Slogans depend as much upon their timeliness as the content of their assertions. Everything is politics is an unspoken maxim by both left and right precisely as our lenses for understanding politics fail to represent the pathos of ordinary life. Only movements which deal with the most obvious moral imperatives, such as the Fight for 15 and the Poor People’s Campaign, seem to speak for anyone except the pundits.
As a child, it was almost a comforting Thanksgiving ritual to see father’s and uncles’ eternal heated political discussions end in dramatic exits and short-lived promises to never speak again. Everyone comically came off as drunk and not a little foolish. Back then, ideology was a tough-guy means to avoid the family intimacy those occasions are supposed to offer. But the joke subsides as it rises to the level of permanent national discourse. As a Midwesterner, to say nothing in politics speaks to me is not to say I’m reactionary or aggrieved. It’s just that out here, as the wheels of power go on revolving elsewhere, talking about politics is often a way of talking about nothing.
Unfortunately, the Midwest only gets noticed when something funky is brewing politically. You’re set to fail, then, when you come out to understand the people through their politics. The Midwest is a virtual sea of false consciousness. That statement is true—but I hope it’s not taken to be forgiving or condescending. Most importantly, it’s not enlightening. If you want to understand, start paying attention precisely the next time the Dems sweep Congress and eyes are taken off us for a bit. The ebb and flow of partisan attention obscures the reality underneath. Once we’re forgotten is when you can start to see us clearly.
The running joke about Cincinnati’s Wussy is that each of their albums for the past ten years has been their “breakthrough” album. Their Midwest style of country-shoegaze has accumulated fans but the pace is akin to rising ocean levels. The band is a little too alien to mainstream tastes for that final push in superstardom. The band’s two singers and songwriters evoke elements of the alt-rock past familiar enough to enjoy but too jagged to fit neatly into continuity with such noise-forebears as Dinosaur Jr.
Lisa Walker is the more marketable of the pair. Her voice verges on a pastoral Kim Gordon–surely a longtime request of record industry focus groups. In the bands early days, Walker’s lilting warble atop jangly guitar provided the easiest entryway in the band’s oeuvre. But her songs were just as likely to shift into a discordant minor key as ride the sweetness out ‘til the end. “Gone Missing,”[1] from their mid-career eponymous album, epitomizes her approach. She sings the verses in that primal Wussy mingling of longing, ecstasy, and melancholy. Other bands might use that sound to convey nostalgia, but Walker always locates the pain in a five-minutes-ago that’s as eternally now as it is distant—“We met the other day/ On a sinking ship…” And while you always know what she’s singing about, it’s often hard to pin down the literal meaning. Later in the song she sings “Your hollow teeth are tasting my lower lip/ Now my heart is on my sleeve, or what’s left of it.” Listen to the song and, if you’re like me, the indeterminacy of the tattered heart/sleeve melts away into an emotional intensity as concrete as it is ethereal. With that, and her tales of “sad Midwestern Baptist girls,” Walker’s songs don’t fit well into usual indie categories. Nowadays lyrics are either disposable amidst ravishing background music a la Beach House or hyper-granulated in their literality as with most rap.
You can’t really introduce Chuck Cleaver without saying that he just has one of those voices. But it’s not even you have to get over it to enjoy the music. You really have to break down and learn to love it. That sounds like work, which it is, but the rewards are substantial. I guess the word to describe it is “Appalachian.” Even then, a century of mass media conditioning I guess made it hard for even this native Cincinnatian to adjust. On that note, if Cleaver were born a century ago we’d probably be studying his vocal phrasings and recordings in the Anthology of American Folk Music. And, as the song where I finally “got it,” I wouldn’t be surprised if folkie-era Dylan covered a song like “Shunt”[2] from Wussy’s 2005 debut. “I wish my head had a tap/ And I wish my mind had a drain/ So I could shunt my fears away.” The word shunt immediately jars the listener outside the usual artistic treatments of anxiety/depression. That hands-on way of grappling with the blues may reflect Cleaver’s trade as stonemason. His voice is also capable of remarkable tenderness. He sounds like an incorrigible asshole who’s forever falling in love for the first time. His harsh blues (primal and electric) interact with Walker’s sweeter numbers to make the average Wussy album something bigger than either style. Walker/Cleaver are one of the great American songwriting duos because their stylistic back-and-forth carve out serrated regions of the Midwestern psyche inaccessible to sentimental country music or flyover documentaries.
I describe Wussy to friends (with variable success) as a band that writes amazing songs and then pours two tons of noise on top to make it more interesting. That basic commitment to solid songs differentiates them from other rockers whose m.o. is noise pour l’noise. Wussy resists frequent stylistic changes and the impulse to grand statements. Both are key to differentiating one’s self from other bands and making it big. Instead, they’ve quietly created a rich discography that nurtures and grows deeper through time spend alongside it.
Wussy are “blue-collar” (the band members still proudly retain their day jobs), but their weirdness and a look at their plentiful tattoos confirms we’re not dealing with straight-up reps of the deep rural Midwest. Cincinnati has even been named in a recent “study” to be one of the top three hipster cities in America. But it’s important to differentiate the Midwest hipster from his haughtier coastal cousins. It means something different when you’re in an area that’s not a cultural hub. I can’t speak from much firsthand experience, but the hatred poured on coastal hipsters seems partly due to both gleeful appropriation and pretentiousness. There’s also something of the cultural social climber in the archetype of the hipster intellectual. Out in the Midwest, “brain drain” (ignoble term) has sucked many of those types into larger cities and college campuses. Out here amidst the cultural wasteland, hipsterdom seems to me to be more a pursuit of the good life than any cultural prestige. That hipster study ranked Cincy mainly because of the per capita incidence of tattoo parlors. Tattoos are trendy now but even before we were willing to permanently place our bets on what matters. Even the terms aren’t entirely compatible. Bohemianism out here is tinged more with real, crushing poverty than the trust-funded slumming widely purported. And signifiers can be taken differently. Yo La Tengo seems to be popular in Cincy in a slightly over-representative way. Out here, Yo La Tengo’s search for domestic bliss hits home as working with the few materials available. But in YLT’s native New Jersey is that same pursuit escapist? Regardless, those involved with the alternative Midwest scenes Wussy sprouts from are more likely to work a factory job than to wear the proverbial trucker’s hat.
Wussy kicked it into god-mode on their 2014 album Attica. That one opens with “Teenage Wasteland,” the song they’ll forever be known for if nothing else lasts. Walker evokes teen years spent listening to songs like “Baba O’Reilly” in the cavernous interior of Midwest cornfields and suburbs. “Do you remember the time you finally heard something about it?/ When the kick of the drum lined up with the beat of your heart” she asks. “Stuck in a corn-maze with only a transistor radio,/ Making paths with the soundwaves and echoes and–” Walker’s voice revs up into howls of longing both for and up against everything at once. I think you could only write this kind of song if part of you never really Got Out. “It don’t take much to sound like a sleeping prophet/ when your misery sounds like ours so far away”—Walker conjures a rain of sonic fire across the sleepy Midwest better than the Who ever could. It’s a miracle of a song. The appeal is universal but Walker’s ecstatic fury shines blindingly into the state of every forgotten Midwest adult who engages in such remembering.
2016’s Forever Sounds went deeper into the noise and epic subject matter. One of the few pop culture artifacts that reaches for a Miltonic note—its sublimnity hints at vast unknowable things right out of view (and it rocks!). Heavy metal goes for that kind of thing occasionally for mostly schmaltzy effect. Even at such heights, Wussy tether their reachings to the hungry Midwest ground—“Who robbed the wishing well? It seems like there’s nothing’s coming true.”[3]
Their latest, out last month, is titled What Heaven Is Like. That title conveys a lot of what Wussy’s music has been for fans over the last decade and a half. The cover art depicts a 1950’s-looking couple staring off into a sunset. But it struck me as kind of sickly. Chuck Cleaver provides a clue in “One Per Customer,” the opener—“Having you ever dreamt you were an atom bomb/ Lighting up the sky on the Atoll?” Wussy are responding to the current national mood with a sour note on their most cheerfully titled album. (“We like fucking with people,” Cleaver explained about another song on the album.) As alt-rock vets all pushing forty, the band seems to be responding with disappointment to a world now barely recognizable. But resignation isn’t cynicism– even on Chuck’s world-weary songs he sits with the pain rather than hardening himself up against it.
“Gloria,” the standout track, is based off a character from FX’s TV series Fargo (“I was running out of Biblical references,” Walker explained). But she transcends that resolutely good source material. “She drives through the spirits like the haunted flashing lights on County Road 9”—Walker’s deeper voice lilts with an almost-country twang she’s rarely unleashed in the past. The song evokes a woman, disappearing to all the world and even herself, travelling over her past haunts. “As she fades into the dark/ You wonder who will stay and put it to rights” evokes the “Savior to rise from these streets” from “Thunder Road” but Gloria is left to make sense of her past on her own. There’s nothing in the TV show quite like “She is looking over baseball fields and fairgrounds in the snow.” Gloria and the listener are left mourning over a past that’s covered over now—forced perhaps to face it again in the Sisyphean daily commutes to service sector jobs dotted across the Midwest landscape. I recognize rural women I’ve known with such striking self-awareness. Their private imaginative worlds have slowly been overrun with unplanned children and piling bills. Their voices are eventually silenced by poverty but you know them by the unflinching stare they give back at the world.
She was the only light the lonely night
The night she turned around
But she believes in something brighter
Than the darkness that surrounds
Her name is Gloria
I don’t know if our Gloria voted last time around but that knowledge wouldn’t provide nearly as much insight as simply her name. Wussy round out that declaration with a minute-long guitar solo of such howling longing you think your speakers will burst. It’s like some crazy apotheosis of those old country crooners. Walker ratchets up the noise until the Midwest itself sings with all its fatalism and transcendence. It cries out for resolution, but the fuckers just leave it there hanging. They avoid catharsis because in reality that’s not the way the story ends. And that’s a political act.
Notes
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcCwnEcw71Y
[1] The alternative acoustic version is a good entryway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkX16SGweVU