as tiny shreds of tone and melody, gain texture and grow fierce until even their prettiest phrases bristle with tension and menace.
And this makes perfect sense, this friction between dread and joy that comes through in every note of this record; it accords perfectly with what Oldham conveys lyrically. Superwolf is an unbearably moving homage to devotion and grace and possibly his most direct statement of the erotic-religious ethos that he has articulated throughout his career. Running throughout the album is a sense of boundless hope in the transformative and transcendent power of love, coupled with a chastened understanding of our own prodigal nature. Love and God are interchangeable in Bonnie Billy’s universe, each acting as the source of revelation and redemption: our bodies are conduits to the natural world, and the natural world is the source of divine revelation. On “Only Someone Running”, Oldham sings: “I sing evil I sing good, I sing as a seagull should /and if you melted I would melt myself all into you all/ can you love the one that God does/ can you love the lily of the field/ can you tend the soil inside of her, till all has been revealed?” Oldham tends to describe the transfiguration that one undergoes while in the throes of erotic grace in animalistic terms. On “Beast for Thee,” an unthinkably gorgeous ballad, the protagonist/lover assumes the form of a servile donkey; on “Lift Us Up”, the mythical Superwolf is formed when two lovers transcend their human forms and face God; in the mournful “Rudy Foolish”, the narrator’s lover takes the shape of a “panther-girl”, and it is this revelation that confirms her immortality.
Lurking on the other side of this hope for immortality is, of course, death. What gives that sense of hope and all those offerings of love any meaning is the awareness of mortality that runs through every song on this record. This is what I mean when I call Will Oldham’s music ‘honest’. He knows we are prodigal and wicked and that all the love in the world may not be enough to redeem us after all. Each act of love, each grasp at transcendence, is a leap of faith, a gift given knowing it might be rejected, and that such a rejection means nothing but death. In “I Gave You”, Bonnie Billy sings “I gave you a tree and you did not embrace it/I gave you a nightmare and you didn’t chase it/I gave you a dream and you only wake from it/now I’ll never go to sleep again…and now you have vanished into the air, the air in which I must live.” Joy and hope in the face of death is the real, pithy essence of irony, and I think it’s why I find this record so moving, a thousand times more moving and true—that’s the word, true—than all the self-pitying, “sincere” stuff we’re saddled with on a daily basis. If that’s sincerity, if that’s seriousness, then fuck those things, you can keep them. I’ll take enigma and riddle and irony, because when I listen to this, I hear something wrenching and joyful and honest and true. |