In 2005, a young singer-songwriter made the first real misstep of his career. His albums were normally created around concepts, but until then, he had mostly managed to anchor these concepts in something personal, such as his homestate Michigan or his Christian faith. But when he made that aformentioned album about Michigan, he had stated that he was going to devote an abum to every state in the US, and so he dutifully set about creating an album on Illinois. As such, for the first time the concept seemed impersonal, it seemed to be something he felt obligated to do, rather than something he truly felt about, and the resulting album seemed researched and studied rather than felt, it felt much too constructed, and in the end, it simply rang false. Yet something weird happened: This album, his first one that would have to be called a failure, became his big breakthrough album. The critics, led by an internet publication coincidentally located in the state he was singing about, all declared it a masterpiece, and his fame increased tremendously. To the credit of this young artist, he didn't do what most would probably had done, which was to continue making albums that had proven popular even if it wasn't artistically succesful. Instead, he took a prolonged break, worked on other stuff, reworked an older album, which reminded people of how anomalous his breakthrough record actually was, and then returned with an album that was a complete departure from his popular style, plus statements saying that his 50 State Project was always kind of a joke. But, while the artist himself has seemingly recognized the lackluster results coming out of the undertaking, the public at large still hasn't realized this, with the aforementioned internet publication placing the album as the highest charting release of 2005 on their recently made list of albums from the last decade. Well then, this is an attempt at a reexamination. It will probably completely reverse the discourse on this album all over the world. Or it might be read by like, 20 people, and then be hidden on page 11 of Google, following blogs gushing over why Chicago is the best song ever. One of those two. Oh, in case the title of this post didn't tip you off, the album in question is Sufjan Stevens' Come On: Feel the Illinoise from 2005.
Actually, I've kinda already explained that the problem is the studied and impersonal nature of the record, but just to give an example: The second half of the title-track-suite is called 'The Ghost of Carl Sandburg Visits Me In a Dream', and it opens with the lyrics 'I cried myself to sleep last night / And the ghost of Carl, he approached my window' Well, if this album wasn't a concept album on Illinois, I might believe this, but now it just seems incredibly coincidental. No, he probably wasn't visited by Carl Sandburg, he probably read his books as research. And so, he probably didn't cry himself to sleep as well, he is just really exagerating. It just rings false. Perhaps, Stevens was aware of this problem, the song repeats the question 'Are you writing from the heart?' And no, coming after a quirky and funny rumination on progress and the Word Fair in Chicago in 1893, he seems to write more from books than from his heart.
The biggest misstep on the album, however, is the following song, John Wayne Gacy, Jr, about the infamous mass murderer. Well, when you are going to make art out of a tragedy, and in a best case scenario make money out of that art as well, honesty and purpose becomes even more important. If a song about seeing the ghost of Carl Sandburg rings false, it just seems silly. When the same thing happens to a song about killing young men, it unfortunately seems like exploitation. And the song on Gacy rings false. Again, it suffers from being located on a concept album about Illinois, that alone means the concreteness of the tragedy is disminished. But when Stevens actually tries to describe the humanity of his victims, he does it with the vague and inconcrete lines: 'Twenty-seven people, even more / They were boys with their cars, summer jobs / Oh my God' That high pitched Oh my God is probably the worst moment in his entire carreer, completely unearned and phony, fake outrage invoking more anger than anguish in me. When Jeff Mangum set out to make In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, he managed to make his ruminations on the murder of Anne Frank seem personal and from the heart, even though he alowed the creepishness of the concept to take center stage. This is the opposite of that. It reminds me of rubbish Oscar-bate based around Holocaust or mental illness, or something else that will make the studios and the stars seem more human. It's just horrible. And the ending of the song is even worse. After describing the murderer and the murders, Stevens reaches this conclusion: 'And in my best behavior / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid' So many themes are touched upon in this song, and Stevens thinks the lesson we should take away from this, is that secrets are bad. This is such a weird conclusion, it both seems so safe in how it skirts away from for example the repressed homosexuality of Gacy, the mood concerning homosexuality at the time, which probably made Gacy repress himself that much more, the death penalty etc. And yet it is also infuriating in it's equating between secrecy and murder.
But two duds does not a failed album make. No, the problem with this album is, that the framework means, that the whole ends up less than the sum of it's parts. To illustrate, take Casimir Pulaski Day. It's a great song, an absolutely heartbreaking description of the death of a girlfriend from cancer, and how it makes the narrator question why God would let it happen. The last line, when the instrumentation cuts out and Stevens sing 'And he takes and he takes and he takes' is immensely powerful. It's a wonderful song, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Illinois, except that the woman dies on the titular state holiday. Well, the song is meant to inspire heartbreak and religious introspection, but I'll bet the most common response is to go on wikipedia and read about the Polish general mentioned in the title. The framework ends up hurting the song ever so slightly, it might not seem like much, but on the other hand the ties to the concepts doesn't add anything. The detail that the death takes place on this date does not make the story seem more real, on the contrary, it seems awfully coincidental. But again, on it's own, it is a great song. In context, it suffers. Just like that, I'm not saying Illinois doesn't include some great music, some great songs, an abundance of great ideas. But as an Album, it fails. Again, that might seem like stating the obvious, seeing as the album contains 22 tracks in 74 minutes, but this is Indie-rock we're talking about, a genre that has always prided itself on being album oriented, being both grander and yet more personal than glossy popmusic, and so it seems weird that an impersonal concept album that so obviously fails as a concept album just gets a free pass. I too, of course, adore Chicago and Decatur and some of the other stuff, they belong on a list of the best tracks of the decade, but the album itself has nothing to do on such a list.
Well, enough with the moderation. On with the thrashing and the implying. On to the thorny issue of Representation. The idea that, when you set out to make an album about a whole state, you have a responsibility to represent people of all kinds, ethnicities, sexuality, religious inclination, and not just paint an entire state like white surbubanites, with a few dead poets thrown into the mix for kicks. And, well, I actually don't really agree with this idea. I mean, I'm criticizing the album for being impersonal, it would be hypocritical to then on the other hand criticizing the album for not including enough other personalities... So for me, the hardly significant amount of blackness, in both the music and the lyrics, seems more archaic and weird than offending to me. But here we are, just 6 years later, and Illinois has been used as the foundation for the career of the first black president of the US, and is the homestate of the biggest rapper in the world (Kanye), and this album represents the feel of the state through banjo and Reich'ian minimalism. I've never been to the state, but it does strike me as odd. Of course, the archaicness is by design, the album is mostly concerned with stories from the past, and while the front cover invites us to 'Feel the Illinoise', that seems more toungue-in-cheek than a claim to accurately capture the spirit of the state.
This video shows how diminished the song can become: It's all just mentions and allusions, signifying nothing. I love those harmonies, though...
No, actually the album becomes much more problematic when Stevens actually touches on problems and issues, for nearly all of the time he leaves it at just touching them, and immediately skirts away to safer pastures. I've mentioned how John Wayne Gacy, Jr ends up blaming secrecy for the murders, but there are other examples. Take the second track, the instrumental 'The Black Hawk War, Or, How To Demolish An Entire Civilization And Still Feel Good About Yourself In The Morning, Or, We Apologize For The Inconvenience But You're Going To Have To Leave Now, Or I Have Fought The Big Knives And Will Continue To Fight Them' It's the ony mention on how the state is actually based on getting rid of it's original inhabitants, and it's played for laugh. Never mind that the track seems almost triumphant - it seems to describe a birth, the birth of the album, the birth of the state, and it seems to build on the first song, which describes something indeterminate and formless. In other words, it's way too clever for it's own good - the problem is, that the Native American experience is actually excluded from the rest of the album, and just mentioning them in a songtitle - no matter how long - just smacks of tokenism. The same problem arises when the next to last song is entitled: 'Riffs and Variations on a Single Note for Jelly Roll, Earl Hines, Louis Armstrong, Baby Dodds, and the King of Swing, to Name a Few' All fair and good, but actually incorporating their experience and their music into the album would have shown much more respect. Another example was apparantly changed before release, as I found reference in a review on Uncut to a track that was called 'To The Workers Of The Rock River Valley Region, I Have An Idea Concerning Your Predicament, And It Involves An Inner Tube, Bath Mats, And 21 Able-Bodied Men', which on the final tracklist has been cut after 'predicament'. Which is for the best, as it yet again just skirts over real problems and uses them for a joke. The problems in the aforementioned region seems to be outsourcing of industrial labor and high unemployment, but the more realisticaly titled 'To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and it Involves Higher Taxes for the Richest, Socialized Health-Care, and Massive Investments In Public Education' would probably have been somewhat divisive. Also, while I really like that the upbeat Jacksonville, which seemingly praises the spirit of progress and of America, is followed by a ruminative coda, which to me seems to reflect on the fact that America, while undoubtedly in the running for best country in the world, still is fraught with problems, conflicts, and peope living on the margins. But then it is called 'A Short Reprise For Mary Todd, Who Went Insane, But For Very Good Reasons'. Mary Todd was the widow of Abraham Lincoln, and it just seems offensive to me to actually invoke the history of the Civil War, with all the horrific stuff connected to it, and seemingly asking us to remember the plight of the white women of that time. In this instance, black history is completely kept out of sight. To sum up, the word that best describes how Stevens deals with political and social issues in Illinois is perhaps 'escapism'. He mentions them, and then immediately skirts away, or plays it for laughs. It would actually have been better for me, if he just kept to describing his own childhood and relationship with the state, instead of touching on these issues now and then, but doing nothing with them.
But why, if this album is bookish, studied, impersonal, escapistic, and filled with unfortunate politics, why has it become a touchstone on the indiescene in the last decade? Well, parts of the discourse sorrounding the album is just wrong. In the blurb on the album in Pitchforks list of Albums of the Decade, the conclusion reads: 'Stevens' self-confidence manifests itself in having enough belief in his own voice to tell everyone else's story-- all geographical namedrops aside, Illinois could've been relocated anywhere and it would still be nothing short of universal.' With this, the studiedness and the impersonaity of the album suddenly becomes a strength. And well, it's just wrong. This album simply couldn't have been relocated to Denmark, for instance, it sounds extremely American, the serial-killers, the bible study, the banjo and the sense of expanse. Nope, this is a midwest abum through and through, and it suffers from sitting between the two chairs of the personal and the universal, without actually achieving either. But then why is this album so popular?
In The Recognitions, William Gaddis' massive proto-postmodern tome on Art, Falseness and Boho's - definitely one of the best books I've never managed to finish - several characters mouth musings on the same theme, first stated as: 'Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest' (p. 252) This is of course exceedingly true of the indierock scene, where a knowledge of styles and diffusive, allusive lyrics are very common. It is perhaps the cleverest music style, and unfortunately often the least honest. At times the contradictions in the music makes it capture the times, and makes it that much more relatable, at times it makes it able to rise above the clichés and prejudices of the day. At other times it just seems phony. Illinois rings false in my ears, but it still seems like the most purely enjoyable of Stevens' recordings. Michigan is filled with real anguish concerning the plight of the working class in a postindustrial age, and I feel uncomfortable with the Christianity on Seven Swans. Those two albums are uncomfortable listens. A few songs aside, Illinois makes me feel sophisticated and clever. But is that really the best indie-rock can aspire two? That Illinois, the only feel-good failure in the discography of this great, inventive singer-songwriter, has become the consensual pick for Stevens' magnum opus, unfortunately speaks volumes about the problems of the scene as a whole. At least in my humble, yet perhaps obsessive, opinion.
