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The Adult-Contempo Yoni Wolf

by OWEN ROBERTS

I heard Yoni Wolf's voice for the first time in Iowa City, at an independent record shop on University of Iowa's campus. I don't think I'd ever done this before or since, but I liked the music I heard playing in the store, and asked the cashier what it was. He was a big guy with light curly hair, and I remember thinking he seemed cool. He pointed to the cLOUDDEAD album, Ten, which was on display on a shelf across the store.

Ten is a weird album, and when I played it for my friends at home it instigated a long, arduous argument about the merits of music that made for such difficult listening. I defended the album aggressively, and after having spent my freshman year at Wesleyan University, where experimental music is kind of the Thing, I felt pretty righteous in my appreciation of all things weird. My friends thought it was obnoxious, meaningless, noisy crap that only pretentious dicks would like (paraphrasing).

Admittedly, cLOUDDEAD lyrics often don't make much sense. The argument was basically whether that meant that the songs themselves were meaningless. There were a lot of things that I didn't yet really know or think about at the time, like what it meant for white people to be making arty music that sounds sometimes like rap. But at the time we were hopelessly concerned with trying to parse some meaning from the words on the album. The album begins:

The wood man and his splintering self, The wood woman and her hollowing out The wood man and his splintering self, The wood woman and her hollowing out The wood man and his splintering self, The wood woman and her hollowing out Elvis, what happened Popsicle, the label stapled speaker, To the back of a sheep's throat, Tongue depressor with the width of a spatula suppresses all, Bah bah blah, bah bah blah, end end end quote

So this was a fruitless effort, but my point, however convoluted it may have been at the time, was that obvious ways of interpreting the lyrics were more or less pointless, because it wasn't about a message or anything like that, it wasn't supposed to be "meaningful." In the end, my friends didn't like the music (whether it was the lyrical content, the music or the general sort of ironic coolster vibe of the album) and I did, and our arguments were formed from such extreme sides that no middle ground would be reached.

I had more or less forgotten cLOUDDEAD when Why?'s Alopecia came out. When I heard Alopecia, I knew I recognized certain lyrics, but I couldn't remember where they were from. I became obsessed with Alopecia, but it wasn't until a few months later when I was visiting my parents in Richmond, and, going through old CDs to find something to listen to in the car, I came across Ten, and put it on in the car, and realized those were the lyrics I was hearing. Alopecia's "The Vowels Pt. 2" and cLOUDDEAD's "3 Twenty" share the phrase, "I'm not a lady's man, I'm a landmine / Filming my own fake death." It was a cool moment. I became more obsessed with Alopecia, and actually read some shit on the Internet about Yoni Wolf and anticon. I probably listened to the album twice a day for two months, maybe longer.

I told my friends about Alopecia, without mentioning the whole cLOUDDEAD thing, and then a few months after that I hung out with Taylor, my friend most ardently disdainful of cLOUDDEAD, who has been in Japan and not America for the past two years, but was visiting, and somehow Why? came up, and we started quoting lyrics to each other. He was as obsessed with the album as I was. It was like being dorky sixth graders again, singing lyrics together, except we weren't singing Smashing Pumpkins.

Why?'s forthcoming Eskimo Snow, which this piece of writing is ostensibly about, was recorded during the same sessions as Alopecia, but, according to the anticon press release for the album, "The vision for the separate albums emerged on a snowed-in night after a hot toddy or two. If Alopecia, however inexplicably, maintains a summery tone, then Eskimo Snow captures the bite and resignation associated with the Midwestern winters that these Cincinnati boys grew up with."

Snow is apparently a big deal in Cincinnati, at least Google Image Search leads me to believe so

Musically, Eskimo Snow, has more or less the same instrumentation as Alopecia, but all the edge of it's predecessor has been smoothed out, atonality and creepy samples abandoned in favor of major and harmonic minor chords. The album is definitely the most adult-contempo of Why?'s career, and though I don't feel that it has crossed the line to being boring, I hope it doesn't mean that it is "the direction he's going in" (it reminds me of a conversation I've had with several different friends trying to name an artist who got better or stayed at least as good as they got older). Anyway, the point is that the album is a lot cleaner and more "pop" than anything else he's put out. It's a long way from Oaklandazulazylum.

Eskimo Snow is also different from Why?'s earlier work because there isn't any rapping. Earlier Why? albums have always been a mix of singing and rapping, sometimes blurring the two. I wouldn't say that it represents a shift away from rapping for Yoni Wolf, though perhaps it is the result of increased confidence in his singing.

I've always wanted to write about Why? because I've thought a lot about the blend of indie rock and rap and the strange cultural space that Yoni Wolf has created within the contentious world of white rap, but the album I'm talking about doesn't having rapping on it, which may be good, because, for all the thinking I've done about it, I'm sure that Wolf has done a hundred times more, so for now I'll trust that he knows what he's doing.

I will say that I like Wolf's rapping because he raps about things that, though explored exhaustively in indie rock, are very foreign to hip hop, a genre that often seems preoccupied with machismo. He's pretty good at rapping, I think, but it doesn't sound like main stream rap because he writes about his neuroses a lot more than he does about money and women and how he's better at rapping than other rappers.

The hook of "This Blackest Purse," released a few weeks ago on RCRD LBL, has the effect of a lead single release. It contains the phrase, "Mom am I failing?" Imagine that coming from the voice of Lil Wayne or Eminem.

Well, maybe Eminem

Wolf's writing is bold in how revealing and frankly uncomfortable it can be. My relationship to Wolf's writing is similar to that of my favorite novelists, like John Updike or Philip Roth (not that they bear any resemblance beyond my familiarity with each--well, maybe Roth), where I find myself, upon starting a new book, often thinking things, "Oh, boy, why did you have to do that?" or "Okay, I'm just going to assume that this is sort of a joke." You get to a point where you feel personally involved with the work of an artist and feel disappointment or satisfaction with their decisions.

I love John Updike, but this book is fucking terrible, and I sincerely hope that it is supposed to be a joke

It's hard to tell if Wolf's boldness is intentional or not. The body of his writing creates a bizarre self-portrait, which is clearly a blend of fiction and autobiography. His frequent use of confessional and embarrassing references seems compulsive--both Alopecia and Eskimo Snow contain numerous references to crying both in public and in private. Unlike his writing for cLOUDDEAD, which is absurd and emotionally detached, the lyrics are so bluntly revealing they can be hard to take seriously (from "Good Friday": "Sucking dick for drink tickets / To the free bar at my cousin's bat mitzvah" is a good example). Parsing the "true" from the "fictional" in Wolf's writing becomes an obsessive but impossible game.

If Alopecia is obsessed with death and sex and the conflation of the two, Eskimo Snow shows a bit more self-consciousness about a particular form of posturing involved in singing so liberally about suicide, homosexuality, death and abuse, and the fictionality of his performance.

"This Blackest Purse," begins in this vein:

I'm not who, with my eyes from stage, I claim to be I've only cradled death in my own ending Flesh from far off and abstracted lit Candle wick flickering

And when a thing starts finishing around me I faint or fake a mustache, an accent, or flee In fear my expired license be pulled by sheer proximity

If nothing else, Wolf is always self-deprecating, and in Eskimo Snow he has found another issue to explore: the way he writes about his issues.

And I never got a name for my shady compulsion 'Cause I messed up and kissed my shrink in a Jersey City hotel room And I know saying all this in public should make me feel funny But you gotta yell something out you'd never tell nobody

I'm worried that it sounds like I'm starting analyze Wolf himself, but what I'm talking about is the way that his persona becomes convoluted through the repetition and variation of these themes. Parsing the real from the fake and the meaning from the style becomes the game of listening to Why? Wolf's songs are preoccupied with the minutiae of hipster style, romance, obsession; most things that young people experience, which is melded with his more bizarre rhymes about death, and decay and depression. The opening lines of Eskimo Snow, in "These Hands," cover most of everything he tends to talk about, including Jesus and his father (references to both appear often):

I wear the customary clothes of my time Like Jesus did, with no reason not to die Facing history, with little to no irony Like i'm some forgotten southern city, Sherman razed Still hid under thick smoke after all these years

These hands, are my father's hands but smaller Soaked in paint thinner, Until they're so dry coming together, They make the sound of resisting each other A shrill squeal like two moving rubber, tires touching Hide nothing, hide nothing

Alopecia and previous albums tend to dwell on death and suicide, and while those motifs are certainly present in Eskimo Snow, the album feels on the whole more somber than Why?'s earlier work. Descriptions of loneliness and emotional detachment appear in places that would have previously been occupied by references to masturbation (and occasionally alongside).

The detached edge Wolf brought to certain confessional lines is not so prevalent, though he occasionally drops lines like "Still sportin' my ex-girlfriend's dead ex-boyfriend's boxers." The general feeling of the album is one of maturity, the music is more controlled, the lyrics are more somber and have fewer moments of goofiness.

Although I discovered Alopecia after college, listening to Why? and any new music is heavily informed by my experience at Wesleyan, where there's a good experimental music program, and students spend a lot of time declaring things are "cool" and then later deciding they are not cool. I had the advantage of never having been cool, so being or becoming cool was way beyond me. But I made friends that had a different way of thinking about music, not one that is necessarily better or worse, but maybe a little more challenging in the sense that it became slightly more important to like good/cool music, but at the same time long, earnest discussions about the merits of an album or artist were no longer really acceptable.

So what my high school friends liked about Why? that they didn't like about cLOUDEAD was that the lyrics were more meaningful, but my college friends weren't into Why? because it isn't cool, in part because of the emotion expressed by the same words. "Cool" is a very general term. I guess what I'm talking about is that when I first discovered cLOUDDEAD I wasn't sure what I was listening to really, I didn't necessarily get the irony, I just liked the music and thought the rapping was interesting and funny. It's similarly difficult to say that Why? is cool or uncool, because it's hard to figure out what is ironic and what is serious. Music being isn't necessarily important, but it does have something to do with what you listen to and how you listen to it.

Rap is unquestionably cool, making bad rap unquestionably uncool, and being a white rapper doesn't help that, but it's more the earnestness of Why? that makes it uncool. Actually, my roommate Will (a Wesleyan grad) just summed it up perfectly: "It's a little too emo..." Emo is definitely not cool.

Deciding that things are cool is perhaps a pointless gesture, but it has a monetary correlative, which is people buying music and concert tickets and telling other people to do the same. I think the point is that Why? is interesting to me because it often seem deliberately uncool. It's weird, actually, writing about Why?, because I am not nor do I desire to be a music journalist, but I've thought a lot about the band and the lyrics, so writing about it is both a natural and unfamiliar activity. It's also strange, because I had never heard Eskimo Snow before I proposed writing about it, so I approached listening to it knowing that I would be writing this piece. The first few listens felt like work, but it is now like any other Why? album in that I find myself wanting to listen to it over and over again.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in New York. He last wrote in these pages about the history of the cookie.

"On Rose Walk, Insomniac" — Why? (mp3)

"Against Me" — Why? (mp3)

"Eskimo Snow" — Why? (mp3)

"Berkeley by Hearseback" — Why? (mp3)

The Best of Owen Roberts on This Recording

A short history of cookies.

Literary forgery breaks hearts.

Cory, Shawn, and Topanga.

Comments

[Eric]

Never really heard of any of these bands; I like what they're doing.

If you want to check out another rapper who takes a similar approach to lyricism, beats, and flow (but admittedly flows a lot better than this wolf fellow or mostly anyone else on these tracks (not saying that they're bad), you should check out busdriver, whom I really really dig.

Hey Owen, you ever listen to him? I'd really like to read what you have to say about busdriver (in resect to Why? and the "indie-rap" movement).

Also, I think it's really important to set indie rappers aside from "conscious" rappers, or even backpack rappers. It's not something you see being done so much, and I think it's really important to make that distinction.

[Annelise]

I found this post interesting, mostly because I'm a huge Why? fan, but also because you mentioned Iowa City, where I live. And The Record Collector is most likely the record store you were talking about. Your views on Eskimo Snow are pretty dead-on in my opinion. If you like Why? and cLOUDDEAD you would love Hymie's Basement and all other Anticon. label's artists.