Almost all popular culture is dedicated to Denial. Nothing new there. Only now, instead of pretending problems don’t exist, pop culture pretends to have solved them, offering ethnically diverse superheroes as a feeble coping mechanism for a society plagued by resurgent racism (to name just one example). If old-style escapist pop could be likened to tooth-rotting candy, current trends have brought commercial entertainment one step closer to the business model of illegal narcotics. Not just an empty distraction from bitter realities, but a dangerously seductive, addictively illusory ethos.
Some sense of that uncomfortable proximity can be felt throughout This Mess We’re In, singer-songwriter Arlo McKinley’s recent album. Throughout the record, McKinley’s resistance to country music conventions is inextricably tied to his real-life struggles with opioid addiction. Blending country, folk and rock (with soul and gospel influences always conscientiously balanced), McKinley, a Cincinnati native, sings with a cracked twang and an addict’s wariness of what false notes – the ingratiating, death’s-head friendliness of the dope dealer – can lead to.
Ironically, perhaps the album’s most stirring cri de coeur is “Where You Want Me”, the song that sounds most like a hit on country radio, or so McKinley’s associates say. Backed by an undissuaded fiddle, McKinley showcases expansive affinities (“friends out west…girls down south…families north…boys back east, they wonder which way I will go”) while pledging allegiance to love, “Darling, you got me where you want me now.” This slow-dance tune doubles as a declaration of fidelity to an all-demanding personal Muse.
McKinley’s burned-man’s determination to elude the dogged grasp of fakeness isn’t merely ornery; it’s what grants his music emotional distinction. It mirrors what some of us feel as we try to break free of the disgraced ideologies that led us to “this mess we’re in” in America, without a clear path forward. And it infuses shopworn pop entreaties with fresh political feeling and meaning, as in “Dancing Days” (“I just want to need somebody/I just want to leave my name”) and “Here’s to the Dying” (“Trying to find/Somewhere solid to stand”).
This Mess We’re In is good enough to make me want to revive the nearly discredited notion of American unity.