The Afghan Whigs’ third full-length, 1993’s Gentlemen, is a refreshingly anomalous choice for Counterpoint Press’ ongoing 33 1/3 series, which celebrates classic pop albums in book-length studies
written by established critics and musicians. With few exceptions, the
series has hewed pretty closely to the established pop-nerd canon,
covering Dusty in Memphis in volume one and moving through Pet Sounds, Forever Changes, Highway 61 Revisited, Music from Big Pink, Exile on Main St., The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, et al, with occasional dips into more recent indie milestones like In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Daydream Nation, Loveless, and Bee Thousand.
The
Afghan Whigs don’t quite fit into either box; neither a
platinum-selling cultural touchstone nor—despite being a
first-generation Sub Pop signing—a beloved indie influence, the band
has the undistinguished legacy of being one of the most musically
interesting grunge bands to emerge in the early 90s. If Nirvana were a
24-track punk band, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were mopey inheritors of
the Zeppelin-style hard rock style, and Smashing Pumpkins were
glam-fashioned neo-arena rockers, then the Afghan Whigs had the
audacity to fancy themselves a soul band. Frontman Greg Dulli’s lyrics
were often harrowing and cathartic in the Seattle vogue—Gentlemen chronicles the painful, protracted breakup of his first adult
relationship—but the band kept their hair (relatively) short, wore
suits and sunglasses, covered the Supremes, and aspired to the rhythmic
tightness of James Brown’s classic JB’s lineup.
These
stylistic details overstate the extent to which the Whigs actually
sounded like a soul band, however. Any listeners unfamiliar with the
band’s latter-day live shows—which featured background singers, a conga
player, and full horn section—would probably listen to Gentlemen and hear a slightly funkier version of that year’s typical rock sound:
roaring guitars, pounding drums, a singer more inclined to growl than
croon. And you didn’t exactly have to be Sly Stone to out-funk Nirvana.
One would have to possess a pretty limited appreciation for the
finer points of 20th-century black music to deem the Afghan Whigs worthy
of the Motown/Tamla or Stax legacies, and from the star-struck, easily
awed tone of Gentlemen The Book, author Bob Gendron appears to
possess just that. His book presents a fanboy’s view of a good-to-great
record, comparing it to similarly heart-rending classics like Blood on the Tracks or Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear,
but he doesn’t address the potentially fascinating cultural issues that
the Whigs raised: white appropriation of black music; the slippery
concept of artistic authenticity; or the bizarre near-rejection of
black influence by white 90s rock musicians. Instead, Gendron take the
genius of Gentlemen (and Dulli) as a given and proceeds. His
book is a missed opportunity to reopen the cultural conversation on a
fascinating, frustrating band that nevertheless deserves a reevaluation.
Gentlemen The Book starts strong, with a flashback to a beating Dulli took after
a 1998 gig in Austin followed by an informative chapter on the complex
musical and cultural identity of Cincinnati, the band’s hometown. These
episodes introduce the two major motifs of the book—Dulli’s legendary
self-abuse and bad-assedness, and his band’s miscegenation of musical
styles, both of which are addressed throughout with near-religious
admiration by Gendron. Dulli claims his inspiration for the Whigs’
sound was a pair of concerts he saw as a teenager in the early 80s,
Hüsker Dü and Prince, although Cincinnati’s Midwestern location meant
that a little country snuck in there too, evidenced in guitarist Rick
McCullom’s frequent and effective use of a slide in songs like the Gentlemen highlight “When We Two Parted.”
Gendron
limns the band’s trip from local parties to national tours, plus their
distinction of being the first non-West Coast band to sign with Sub
Pop, the original home to Nirvana and Mudhoney. They released two
records on that imprint, 1989’s Up in It, and 1991’s great creative leap forward, Congregation.
The latter album is also where the significant anti-Whigs crowd started
to grow, particularly in their disapproval of the record’s cover art—a
naked black woman holding a white baby—and of Dulli’s increasingly
sexualized, self-obsessed lyrics.
There are a number of
reasons why a group of white Midwestern college-rockers would be
scowled at in 1991 for wantonly borrowing tropes, cover songs, and
imagery from black soul music; unfortunately, Gendron just posits the
band’s myriad detractors (and Dulli’s refusal to kowtow to them) as
evidence of the Whigs’ unquestionable greatness. The growth of indie
labels like Sub Pop, SST, and Two-Tone throughout the 80s (wonderfully
depicted in Michael Azerrad’s This Band Could Be Your Life)
built a music culture that based authenticity on commercial, rather
than aesthetic, distinctions. Thus the growth of the lo-fi movement and
the community’s increased concern with “selling out.” The Afghan Whigs
were groundbreaking in that they mixed the superficialities of
indie-defined legitimacy (loud guitars, DIY touring, emotive lyrics)
with a total disregard for indie’s asexuality and arbitrary
romanticization of lo-fi recording technology.
This is no small
achievement, nor was it an economically lucrative one. At the time,
rock songwriters were basically either emoting in the
Cobain/Vedder/Corgan mold, or draping their songs in non-sequitorial
pop culture references like Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus. Either way,
early- to mid-90s rock had a peculiarly standoffish relationship to
sex, which made Dulli something of a renegade when he wrote lines like
“She wants love, and I just want to fuck,” “Zip me down, kiss me
there,” or Gentlemen’s most notorious moment, from the song “Be Sweet”:
“Ladies, let me introduce myself/I got a dick for a brain/And my brain
is gonna sell my ass to you.”
Still, Gendron refuses to
acknowledge that, while unique and obviously the product of an
authentic love of soul, Dulli’s cultural appropriation and
confrontational lyrics often come off as forced or posturing. (He's treading similar territory in his newer band The Twilight Singers, and his collaboration with Mark Lanegan, The Gutter Twins.) The
Whigs’ mixture of rock aggressiveness and soul nuance was frequently an
awkward marriage due to Dulli’s limitations as a singer and melodicist,
and his tiring preoccupation with emotional darkness. This balancing
act is central to any discussion of Gentlemen The Album, yet
Gendron only wants to discuss the record’s brilliance, with pauses to
rail against critics who failed “to capture the essence of a band whose
creativity, for better or worse, isolated it.” “There isn’t a fake or
false note on the album,” he exalts, occasionally even lapsing into an
Olbermann-worthy series of adjectives: “Conflicted, lacerated,
claustrophobic, naked, real, out of control… is exactly how Gentlemen sounds.” I was especially entertained by the occasional poetic flourish: “Gentlemen is a masterpiece of a four-headed hydra.”
Please. Gentlemen is a good record, with a few stunning moments when the mixture of rock
and soul actually works, but it’s also a frequently juvenile one. (I
say this as a guy who encountered the album at a perfectly timed
late-adolescent moment, and then slowly grew out of it after realizing
that the “dick for a brain” line isn’t really as profound as it sounds
when you’re 15.) Gendron basically admits as much when he claims that,
during an interview, Dulli’s “expression—cute, curious,
mischievous—resemble[d] that of an eleven-year-old who just snuck a
long peek at a gorgeous woman in the shower.” Unbeknownst to Gendron,
however, that’s exactly the problem with Gentlemen; it’s
leering and adolescent more often than haunting, and atonally
aggressive more often than mature. No wonder the best parts of Gentlemen are the ballads—“When We Two Parted,” “My Curse” (sung by Scrawl’s
Marcy Mays, the lone female presence on the album), and a lovely cover
of the Tyrone Davis b-side “I Keep Coming Back.” Everything else just
kind of lumbers along in a typically drum-heavy grunge mix, steered by
Dulli’s equally unsubtle lyrics. When Gendron laughably compares the
record to Richard and Linda Thompson’s stunning Shoot Out The Lights,
it only underscores how infantile some of Dulli’s gestures seem when
compared to genuine adults confronting similar heartbreak.
Gentlemen The Album is the Whigs record most suited to the 33 1/3 treatment since it has a unifying concept and came the closest to
claiming a mainstream audience, but they would go on to perfect their
Prince/Hüsker Dü hybrid on their last two records, 1996’s Black Love and particularly on 1965, released in 1998. The former is spottily brilliant but pretty uneven and even bleaker than Gentlemen, but 1965 is a great, unsung record of the 90s, its arrangements a perfect mix of
horns, percussion, strings, female background singers, and slide
guitar. It’s Curtis Mayfield’s Curtis by way of Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me, with a sense of R&B joy that’s missing from Gentlemen and Black Love. A proper reevaluation of the Afghan Whigs should start with a listen to 1965 and an honest appraisal of their flaws leading up to it; Gentlemen The Book instead falls prey to the trap that the 33 1/3 idea lays: approaching an album with adolescent reverence rather than objective curiosity.
Gentlemen by Bob Gendron. 114 pages, $10.95. Published by Counterpoint Press.
