On the Musical Genealogy of Neko Case
by Justin Rogers-Cooper
This review is an attempt to assess the latest work of Neko Case within a broader genealogy of mostly North American guitar songwriters. It imagines these songwriters as a collective voice cut into discrete consciousnesses, contributing to one long, dissonant narrative on the rolling American stone. For the sake of argument, then, Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone might stand as a statement of minor importance. It’s a fine album of creaky pianos and bright chords, tucked away in the middle of a continent in the first seasons after Bush, in the decades before the oil wars became water wars. It’s a minor classic of the early internet age. It can mean these things because the guitar was valuable protest software for the twentieth century brain, and an artist like Neko Case is one of the more urgent contemporary specialists still commanding its acoustic affect.
Neko Case writes classic songs. The trick to writing acoustic classics in particular seems crucially tied to a rhythm of hopeful melancholy endemic to all great songs, from John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero,” to Animal Collective’s “Flesh Canoe,” to Sera Cahoone’s “Baker Lake.” Because you can’t really dance to it, great acoustic songs have to make you walk, nod, or drive. If they make you cry, because the sentiment clicking inside you is indirectly expressed. The best pop music does this too at times, like the opening of Wilson Picket’s “If You Need Me” — “if you need me/ call me.” It’s understandable that in America poetically crafted emotions like despair and yearning are softly political, since so much commercial affect is meant to make you happy, meant to make you laugh, meant to make you want fun, meant to make you want sex, or meant to make you disgusted with yourself. The great indie songs of our moment are sensible to us because they come from the popular traditions of folk, grunge, and what’s known as “alt-country.” They hang together precisely because they are not “fun” the way Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” might be “fun” to “tweens.” This is, however, why indie fans secretly admire fun songs made by their favorite dissonant musicians. Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is a prime example.
The roots of Neko Case go back a few generations. In the mid-twentieth century depths of post-war McCarthy commie hunts and black and white TV, the fecund seeds of Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash grew instantly rustic ballads of the post-cowboy: the humming tramp-rebel, hungover and earnestly anti-authoritarian. Guthrie, of course, is more widely known for protest songs than Cash. But Cash’s voice captured an edgier, sexier, and more intimately combustible 50s genesis of Salinger novels and Elvis Presley – popularly existential, somewhat wry, and on the edge of danger. For those so inclined to measure the implicit politics begotten by them, one has to start by emphasizing how they place history into the ordinary lives of the songs’ characters. In the blood of Cash’s song “The Long Black Veil” is a dishonest exchange between a man and the law, and honor falls on the man’s side. Indeed, one of the most celebrated recordings of this song happened at Fulsom Prison in 1967.
Cash can get even more straightforward. In “The Man in Black,” he sings “I wear black for the poor and beaten down / living in the hopeless hungry side of town.” What unites the middle-class exile and the “beaten down” is the destructive loneliness of an atomized life. The former has more choices than the latter, but both can potentially make money singing. Yet if the blues are about turning the hard life into art, then Cash and Guthrie songs are blues’ in-laws. All indie rock is a distant relative, too, because it attempts to produce that humming, emotional identification with a speaker left by herself to artfully moan. Some complaining is sexy.
In the ‘60s, the songs of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez arose to explain the uncomfortable but sprightly place where the personal became political. They sang in elegant, medieval voices about the tension of relationships built to decay in a culture that disposes its art into museums like stuffed birds in a natural history diorama. It’s no accident that their voices, like those of Neko Case, would turn to interrogate any contradictory desires for another space by winding new words through an old sound. Think of Mitchell’s “California,” or the way Baez’s early ‘60s stuff sounds like lost recordings from a stunning Renaissance peasant. In “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Baez sings, “whatever you wish to keep / you better grab it fast.” Compare this with Mitchell’s “River,” where she can say, “I wish I had a river so long / I would teach my feet to fly.” They are the arch forerunners of Neko Case because they signal desire as the only constant in a world where everything solid eventually melts.
Through the singular and exceptional figure of Bob Dylan, whose own early 1960s persona can be seen as an uncanny blend of Cash and Guthrie, the roots of the guitar-song in American popular music became a democratic source of catchy perspectives on the emotional tailwinds from larger economic and political shifts. John Lennon, too, has an Americaness filtered through his love and association with New York, passed to him through Dylan’s joint, made con-crete in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields. There is a living hand that carried “Imagine” into Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World,” and from there even the Indigo Girl’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” Dylan and Lennon together beget Neil Young, whose fingerprints are all over work like Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack, itself written for a film attempting to trace the mysterious protest behind a dude’s decision to permanently hit the woods. Neko Case is just off to the side of them, singing on a porch, watching a tornado spin close.
The movement ran away in the ‘90s. The romantic destruction that lurks behind the Into the Wild character Vedder channels in that soundtrack isn’t far from Pearl Jam’s somewhat forgotten ‘90s hit “Jeremy.” In fact, Vedder’s character from Into the Wild and his character Jeremy from Ten are close cousins of that psychofamily known as the deranged white American male, his thoughts bursting with suicide and homicide. Kurt Cobain isn’t quite the opposite of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, but more like their artistic great-uncle who shared their obsession with guns but not for the same purpose. There’s a reason, though, that Gus Van Sant made them two of the three subjects of his Elephant, Last Days, Gerry trilogy about ‘90s male madness. Schoolage guys have killer urges. Cobain couldn’t stop singing about high school adolescents, either on Bleach (an incessant chant of “no recess”) or in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
In the political spectrum of an alienated anger that characterized the psychotic extremes of the white middle-class ‘90s, Cobain’s shotgun suicide became the radical inversion of the Columbine shooting and Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. Grunge amplifies and distorts the affect of anger. It makes more sense as an anti-political emotion than any politics as such. In his critique of McVeigh, Noam Chomsky called that brand of thinking “anti-politics.” It bled out in the wake of NAFTA, and puked up a death groan for the absolute absence of practical revolutionary ideas exorcised by the culture wars. It’s the screaming, stupid: 1994 was the year of Cobain’s explosion, and the passing of NAFTA, and the Republican Revolution’s “Contract with America.” Not coincidently, Jon Krakauer’s original article about Into the Wild appeared the year before. In 2007, note the way Vedder positions the character of Christopher McCandless on “Society”: “I think I need to find a bigger place / because when you have more than you think / you need more space…Society / crazy indeed / I hope you’re not lonely / without me.” This voice of self-centered melancholy is the strength and weakness of this period. It’s the voice of the middle-class narcissist driven to death by the majoritarian strangeness of consumer culture, and is directly relevant for understanding our current group of indie guitar artists.
Earlier this decade is where a not insignificant split occurs in the tone and lyrics of the guitar-based transatlantic rock tradition. Though they’re both politically active, the difference between Eddie Vedder and, say, Thom Yorke of Radiohead isn’t just one of tone, but of practicality: Vedder is a far-left liberal who believes in voting and, once upon a time, fighting corporate monopolies like Ticketmaster. As Yorke sings on Kid A’s “Idioteque,” he counters that optimism from a bunker, laughing until his “head comes off,” the ship sinking: “ice age coming / throw him on the fire…we’re not scaremongering / this is really happening.” For Yorke, the problem isn’t reforming the system. For him, the system is the problem. This direction informed what paths new songwriters would follow. For the most part, the specific brand of 90s despair would transform from anti-politics to an excitable anxiety about the culture of climate change, resource wars, fear of terrorism, peak oil, and — until 2008 — enormous wealth bubbles. As the music industry collapsed along with Lehman Brothers, the songs of Wilco and Neko Case were already popular downloads on college campuses. They were played with Vedder and Arcade Fire.
Among contemporary American singer-songwriter traditions, the old tradition of the folky political song has passed through its anti-political stage and found its way into another realm altogether: the odd and exciting genre that might be called “doomer” songs. Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed,” from the Wonder Boys soundtrack is perhaps one of the cornerstones of this genre.. Although the beat is basically a frisky blues trance, Dylan’s character culls together the best of the apocalyptic American beat-down bums that mumble stories all through his recent records. They sound like aged, aimless ex-ministers lurking around a Cormac McCarthy novel, prone to violence and out of weed. “People are crazy and times are strange,” he sings, “I’m locked in tight / I’m out of range. I used to care / but things have changed.” He goes on to catalogue a restless night of hot nightmares and last second desires: “if the Bible is right / the world will explode…feel like falling in love /with every woman I meet.” There is nothing like this newschool millennial angst, so prescient in its fanatical rapture, to mark those early Bush years when kids threw bubble-wealth parties as American war planes bombed Afghanistan. This is the Dylan that can hang with Radiohead’s Kid A and Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, which contains perhaps the ultimate “doomer” track of the decade, “Keep the Car Running.”
And then there is Neko Case. Neko Case says that the characters in her songs “live between the world and history, or memory, they kind of fall between the cracks.” Like Joni Mitchell, Case writes songs on Middle Cyclone that resemble her best work: torn-up lovers seeking spiritual solace in the morning cup of coffee, or from a speedy race up a country road in an old truck. Not unlike a doomer song, her characters are waiting for something big, but it’s a big gesture from a long-lost friend, or a weird sign from the woods. On the upbeat song “This Tornado Loves You,” she touches Guthrie and Arcade Fire at once: “I have waited with a glacier’s patience / smashed every transformer with every trailer / ‘til nothing was standing.” These lines come out of an apocalyptic ecology that forces grid-crash in the name of some dark heart’s desire. She is singing from the perspective of the tornado. It destroys lives as if it were sucking them to death as a necessary food: “I left them motherless, fatherless / their souls they hang inside-out their mouths / but it’s never enough/ I want you.”
For Neko Case, love can be perverse like this. The need for it hangs in the chest like the need for money. On the album’s calm title track, she says, “Can’t scrape together quite enough / to ride the bus to the outskirts / of the fact that I need love.” A piano trickles through the song like a xylophone under water. Her character is desperate, vulnerable, and full of terminal insight. “It was so clear to me / that it was almost invisible,” she croons. “I lie across the path waiting / just for a chance to be / a spider-web / trapped in your lashes / for that I would trade you / my empire for ashes / but I choke it back / how much I need love.” It’s a haunting song, but it makes you feel alive with longing. Her people are trapped by old desires for new bodies. As the only constant, desire becomes one’s best friend. On her earlier and magnificent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, her fans would instantly recognize the intense, sad recognition of its opening frame from “Hold On, Hold On”: “the most tender place in my heart / is for strangers.” This is a person addicted to the devil of unknown faces at parties, or in the street, and who claws through remote corners of foreign beds rummaging for him or herself in the dreams of post-laid sheets.
But Neko Case doesn’t write doomer music. She writes about the gorgeous nomads sipping the sensitive moments recovered from that ‘90s anger. Her voice soars; it’s awesome. Her music renovates old country houses. If music could go green, hers would. It plays in the holes of the continent where people grow vegetables in their garden and, like Michael Caine’s stoned activist in Children of Men, they laugh and smoke pot in the tiny sustainable corners of their rural quarantine.
The record is best heard in this long context, because it unleashes the wistful acoustic interplay of the pianos, the guitars, and her voice. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon record. It doesn’t have the impulsive charm of her previous work. It succeeds as an album and not as a collection of songs — there really aren’t “singles” on it. To the extent she drops images of birds, car alarms, and teenage marriage, her voices seem crossed with moody memories of old farm towns and the regretful sighs of lovers three times the age of their first engagements. It’s not nostalgia that animates the emotional dynamics of the record, but the sudden remembering of lost sex that burns in the mind: “you kept me wanting, wanting, wanting / like the wanting in the movies and the hymns.” In this way, her songs are about loss; they communicate a desire that remains zealously hungry as the body shuts down. They are as smooth as lullabies. They’re sewn together with riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on R.E.M.’s Out of Time. This record is a minor piece of perfection from maybe the most poetic and impressive of this decade’s songwriters.
