When I got new Mountain Goats album Heretic Pride on Tuesday I listened to it so loud for so long that I temporarily went blind. THAT’S RIGHT I SAID BLIND. It caused a synaesthesic maiming, it’s so badass.
The internet has been inundated these last few days with reviews—a healthy dose of raves, a solid set of qualified-positives, a few thoughtful negatives, and a smattering of the inevitable snarky pans. Largehearted Boy has been doing a fine job of indexing them, so you can follow those links. Some of them are quite good—I recommend this recent Village Voice review/interview, even though it refers to the title track as “Springsteenian.” Hey, Village Voice! Comparing John Darnielle to Bruce Springsteen is my schtick! I don’t have much else, you know. Don’t take this away from me. I also recommend PrettyFavorite Conversely’s insightful write-up, which does a nice job of criticizing and avoiding the already crystallizing cliches about the album. Baton Rouge music writer Alex V. Cook has some thoughts worth sharing as well.
Anyway, I’m still taking the whole thing in; so far it’s standing up to multiple repeat listens in the way a great album should. Even as the rave-ups begin producing slightly less adrenaline, they still hold up well when considered 10% more dispassionately; and without the rush of blood singing in the ears, the quieter songs can begin to assert themselves a little more forcefully. (Though let me call it now: in 20 years, there will be at least a dozen teenage rock bands calling themselves “Lovecraft in Brooklyn.”) Adding Superchunk drummer Jon Wurster was clearly a brilliant move, and I can’t wait to see them live, assuming they make it here eventually.
But I do want to linger over the title track here for a moment. My face cracked right open when I heard it, and I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s been the song I’ve returned to most frequently so far. “Heretic Pride” is told from the perspective of a fellow who is being dragged from his house and executed in the town square for unspecified heresies. He is delighted about this: “The transfiguration’s gonna come for me at last / and I will burn hotter than the sun,” he sings; “I will be so proud when the reckoning arrives.” Darnielle’s liner notes describe this song as a “persecution fantasy”—not, notably, as a “song about a persecution fantasy.” The swelling—yes, Springsteenian—major chords, the open-road piano, the narrator’s palpable delight in the flavors and perfumes of a world about to burst into bloom, all work to suspend any narrative distance between singer, character, listener. There is no irony here. The protagonist’s joy at his impending doom is completely infectious, and part of the weird and wonderful way in which the song works is that to really get caught up in the song you have to get caught up in the spirit of the fantasy.
I suspect I respond to this particular track so strongly because it plucks all kinds of dusty cords for me. The first time I heard it I flashed back immediately to evangelical summer camp and to that most dreaded and feared of events: no, not the dance, which was scary enough—who to choose when the opening strains of Richard Marx’s “Hold on to the Night” begin to unctuate out of the PA system?— but the camp’s-end altar call. I have a vivid memory of one particularly fiery exhorter who wasn’t satisfied with the trickle of newly saved and re-committers wending its way down the aisles and so turned his attention to the long-churched among us. His pitch to us was a variation on the old question: Are You Ready? Ready, in this case, not for judgment day, but for the horrors that were soon to befall our nation: when the armies will be patrolling the streets and locking up Christians for their faith, when the wrecking balls begin swinging into steeples? Will we be ready to stand down the rifles and the tanks of those who deny Christ?
This was all pretty heady stuff for a bunch of middle-class junior-high white kids who were dazed from a marathon week of canoeing, swimming, and clumsy flirting; kids most of whose adult lives would involve them standing down nothing more intimidating than their kid’s soccer coach.* Kids living in a country where you can’t get elected president without professing some form of Christianity. But man was it effective at pulling bodies into the aisles—precisely because it appeals to the very un-Christian, but very junior-high, values of vanity and self-absorption. (And as various observers of American politics have noted, appealing to the privileged via the romance of persecution is a time-tested tactic for rallying a certain strain of fake conservative. For the South the romance of persecution goes at least as far back as the Civil Rights era, during which white southerners felt, or claimed to feel, themselves under siege by outside agitators who wanted to Destroy Our Way Of Life—a topic touched on in Welty’s classic “Where Is The Voice Coming From?” and in our own PF contributor Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ—pages 98-99, 167, you want to look it up.)
So the thing that grabs me about “Heretic Pride” is that it could have been the soundtrack for that altar call, the big praise song—a genre I’ve griped about before—we all joined in on to set the mood or to sing us out as we left the hall and avoided the tear-wet gaze of those who’d gone down front while we sweated in our chairs: simple verses, an arrangement easily adaptable to the standard church-band line-up. (It would be better than all those songs, of course, because it includes things like sensory details.) I mean seriously, take a five-second clip from this song and you could slip it into any one of those late-night ads for praise-song compilations. Third Day could cover this song entirely straight and it would top the CCM charts in six months.
So yeah, now I need to sit for a while and figure out just what percentage of my love for this song is a weird kind of nostalgia for a time (like this one) when I would happily indulge fantasies of myself as a victim of persecution in Christ’s name, and then figure out how comfortable I am with that.
UPDATE: Please enjoy this video of the newly be-drummered Goats performing “Heretic Pride” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I said “please,” but really, it was more of an order than a request.
The Now-Legendary Baton Rouge Halloween Mountain Goats Show
Review: Get Lonely
PF’s (already multiply revised) Mountain Goats Top 10
Mountain Goats in Baton Rouge: April 2005
Review: The Sunset Tree (“Darnielle on the Edge of Town”)
Gorjus’ MG show poster
Gorjus: “Sub-Par in the ‘90s (‘You and Your Memory’)”
*This is not to say that maybe some of these kids aren’t, say, doing missionary work in a country where they might actually be persecuted, of course; in any case, come on, persecution fantasies aren’t doing anybody any good.
...yknow it was via my darnielle obsession that i found yr site, not the comic stuff…
anyway, i love HERETIC PRIDE. LOVE IT. have been listening with a ridiculous zeal and it gave me the juice to wrap the last issue of CASANOVA V2.
Here’s a question. At first, i thought maybe it was a concept-less MG record, but now, the more I listen to it, I wonder if—if not a narrative concept—maybe this is a thematic concept record:
is HERETIC PRIDE a record all about monsters?
(love the site, mmmmmwah)
Right on! I think the idea works: Monsters and the monstrous. And the more I think about it even the songs that don’t seem to fit actually might fit very well indeed. For instance, I was thinking to myself, well, “San Bernardino” doesn’t quite fit into that pattern, does it? Except for being set in the place where Mike Warnke is from? Aren’t these kids pretty sweet and earnest, and don’t we like them? But! Then I thought more about the best lines in that song: “flaming swords may guard the Garden of Eden / but we consulted maps from earlier days / dead languages on our tongues.”
And now I see how it might fit after all: in order to get where they’re going, to do what they’re doing, they’re having to become something so unfamiliar, so outside the bounds of the socially acceptable, that it might as well be pre-human (if the G of E is where humanity metaphorically begins), un-human, demonic, monstrous, as far as everyone else around them is concerned. Maybe it’s a little self-dramatic, but that’s how they feel about it, and that’s what counts here.
Many thanks for the kind words—glad to hear that HP is leading to more Casanova!
I worry I’m being overly simplistic, but obviously Sax Rohmer created a monster. Lovecraft is an adjective for monsters. And swamp creatures, Michael Myers . . .
Maybe I’ve been listening too much to the amazing “vote today!” anthem “Down to the Ark” that Cud’n Darnielle did the other day, but “Heretic Pride” screams out a slightly different type of schadenfreude to me—maybe, just maybe a little bit, in a “brite blue dot” way. (A sticker I happen to have on my car). The sheer joyful validation of it all—the IN YR FACE! that being proved right can bring anyone . . . especially the outcast, the miscast, the no-cast, the heretic. Being singled-out as different can bring its own joys; when one is convinced the emperor is naked, screaming it out feels damn fine.
In this song, the heretic is absolutely convinced of their righteousness . . . I love it. It’s just so damn awesome. And I love that those brite blue dot stickers are now “in a temporarily red state.” A little heretic pride for everybody in 2008.
it’s funny, when my boy was born, i thought—really earnestly thought—that it was a shame darnielle hadn’t had kids, because i really needed a Mountain Goats “new parent” record. I’ll settle for “San Bernadino”...!
(the line “it was hard but you were brave/you are splendid” chokes me up every time)
it’s a naive, juvenile sort of monstrousness, isn’t it? a loosey-goosey theme at best but, i dunno, i can’t shake the thought, every time I listen.
god what a great record.
(the E.M.P.I.R.E. ship called THE RECKONER is an explicit HP connection)
Professor Fury your take on this first tune is so incredibly interesting! First of all the song topic is fascinating, like a weird remake on the struggle from Murder in the Cathedral, “for a little time the hungry hawk/ will soar and hover circling lower/ waiting excuse pretence, opportunity/ end will be simple, sudden, God-given.”
It reminds me, as well, of Nabakov’s Invitation to a Beheading. But then your musings on the teen campfire invitation is very perceptive indeed. I think that Jack of Jujitsu would have some things to say about the commitment to sacrifice, but literarily (is that a word), spiritually, and in this case, musically it certainly does carry a long and interesting tradition. Wonderful post.
The other thing that is brilliant about “San Bernardino” in terms of tying it in with the monstrosity theme is that moment right after the first chorus where in the background Friedlander very quietly does a kind of high-pitched horror movie tension-building thing on the cello. Or at least you could read it as such if you were so inclined. Over on the MG forums Darnielle said that every instrument on this track is cello, which is pretty amazing.
I am lately obsessed with “Sep 15 1983” and “Marduk T-Shirt.” I think this is going to be the album to blow the Mountain Goats up something huge. We’ll be watching them on closed-circuit TV in the overflow rooms of sold-out arenas by 2011.
It would be interesting to go back through and see monster-themed precursors in the MG catalog: “If You See the Light” from GL of course, and “Magpie” (and maybe all of Sunset Tree, in some way?), “House That Dripped Blood,” “Grendel’s Mother” obvs… “the ghosts that haunt your building have been learning how to breathe” . . . etc . . .
Looking forward to seeing what happens when The Reckoner arrives . . .
Just got my copy from eMusic (a great source for all MGs) and am looking forward to hearing what all the excitement is about.
You know, I haven’t listening to the record pretty much constantly mostly in a car (long trip this weekend) and I haven’t been able to really listen to the the lyrics closely, but I continue to be obsessed with the new sounds of this record—his voice is dancing around in places it hasn’t before, and I can’t say enough about the drums! I look forward to testing this monster theory more closely, but I’m willing to bet that there’s something very real to it.
Hope you won’t mind my intrusion, Professor, but I found my way here via Wikipedia, and I’ve been thinking about this idea of monsters (or monstrousness) as the theme of Heretic Pride. One thing I wanted to mention is that the high-pitched cello sound in “San Bernardino,” which I think happens after each chorus, reminds me of nothing so much as the electric whine of a flashbulb, such as on a Polaroid, recharging after the picture’s been snapped.
As to the title track, I was raised nominally Christian, but actually liberal secular rationalist, and I have a very similar emotional reaction to it (and to similar kinds of apocalyptic triumphalism elsewhere in Darnielle’s oeuvre, and elsewhere). So to make a mostly-unsupported and probably-invalid extrapolation from my own experience, perhaps it’s more that both the persecution fantasies of the Christian right-wing and that of “Heretic Pride”’s narrator tap into the same underlying impulse, than that the latter evokes the former as such.
Thanks for stopping by, Smadin—stick around for a while! I greatly dig the Polaroid flashbulb idea—if you poke around on here a bit, you’ll see we’re big into Polaroids. And I think you’re right that what Darnielle is tapping into is something very fundamental that manifests itself in a variety of social/political/theological ways.
Excellent piece, I can’t get this disc out of my head lately. I’m going to see John next month for the first time, very excited!
You’ve got to love the Mountain Goats for starting the first leg of their tour in Alaska and ending it in New Zealand. That’s a band who’s committed to their far-flung fans.
I don’t have a thing to add except that this was another top-notch work of Goats appreciation. Well done!
Thanks, Steve! As a belated follow-up, this recent Slacktivist post does a great job of describing and analyzing the martyr complex in certain strains of evangelical Christianity, especially those concerned with the end times.
Wow. Never heard of the Mountain Goats until a few weeks ago, when I heard this song. When I googled it, I got here through Wikipedia. That song has been agitating me since the first time I heard it. I am a long-recovering evangelical, but I had the opposite reaction: I visualized the madding crowd as the religious zealots, and the singer was the sinner. I didn’t know the name of the song at the time, but it seems to affirm my sense about it. Who knows.
Hope to check in again soon, Professor Fury sounds like a thoughtful soul.
I enjoyed this review almost as much as I enjoy the song.
I had a lot more written here (specifically, a long-winded comment expressing my appreciation for your bible camp anecdote), but as they say, brevity is like a wildebeest, yearning for the ripe apple of attention, which hangs from the tree of literature, which grows in the blood-soaked soil of the New York Times Bestseller List, which incidentally also nurtures the deadly comma splice!
Anyway, my heart thanks you for the writeup and for linking me to Slacktivist, but my head thinks you’re a jerk for keeping me up all night.
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