When outright societal disaster really comes, as it did in 2020 and 2021, but there is an ideological pressure upon yourself as a representative of rock bohemia not to dwell on it, and certainly not to admit its seriousness, what do you do?
I think the answer, if you’re an artist like Kevin Morby who seeks to live up to the way the best rock has sought to be an authentic witness to the times, and you care for America and hold out hope for her healing, and finally, you’re drawn to the possibility of subverting apocalyptic thinking even while seeming to express it (as Walker Percy was), is that you write a song like “It’s Over.”
For surely you know that many persons feel a fundamental shift just has occurred, a sudden down-lurch of our modern societies which forces us to reject their past three-decades presentation of themselves as normal, functional, etc. You know that questions like “Is city living as we have known it no longer tenable, and thus over?” are being asked by many. Some are wondering the same about constitutional democracy, America, and rock bohemia. More practically, they are asking “Should I abandon (city/career/goal/institution/nation) X, before getting out becomes too costly or too late?”
Yes, you refrain, from giving those shadows gathered about the medical establishments, the federal agencies, and that election, a sustained look--you sense the darkness over there, covering over some set of evils which, even though you assume its seriousness is wildly exaggerated by the MAGA types, surely portends nothing good; but you have your reasons for averting your eyes. You also know that statements like the one the Vax-harm substacker Eugyppius presents as his motto--We are witnessing an unprecedented, comprehensive failure of policy, medicine and science—the world will never be the same are at least plausible. You know that many people who until recently you had no reason to expect to hear radical or populist-conservative ideas from are saying things similar to what Neil Oliver did the other day (45:27), that at some point over the last two years, I realized that the world I thought I knew had died.
Kevin Morby is one of the better and more enduring artists to have emerged, along with Fleet Foxes, Cate Le Bon, Allah-Las, La Luz, and Weyes Blood, from the millennial-gen rock scene that revived/remixed 60s folk-rock and psychedelic sounds. His style can be compared to that of Dylan, especially circa Street Legal, albeit being simpler lyrically and less bluesy. Other sounds-like references would be Opal/Mazzy Star, The Velvet Underground, and The Waterboys. He has not been terribly political, although his few political gestures have been progressivist.
“It’s Over,” from the new LP This Is a Photograph (here’s a review1), has three basic parts. First, the chorus, which is It’s over, it’s over now, sadly but resignedly sung over a Lennon-like depressive piano riff. In the final instance of this chorus, Morby expands it with added lines, such as
Used to take our dinner babe, by the sea
Everyone was a winner then,
When everyone was free
And he wraps up the song with these lines:
And the good times, are over
my shoulder, now.
And how? (5x)
End now (3x)
That signals this song’s connection to the album’s last number, “Goodbye to Good Times,” and forces upon us the question that always confronts a claim of a decisive end or change, which is how one should go on living, when things seemingly so central to your life have apparently ended, and what is more, when their final ending-point remains hard to pin down or be certain about.
For oddly enough, it proves hard to know how to end a song about things being over!
Second, there are two stanzas which present, with a heavy and even chilling kind of drama, the many things going way wrong--as in apocalypse-level wrong. While some of their lines do clearly refer to happenings of the last two years, such as
Where’d Cory go and where is my band?
I miss my life up on the bandstand…
more of them have ambiguous referents. Who, for example, is “Cory?” And what do we do with the next two lines?
Used to sing songs from a motorcade,
as we rolled into the rose parade.
These lines seem to blend a 2021 sense of what (in this case, live performance) was recently-lost, or suspended, with a sense of nostalgia/loss for an earlier America. They are lyrics which exemplify a pattern I see throughout this album, a combining of things resonant-of-recent-events with album-thematic personal mythology. The album’s thematic markers, many of them geographic, include Tennessee, the Mississippi River, old photographs—especially of family--, American celebrities mostly from the 40s-60s period, boxing, Morby’s father, Memphis, and—as on every Morby album--the prospect of death and the remembrance of the deceased. To illustrate this combining pattern, and the main content of this song, let’s look at the central stanza:
The city froze fill up the bath with snow,
as Swallows flock down toward Mexico
Gotta get out now, fuck the dog
leave him back at home
Texas thawed then California burned,
January turned to firewood
Took the homes with the leather floors,
smelled like bulls cooking on the shore
Live here again but I’m leaving soon
back to my abandoned Hollywood
Downtown can’t die if it’s not alive,
I’m up in the Peabody, room 409.
Fevered delivery here, of recollections of poorly-handed 2021 weather-disasters in two states, of images that suggest societal collapse, especially in the cities, and other images that suggest winter, or a personal story that involves multiple moves.
Let’s look more closely at the snapshots of collapse. The abandoned dog image points to persons in an emergency, feeling they have no time left to make their escape—that can’t but remind us—esp. with the reference to an abandoned Hollywood--of the debates not a few residents of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, and LA really did have with themselves and their housemates circa 2020-21 about whether to move out, but obviously, at a much lower level of fear/urgency.
The bathtub image evokes a collapse-of-urban-order situation, reminding me of this from Solzhenitsyn’s March 1917:
In Petrograd, all day, anyone who had a telephone made a great number of calls. Learning and passing on news. Everyone was advising everyone else to stock up on water and fill their bathtubs.
One creepy aspect of 2020-21 is that you could no longer rely on standard media to learn about the basics: would your usual station tell you there were rioters burning buildings in the neighborhood next to yours, or would it refuse to report/investigate such? Similarly: were there significant numbers of adverse reactions to the vax? were homeowners in your city beginning to sell, to abandon it? You may recall the little battle-of-two-columns in NYC about whether urban flight was happening there, with Jerry Seinfeld stepping up to say, “No, it’s a rumor, the Big Apple isn’t dying!”
But the cities were under elementary threat—as Morby’s lyrics suggest, the lockdowns froze them, and they were in a certain sense already not alive. That is no light thing for Morby—yes, after leaving his native Kansas to join the rock scene in Brooklyn, and then LA, he astoundingly moved back to his home-state, even buying a home there, but he has nonetheless presented himself as a champion of city life--in “Dry Your Eyes” from 2017’s City Music, he sang of going to a city square just to see what, or who, I’m gonna find there and being disappointed that he finds no soul I know, and no commotion, for me to be a part of. Maybe that kind of desperate hope for urban connection—which is person-to-person connection unmediated by the net--is why he perhaps hints in the stanza above that he’s going to move back to LA, at least temporarily.
Now I don’t know what to make of the lines about buying leather-floored homes and their connection to ancient(?) sacrifices of bulls, but there is some relevant personal Morby-info on this glimpsed theme of moving that I should share. He one of those artists who is always talking about place, making much of the fact that his first two albums were New York ones, his second two LA ones, that his last reflected his return to Kansas, and that this new one was partly put-together in the storied Peabody Hotel of Memphis.
He’s also mentioned a recent close-call health-event for his father as an influence on the album, such that we can perhaps understand the lines that open this song,
Bought my body on the used lot,
I’ll take the last one if it’s all you got
Just need something to carry me,
Rest of the way towards Tennessee
as telling a personal mythology story of his father working his way from Kansas, post-medical-procedure, over to his son in Memphis, and thus also to Tennessee, which seems to stand in this album for the place of family roots, and the bittersweet remembrance of passed family members.
Not sure about that, and there’s more yet that’s difficult to interpret with confidence. What we can say is that the stanzas evoke a period of societal and personal upheaval, of contemplated and actual moves, of fears of cities dying, of being spooked by disasters on the news, of being reminded of bodily frailty, of the possible ending of a way of life, and of family members seeking to come together.
But there is a third basic element of the song, which is a mere bridge to the chorus, an interlude of dih-dada-dooh phrases sung by Cassandra Jenkins (e.g. at 2:39), but by its coming right after each rush-of-confusion stanza, it’s almost jarring in its peacefulness, its benediction of mothering care—it’s a bit like if you hear several songs of 60s chaos at top-volume, say, “Revolution,” “European Son,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” and “All Along the Watchtower,” and then, “Let It Be” comes on--it somehow washes all of that turmoil away…
I believe that bridge is in fact the main message of the song: its peace is meant to put the drama of the stanzas, and the “It’s Over” statement of the chorus, into a larger perspective that is the governing one. Don’t get carried away with apocalyptic and things-being-over type thinking is the message. Morby wants to acknowledge those thoughts and feelings in response to the last two years, to say “I’ve been having them too,” but to ultimately say that it becomes unhealthy to get drawn into them.
I’m getting that both from the structural feel of “It’s Over,” but also from its evident relation to two other songs on the album. The first of these is “Goodbye to Good Times,” which while it begins rather emphatically,
Seems the good times,
Have finally come to pass,
Make way for the bad times,
Soon to cross our path
And while it contains this reality-of-lockdown line,
And I don’t remember,
how it feels to dance,
is in the main a homey nostalgia piece, and seems meant to honor and reflect Kevin’s father’s perspective especially. Surely the son also feels the lamenting sentiments to a degree, as he sings I miss the good times mama, they’ve gone out of style, but we can’t help but notice some subtle undermining of the many clichéd phrases of nostalgia the song deploys: notice that the phrase “have finally come to pass,” could, if the context were different, signal present fulfillment of the good times, not their being over; also notice that Morby trots out the “good die young” idea, but then quickly adds an odd “but not always” qualification. The song also contains four stories about his father, his sister, and himself when each was young—and ends itself and the whole album with a statement that this is a photograph…of a family growing old. So the song is a portrayal of how any good family might have a conversational tradition of fond nostalgic sorrow at the passing of its salad days, which, sure, for Kevin’s might include some clichéd but sincere longing for the healthier and happier USA of the 60s-80s; the song is far more that than it is a big poetic statement of where America and the West presently stand.
It's not the case that Morby is totally adverse to such statements—for one, we’ve no reason to doubt his believing what he says here, that he expects the coming times to be basically a good deal worse than those he grew up in, and for two, there’s his final song of his last album, 2020’s Sundowner, “Provisions,” in which he advises one and all to grab provisions, there’s nothing for a hundred miles and in which he warns that the storm is coming now. “Provisions” has that straight-up, if non-specific, prophecy at its heart, but I’d say that “Goodbye to Good Times” seeks to deliver a subtler lyrical effect.
The best song on the new album is “A Random Act of Kindness,” and it is the second song that “It’s Over” is connected to. It features a narrator who recounts a number of things he’s now out of, such as time, money, lust, trust, grace, and dreams, thus seeming to be in another “end of the line” situation. But what he winds up pleading for is a friend who will shut me up. He’s asking for someone to knock him out of his apocalyptic mode when he falls into it. And he rhymes that central, desperate-sounding shut me up, with a surprised cry that the sun came up! The song is saying that the apocalyptic mode receives no better check than that daily occurrence.
So I’m saying that all of that—that a.) acknowledgment of the apocalyptic Muse’s claim upon us, especially now, that b.) warning against it coming to put too strong a hold on our hearts, and that c.) statement of life’s continuing hope, are all signaled by the simple nonsense syllables of the little bridge-section of “It’s Over.” The bridge points us back to what we should have learned from “A Random Act of Kindness,” and prepares us to give “Goodbye to Good Times” the more nuanced hearing it merits.
All in all, that’s some pretty impressive rock artistry in these three connected songs. But to return to my initial statements, there remains a political question, a realism-circa-2022 question, about whether the artistry does too much to comfort standard rock-bohemia types. All this poetic ambiguity, all this sophisticated half-affirmation/half-subversion of our present “apocalyptic” worries—what does it do? And what if we have arrived at that rarest of times, one in which the “apocalyptic thinker” and “conspiracy theorist” proves to be in large-part right?
I am using square-quotes now, because we all know how D-party operatives/MSM types have been using these phrases as pejoratives to slander anyone who opposes their Narrative. I don’t want to descend into analysis of the charge-v.-counter-charge partisan mudslinging on this--obviously, my usual take on it is guessable from my willingness to accept the “conservative” tag--but I do want to register some concern about a rock-pattern I believe I’m beginning to notice, of artists too-confidently dismissing the concerns of the doomy-ones in their ranks.
Rock bohemia has long contained a greater ratio of persons inclined to “apocalyptic” and “society-is-corrupt-to-the-core” thinking than just about any other sector. From JFK’s assassination to Biden’s inauguration, the rock scenes were a place where such doom-talk, usually of a leftist kind, could find enough sympathetic ears. Songs like “Iron Man,” “Genetic Engineering,” “Lords of Men,” “Divide and Conquer,” and “The Keepers,” were common, and even the names of bands displayed the tendency: The Screaming Trees, Rage against the Machine, etc. Moreover, what admiring critics said about Joy Division’s transmission of punk rock’s despair-ridden anger at society into despair about one’s own darkness (“from f-you, to I’m f-ed”) could apply to many other rock moments and bands, from the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” to the early Woods album Songs of Shame, which Morby played a part in creating. This long-standing rock-pattern of exploring bleak perspectives, which Morby salutes on “Provisions” with the line and cast your vision, on the dark road, for a while, could of course turn sour if that key for a while was ignored, which is why it sometimes provoked the “friend’s intervention” type of song, wherein a person who went too far into the black—often with the help of their own psychological and addiction issues--had to be pulled back, and reminded of life’s basic goodness, as in “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” There are thousands of such intervention songs, and “It’s Over” and “Random Act of Kindness” are definitely connected to that tradition.
But is now such a good time for poetic push-back against the pitfalls of the apocalyptic mindset?
Let’s go back to the recent conversation between Neal Oliver and Bret Weinstein I mentioned above. Oliver, up until the last couple of years was merely a popular British writer and commentator on archeology and history, and Weinstein, up until about five years ago, merely an Oregonian liberal Darwinian-science-enthusiast professor. Now, they are both known for speaking rather darkly and passionately about the existence of widespread vax-harms, and the societal import of this. Listen to them from 37:18-40:45 especially, and note where Weinstein telegraphically articulates “the topic” at the heart of the Covid/Vax Disaster, namely: “wrong at every level, captured across the board, no functional institutions.” (As a political scientist who remains appalled by people’s 2021 willingness to go along with vaccine mandates, I would add in mass apostasy from fundamental principles of liberal democracy.) Bret and Neil are good at conveying that the minimal condition for being able to talk about any of this, so as to have a chance of beginning to correct it, is going through the emotional turmoil necessary to see just how corrupt our society’s institutions now are, and how that could only be the result of “something’s that’s been going wrong for a very, very long time.”
These guys are right about the ABC facts of the situation—hear the whole conversation, or spend a few hours with Steve Kirsch’s substack if you haven’t been red-pilled on this—and at the more profound level, they are right about the fact that realism about our situation requires the admission of a set of truths that, as would be the case in an actually apocalyptic scenario, are quite difficult to deal with emotionally, and that do lead one to something of an (un-subverted) “It’s Over” mindset. For Oliver is right: the Western society of 1990-2020 really is over, in that even if we can restore major aspects of its functionality through a radical reform movement, we will never return to believing the basic story we told ourselves about it during those years.
So for a certain season, such bottom-line realistic thinking about our situation is going to bear a number of striking similarities to the apocalyptic mode, including to its more unhealthy aspects. Rock artists are not going to help themselves or anyone if they won’t bring themselves to discern this. We really don’t need more lyrics like these I noticed from La Luz’s 2021 album:
So the winds have changed,
And your blooming gloom’s become in fashion.
It would be a shame if rock, for so long a haven for the oddball who claimed his nostrils were detecting something deeply rotten with society, might now turn away from heeding such, and just when intuitions of his sort are being massively vindicated, and proving entirely necessary. Of course they come with basic dangers of mental health overreaction—see my “Out of Denial’s Frying Pan” essay—but we are obliged to deal with them nonetheless.
“It’s Over” and “Random Act of Kindness” are songs in the mid-zone, the place of poetically-amplified ambiguity, on one hand half-honoring the dark intuitions of so many that something basic has changed, but on the other, prepared to classify these feelings as due to a passing fashion and the “apocalyptic” mode.
Another way of putting it, as some far simpler lyrics from one of the (lesser) songs on Van Morrison’s latest suggest, is that in the midst of the most portentous societal change since the civil rights movement, and even in the midst of “It’s Over’s” confessed feeling that just-yesterday was the time when everyone was free, that Kevin Morby has taken too much care to craft songs that, at the end of the day, are sitting on a fence.
We’ll look at some of the songs from the new Morrison LP in the next Songbook installment.
I wouldn’t rank this new album as his very best, as this reviewer toys with. All of his seven albums are very good, but if forced at gunpoint to rank them, I would say: 1.) Oh My God, 2.) Sundowner, 3.) Still Life, 4.) Harlem River, 5.) a tie b/t this one and City Music, and 6.) Singing Saw.