What The HELL Am I Doing?
It's probably better to try to explain it now, and not later, when the streets will run with blood.
I know a guy. We met for the first time in a hotel room in Los Angeles. A friend brought him by in one of those rare impresario moments when it had been decided that this one guy who likes this one thing — in this case: philosophy, art and fighting and sometimes the artful philosophy of fighting — would like, and should know, this other guy who liked the same thing.
There was an initial wariness because? Well, because: LA, where the hustle is constant and continual and smoke up your ass is the order of the day. But before too long we were chopping it up over martial arts. Shop talk. Then he, a semi-successful actor, told me he also had some music thing going and I took a 100-foot-leap into snark, “oh yeah? Kinda like Keanu Reeves?”
He gave me a look but I gave back nothing. Or I’d like to think it was nothing and that my piss taking hit without me having to take the credit/blame for me being the hitter.
“Um,” he kind of laughed. “Well a band.”
We talked on about other things, made plans to talk again and then after he left I typed his name into a search engine and found out that he had been the first drummer for Sonic Youth and I had clumsily just maligned Richard Edson. I immediately texted him, intimating that I had known this all along, but I hadn’t. Not only that but I had seen him play. And not just with them but with his other Lower Eastside bands back in the late ‘70s.
Which is to say: I’m sort of an idiot. But he overlooked this and for a period of time we maintained some sort of working relationship with me trying to co-write a screenplay with/for him. This came to naught but he has become emblematic for me in a very weird and specific way.
“I would hope an OXBOW fan would be more open-minded…” said Dan Adams. And he’s right. Aaron Turner once said after hearing Thin Black Duke for the first time, “not what I expected, but everything I hoped for.”
His cameo in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? When Ferris asks the previously silent Edson if he speaks English and Edson responds, “what country do you think you’re in?”
The sentiment though, the sense of being out of place while in place, an outsider while never being more of an insider, while it’d not be appropriate to use the word “haunted” has forever been a feature of my time on this planet.
And not just for racial reasons if you’d be prone to think that and since that was the implication in the scene where Edson vibed Latino. But for a variety of reasons. Pulling into my all Black 8th grade school, the new kid, and the assumption was: he’s BIG, so he must be dumb. He’s a loudmouth, so very much the same.
Or the number of interviewers who’d ask a question to Whipping Boy, “so your band is half Black?” while talking to the half that was Black. “Or half White,” I’d usually add.
So while I haven’t spent a whole hell of a lot time explaining, I’ve come to find that explaining is useful.
“Are OXBOW lyrics about how tough it is to be young, Black and GAY?” A French photographer in St. Etienne once asked me at the merch table. I smiled. “Well you should buy the CD with the lyrics. It might help you answer that question yourself.” He then proceeded to announce to people over the years that I was Gay. I know this because people in St. Etienne, then Lyon, would say, “I thought you were Gay? I mean that’s what I heard.”
Whatever.
This bothered me about as much as it would bother me if people thought I was Chinese. Which is to say, not at all. I never felt I needed to explain this, and felt no pressure to do so.
HOWEVER, after reading review after review of OXBOW’s past records, I had started getting the feeling that while the reviews have all been universally (mostly) laudatory, that maybe, just maybe, people had really stopped listening. The same words were coming up in other reviews and it seemed that a shorthand was being developed for delivering on an OXBOW review.
We decided to try to change this dynamic and with the release of Thin Black Duke, we released The Thin Black Book, a limited edition, cloth-bound companion volume. So you might still get it wrong but you’d have no excuse for having done so as we laid out, in black and white, as it were, a cryptic guide for how to understand the music that had gone well beyond shopworn comparisons to the Butthole Surfers, the Melvins and Jesus Lizard, all bands we love, but not bands we hear when we hear us.
And it seemed to work.
So while listening to the Joe Chiccarelli mixes for the nine songs on next years Love’s Holiday (Ipecac IPC262LP), a discussion ensued regarding…”explaining”.
“I would hope an OXBOW fan would be more open-minded…” said Dan Adams. And he’s right. Aaron Turner once said after hearing Thin Black Duke for the first time, “not what I expected, but everything I hoped for.”
But the advice once given to Claudius — “trust no one” — has always been at the heart of OXBOW’s oeuvre. Which is probably why co-producer Niko Wenner who has sweated blood, sweat, tears and nails over this record, in following Rakim’s dictum of “no mistakes allowed,” is pro-explanation.
“Yes, OXBOW’S enduring eclecticism should work in our favor…but, as always, the story we tell about ourselves and this record, will be repeated back again and again in reviews of every kind. So, yeah…let’s….”
The fact that we recorded 19 songs for a nine-song record doesn’t tell the story. Not from my point of view. The fact that this is the first record post-the initial seven record cycle needs explaining and still only tells part of the story. Which starts with Fuckfest and wends its way through Thin Black Duke.
Which is my way of putting you all on blast and if after the book comes out you get your feelings hurt remember, hurt people, hurt people…
On the one hand while that’s seven plus records, if you consider the EPs, 7-inches and compilations, on the very distinctive other hand it is one record, set in motion way back in the late ‘80s. If we were German and named Wagner you’d have to listen to them all at once, every time you listened. But we’re not and so you don’t.
Love’s Holiday though? Simultaneously much easier to understand while being much harder to get as the emotional palette is not premised on the first cycle’s hysteria but very much more on existential end of life concerns. Maybe thematically it might be kind of correct to say the first cycle was all about “I’m going to die” patterned as it was on a suicide note. This second cycle? Maybe much more about “I am dying.”
And both gaining and losing the love that makes this tragedy not at all comical is lyrically what I might be singing about. Historical case in point while most of think about cherubs as funny, fat harmless babies it should also be remembered that Satan was part of the order of cherubim. So this is easy/not so easy to understand.
But how Niko and Chiccarelli have framed the musical portion created by OXBOW in its entirety? It will take decades to figure out.
Because there are golden nuggets at every turn in the Love’s Holiday road and we’ll have plenty of other opportunities to explain this but consider now that you have the first clue. Others will appear anon.
Until then I’ll be working on a memoir for Feral House, scheduled to be released around the same time that Love’s Holiday is. May or thereabouts. After reading every single memoir there is that touches on times I’ve been part of I’ve decided to do the one thing that none of the rest of them have done. Instead of simply describing events I’ve dug deep into thoughts and thought processes throughout without concern for feelings of those involved including mine.
These books are only successful in the degree to which they at least tell the truth and at the most, tell it in a way that scorches any attempt to preserve position, relationships or shame. Which is my way of putting you all on blast and if after the book comes out you get your feelings hurt remember, hurt people, hurt people, and I am sparing no one, including me most of all.
Outside of that? Outside of that it’s a total laff riot.
Should I get into the podcast, TV and film stuff happening in 2023 now too? Let’s not right now. Until the checks show up it’s all just ass smoke. Which might sound like party favors in LA, but to me? Just a waste of time.
Instead I will leave you with this: the most interesting place OXBOW has been asked to play in 2023 when Love’s Holiday is released? Istanbul!
Believe it.