Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to use decades as dividers for cultural commentary? As good as the decimal system is, it is surely naïve to believe there is a significant change from one decade to the next based only on the fact ten years have neatly come to an end. What could possibly have changed so much between 31/12/1999 and 01/01/2000? This is brought into sharp focus by this decade, which is the story of the end of one era and the start of another, the turning point of which was not in line with these neat groupings (70s, 80s, 90s etc) but instead occurred on a single day in the Autumn of 2001: perhaps the biggest signifier of the end of an era since the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89.
When I think of this pre-09/11 world (read post-1989 as well), my mind focuses on things that will likely never occur again; foremost is a certain sense of naïve optimism. Optimism about the world and culture. An excitement of variety and possibility, which may just have been a by-product of my youth, or might have been a genuine reflection of a different time; I really can’t tell. In musical/popular culture terms Radiohead’s Kid A is certainly from this old world order, thus I find it inseparable from these emotions. From my current viewpoint in this post 09/11 era, Kid A is one of the final landmarks of that time – and it is a landmark – and a perfect exemplar of that indefinable feeling that will never quite be recaptured, the high water mark of a lost culture.
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George McGovern’s campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz, famously said that Hunter S. Thompson’s chronicle of the ‘72 US election was the “least accurate, but most factual” account. I think much the same could be attributed to the lyrics delivered by Yoni Wolf of Why? on the basis of his recent output. On ‘This Blackest Purse’ Wolf sets out his own mission statement of sorts; “I want to speak at an intimate decibel/ with the precision of an infinite decimal/ to listen up and send back a true echo/ of something forever felt but never heard/ I want that sharpened steel of truth in every word”.
The lyrics of Why? have always been something worth dissecting, acting as both the distinguishing factor between any comparable act and the singular element that unites his discography from his time as a solo artist, through his collaborations, cLOUDDEAD, and the current incarnation of Why? as a fully formed band. The topics here remain largely the same; the full contents of his thoughts on display as Yoni dissects death, sex and his own anxieties at every turn. He is his own therapist, the language of self-analysis pouring out every song. The albums opening line, “I wear the customary clothes of my time/ like Jesus did with no reason not to die” ensures you are instantly aware the lyrics will continue where they left off on Alopecia, a stream of Jungian psychoanalysis and border-line perversion (“and I never got a name for my shady compulsion”) that could be easily mistaken for narcissism (”will I gain weight in later life?”).
Wolf again shows signs of the sort of self awareness rarely found in popular music and couples this with a new self-referential streak. ‘This Blackest Purse’ provides the most obvious example, opening with the lines “I’m not who, with my eyes, I claim to be/ I’ve only cradled death in my own ending flesh from far off and abstracted lit/ candlewick flickering”, a reference to the most prevalent topic on Alopecia that was at the forefront of tracks like ‘Song of the Sad Assassin’ with its first person account of lifting a body out of the water, and signals the beginning of a differentiation between the person or persona and the doctrine he has set himself. His embellishment is in the quest for ‘truth in every word’.
Eskimo Snow is made up of recordings taken from the same sessions as Alopecia, separated for the sake of coherence, so perhaps it is no surprise to hear “looks like a sky for shoeing horses under” on the refrain to ‘One Rose’, or his calls of “no flash photography” on ‘Even The Good Wood Gone’, taking you back to the same train of thought first heard on ‘Sick 2 Think’ from the Sanddollars EP.
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