Gentlemen by The Afghan Whigs

Aside from a piece by Charles Ives called Symphony No. 4, I’ve been scared by music one time, and that was due to the above. I don’t say that assuming music is something which regularly scares people; and I don’t mean that I was scared as in it was loud or different or it startled me. I didn’t like what it was telling me because I believed this album was telling the truth, and it sounded like the voice I always heard saying, "It's not going to work out for you, so stop."

Many times I dragged it out and held it only to rest it back on the shelf. I realized, at a point in my life when I was entering a deep depression, that it had the capability of dragging me in further and making me more pessimistic than I already was. It’s unrelentingly honest—and one of my favorites—but there’s an intensity in the way it tackles a pop song trope (the love song) as no one else does. There’s a reason other writers don’t go in this deep. It makes you feel like you’re watching the end of your life as a spectator, it’s so disassociating and emasculating. And that album is an album called Gentlemen.

In 1993 I was ten and didn’t care about music and this was released. Andy Shanks introduced it to me through the Smile Shop, sometime in 2004. I remember buying it while I was in my first semester at Penn State, so it had to be somewhere around then. I was very lonely; it had been a little while since I’d had a steady relationship because the previous one had ended so badly (all part of my attempt to move cross-country and figure out who I was); and my fear of this music was a natural extension of a failure I really shouldn’t have taken so seriously. But I was 21 and dumb enough to be so invested in a pop album.

I worked at Barnes and Noble in State College that year and spent my time being pursued by cute and troubled girls. Looking to avoid frequent scheduling on weekends, I opted to work from 7-11 AM on Wednesday mornings, before my drama class. It didn’t work. They just overscheduled me instead. But early mornings in autumn and winter I had this album in my head, as I walked from Beaver Hall (oh, the irony) up to my parking lot by the football stadium, near the end of campus. Steam flew off the heated pool and students—usually women—jogged alone around me. Everything else was dark and quiet and the sun wasn’t yet over the mountains trapping us in Happy Valley. I lived in a surplus room with five other guys, got up earlier, and dressed in the dark. I probably would have felt more unusual or alienated if I wasn’t in a phase of my life which sort of amounts to killing time. College is like a pacifier for young adults. Some are workaholics (in a good way) who make the most of it, but you essentially pay a lot to live next to a nice library, because that’s where you’re going to do the real learning. There and out with your friends.

The other big album for me that season was Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom, which is pretty similar thematically, except he’s too focused on his lyrical abilities to really unleash like Greg Dulli does here. Nothing wrong with that. Costello’s album is so concerned with artifice that it would be hard to ever feel it. He impresses a little more than he inspires, whereas Dulli has created a work of purely visceral power. Walking alone those frequent mornings I thought about the girls I’d met through the boyfriend of an old friend: the confused exhibitionist, the heroin addict, the overweight rich girl looking for attention. They were all scary and fascinating and part of a world I felt too hot to step in though I wanted to strangle it and hold it and become part of it. I was annoyed when our mutual friend warned me about all of them while insisting I hang out with the social group they belonged to (many of them with their own addiction problems), and while I found these girls wanting to spend time with me. Too much confusion. I hate mixed messages. As I felt trapped in between relationships, wondering if any love I’d find at that point was just a potent mismatch of personal issues like my own parents’ marriage, I think I found too much to listen to in Gentlemen. Perhaps I’d have felt differently if a nice church girl came after me.

The songs are unforgettable, Nat King Cole full of bourbon, aftertaste of trespass dripping off his tongue, love making with no sense of being human, religious self-loathing. This guy’s a mess, but he’s also everyman—in a sense—and that marked familiarity, so surprising when it knocks you down, is what stops the songs from letting you out of their grip. I wouldn’t say that everyone is literally like this, so ravenously pathetic and full of an unimpeachable bile, but I did say the album was honest. I can’t really argue with the relationship issues Dulli’s trying to illustrate, because we all end up there at some point. We’re very imperfect and it’s our acceptance of that which leads to the relationships we want to have. You never get rid of problems by trying to outrun them. The character in these songs isn’t able to do that yet. He’s still stuck on his bar stool, face in drink, wondering why life isn’t just playing out the way he’s been taught it would: nice girl, nice house, nice job. Instead he finds himself talking about “what jail is like,” when he’s thinking about his relationship. His biggest fear is the woman who accepts him no matter what he does. Isn’t that something most people are looking for, more or less? Yet he’s smart enough to realize that his callous behavior is a cry for help and she must be even more troubled to stomach the abuse. He is wise without wisdom.

He has all of the elements of a human being without being able to figure out how all of those opposites fit together. The parts are confused, mixed up like the album. The music switches between excited and relaxed passages, two necessary dynamics: excited and relaxed, male and female, dark and light. The narrator attempts to reflect during the more restrained periods, but each time he has to confront himself and his flaws he becomes emotional and agitated and the song becomes more punishing. It’s as if the music is his girlfriend, accusing him. “I’ll warn you, if cornered, I’ll scratch my way out of the pen,” he sings. “You think I’m scared of girls, well maybe, but I’m not afraid of you.”

“If I Were Going” and “Brother Woodrow” are comparatively peaceful, which is also the mode of expression this guy chooses when he’s willing to contemplate both sides of the relationship a little more (he’s unable to do it totally). When he’s talking about just himself, though, he doesn’t let up. “Am I okay? I am sure I’m not,” he says on “Be Sweet.” Lyrically it’s like a personal ad printed from the inner black-tar regions of the psyche, where little is visible and the sensations are extreme, smoke instead of land. In Sexual Personae, when Camille Paglia says, “Men know they are sexual exiles. They wander the earth seeking satisfaction, craving and despising, never content,” she’s writing about this character (Page 19). Men and women, too often, expect the worst from each other and always end up disgusted and surprised when they get it. Women are supposed to believe all men are jerks and men like to think women never want a nice guy. This guy believes in the lie and lays out his understanding like an explorer, which is what makes him sound almost intelligent. He understands it to be true as a way of protecting himself, though in isolation he knows “she wants love” while he “just wants to fuck.” Too bad he can’t admit to her that it’s a construct. Everyone wants someone nice unless they’ve been conditioned to accept less, and those “nice guys” too often focus more on finding a female than finding a truly compatible partner, so they always lose. The guy in these songs wants to lose too. He’s digging himself into the hole, throwing himself into jail. The woman has little to do with it. She’s just foolish and tortured enough to go along for the ride, like the heroin addict I knew, who didn’t pay her apartment’s utility bills and slept over in her ex-boyfriend’s dorm room, where he sold drugs from a sock drawer while she and I studied for finals.

Obviously, I was afraid of being in jail, too. I already felt myself looking over the wall from the outside, feeling like I wouldn’t find anyone because there wasn’t anyone for me. They were full of their own problems. And, of course, I was too. I was too miserable for a relationship then, too unsure of myself, not entirely unlike this guy. He’s demanding and needy, even though he’s probably convinced his partner that she’s the needy one, only because she wants him to be a man. But he’s a gentleman, a construct, an image, not a human being. He’s a shape in a tuxedo holding flowers instead of being the compassionate organism she’s looking for and letting romantic gesture flow from that. He’s wondering why he’s even in the relationship, though it’s obvious he hates being alone if he’s willing to put up with their broken home. The difference between Dulli’s straw man and me is I’ve never wanted to be in a relationship to be in a relationship. I’ve only wanted to be in a relationship that was a relationship. I never wanted to feel trapped in time, stuck in place, watching the poles on my headboard turn into cell bars. In the liner notes, each page is marked “Page X.” In this relationship, there is no sense of place, everything’s the same. That’s why the songs sound like a guy looking back on his relationship, especially since the album opens with the sound of flies over a corpse. But the song’s called “If I Were Going.” And the conclusion is called “I Keep Coming Back.” He can’t live with leaving and he can’t deal with staying. He is going nowhere.

I’m not as afraid to listen to this album anymore. Periodically I find myself hesitant, but that probably has more to do with my memories instead of some vague temporal fear. The past only controls us so much as we want to keep reliving it. Change is scary. But doing something dangerous like throwing yourself into the pit of the future can be pretty exciting, too. And I know my chances of finding myself sitting next to that sock drawer are a lot less like than that girl’s, though I wish her the best of everything. Since the autumn I’ve gone places and found myself a lot closer to being somewhere, even if I also came closer to living out these songs in the process. But I’m not a song, no one is. My achievements mean I get to appreciate this album as a fine work instead of accepting it as some sort of sentence. Happy or embroiled, it’s worth listening to and poring over. Just remember that after 50 minutes it ends. So let it.

That’s Gentlemen, and it’s by the Afghan Whigs.