Pitchfork
Review:
J. Matthew Gerken, Christian Kiefer,
and Jefferson Pitcher:
Of Great and Mortal Men: 43 Songs for 43 U.S. Presidencies
[Standard Recording; 2008]
Rating: 7.6
Politically and musically, it's the perfect time for Of Great
and Mortal Men, a 3xCD anthology on which J. Matthew Gerken, Christian
Kiefer, and Jefferson Pitcher write songs for each of the 43 U.S.
presidents. Tomorrow, of course, marks the symbolic end of an
interminable election cycle that began in earnest with Barack
Obama and John McCain's speeches at their parties' 2004 conventions,
and has since permeated all corners of American life. Indie rockdom
itself is more than ripe for this sort of endeavor, in which the
civic-minded children's theatre of Sufjan Stevens' Illinois is
blended with currently popular sounds of sepia-toned Americana.
Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln's hometown, while McCain
compared him to Herbert Hoover: If there were a time for a folk
song about Benjamin Harrison and the tariff flap, it's now. More
importantly is what this collection represents: When the electorate
is seemingly more engaged with battleground states than, well,
real-life battlegrounds, it's important to consider, as Of Great
and Mortal Men does, that the dominant narratives we're given
are woefully incomplete stories.
Though it goes against every fiber of my critical being, I have
to award this project significant points for effort. It took shape
as Gerken, Kiefer, and Pitcher's effort to write 14 songs in 28
days for the fawm.org website, and quickly expanded to writing
42 songs during February 2006, saving our current leader for last,
and with the promise of a new song for tomorrow's victor (we'll
hope there's not a line about the Supreme Court or whatever Diebold
is calling itself these days). The trio brought in dozens of collaborators
to flesh out the demos, and the collection's most recommendable
trait is its variety of tone-- from the post-rock muscle of the
James K. Polk entry (assisted by Austin band Monahans), to the
shaggy Crazy Horse riffing on the second Grover Cleveland piece,
which follows the banjo-folk first effort. Rosie Thomas lends
a jazz-inspired vocal to the Jimmy Carter number "A Great
Beam of Light", and James Jackson Toth adds sepuchral ambience
to Kiefer's Lincoln portrait, on which he pulls lyrics from his
two inaugural addresses and Gettysburg remarks. Indianapolis-based
Standard Recording Company packaged the final set with an booklet
(hardback would have been much better, but also no doubt prohibitively
expensive) containing lyrics and original commissioned artwork
for each President, but that's not all: There's a blog as well,
which includes production narratives and even advice for educators
seeking to use the collection in the classroom.
All this would be as worthless as a yard sign on November 5 if
the music weren't good, and for the most part, it is. This isn't
the Capitol Steps, folks: True to its name, Of Great and Mortal
Men underscores the fact that even the most lionized American
political icons are made of flesh and bone, subject to strange
fates and prone to making massive mistakes only visible in rearview
mirrors. Many of these songs are imagined deathbed confessionals
masking clever historical revisionism: Kiefer's George Washington,
who elementary school history tells us never lied, divulges that
"those dumb asses believed me," while a trumpet solo
by Cake's Vincent DiFiore lends a nice touch of Colonial ambience.
Califone was brought in to arrange and perform Kiefer's "Such
a Marvelous Dream", in which Ronald Reagan recalls his term
in office as a movie role through the haze of dementia, and they
also lend a surreal soundscape to Andrew Jackson's defense of
his Native American ethnic cleansing: "And I did it and they
stood in the way of God's whole plan." Bill Callahan's signature
baritone is perfect for historical storytelling, and his performance
on the John Tyler song "In Hindsight" is one of the
collection's finest.
The music on Great and Mortal is solemn but never blandly reverent,
and frequently detours into harrowing territory. Pitcher's approach
to John Quincy Adams is as stark as his Ralph Stedman-influenced
watercolor in the booklet: "The icy water runs through the
night and awaits my warm skin. Before the rising sun, I will bare
all and enter the Potomac." Magnolia Summer contributes accordion,
violin, and lap-steel to the surprisingly uptempo William McKinley
offering, written from the perspective of his anarchist assassin,
who asserts, "Let Emma Goldman be the judge of me."
Pitcher allows a distant voice to recite reconstituted notes from
one of William Howard Taft's aides, recounting the mundane horrors
of the President missing a golf outing due to contracting gout.
Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart contributes eerie vocals to the collection's
chilliest number, a stark post-Great War narrative seemingly written
from the perspective of a veteran. New York singer-songwriter
Reid Maclean gets the collection's most resonant line, written
by Pitcher about bachelor James Buchanan, whose presidency ended
in 1861: "A war it will come to bury lonely me".
The most successful works here are those that stay in an impressionistic
pocket, eliding too much detail and staying off the soapbox. Gerken
is the most frequent transgressor in this regard, using cited
quotations like a term paper (from his Harding song: "'An
army of pompous phrases, moving across the landscape, in search
of an idea,' said Bill McAdoo"), and drawing tenuous connections
to the current moment, like noting that Martin Van Buren's wife
was "scrubbed from existence in an early attempt to create
history simply with talking points". It should be noted that
one of the record's best moments, however, does deal with decidedly
non-political material. Called "Zinger", Kiefer's ode
to James Madison is a tongue-in-cheek, Sufjan-esque paean to First
Lady Dolly, now "known to every sticky fingered chubby from
sea to shining sea."
A bit like "Zinger" feels exceedingly appropriate at
the current moment, as do Gerken's blog-like minor polemics. We're
staring down the most important election in a generation, and
are exhausted because it's also the most widely documented and
thoroughly narrativized, with a film about our current president
in theaters before he leaves office and voters asked to make decisions
about the next leader of the free world based on hockey-coaching
résumés, the words of would-be plumbers, and a candidate's
middle name. Bush II has frequently noted that his term in office
will be vindicated by historians a century hence, but here's hoping
that Kiefer, Pitcher, and Gerken's mini-biography figures into
that story: "We don't need the strength of the world's great
minds. We'll just say we're right". Crowdsource this: Whether
the trio's final entry is about a frequently downed pilot who
married rich or a skinny half-Kenyan who mines rhetorical gold
is crucially, in the end, up to us.
- Eric Harvey, November 3, 2008
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