SUPERCHUNK: I HATE MUSIC

SPIN magazine, August 2013

 

Death is everywhere on I Hate Music, Superchunk’s 10th studio album. Sidling right beside us, doing air-guitar windmills on his scythe, from album opener “Overflows” (where “dead” is the third word frontman Mac McCaughan sings) all the way to bittersweet-ever-after closer “What Can We Do.” This is a record of grief, bristling with the anguish of what it means to survive, to re-evaluate your life after someone else’s death: “Everything is different / Everything is the same.”

As if that wasn’t quite brutal enough, McCaughan also dredges up a rhetorical question from that emotional swampland of punk-after-35: What does music mean in the face of mortality? “I hate music / What is it worth?” goes the opening salvo to “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo.” “Can’t bring anyone back to this earth.” It’s a line that pulls you up short—after decades of insisting this song or that album “saved your life,” you’re suddenly confronted with the fact that it actually won’t. It can’t.

It’s a line that leaves you embarrassed in your vulnerability; to have ever asserted otherwise seems like a denial of life’s terms. When you are past that youthful period when your whole identity is tied up in a faith affirmed by music, when the mortal aspects of life start to catch up with you—how do you orient yourself? The small god who lives in a perfect beat or solo, in the raw, chest-beating howl of some puerile punk… Is that the same god we curse out and bargain with when we are trying to keep the people we love here with us? On this album, McCaughan reckons with this belief system that has informed so much of his life. Yet the idea that music is everything is rather naive on this side of 40, and saying music is nothing is too hopeless, too cynical, it disorients the past. What to cling to?

I Hate Music is crushing in its poignancy, its ruthless weighing of what this whole mess adds up to (or doesn’t). “Put up your feet on the dash,” McCaughan cheers; he’s doing the math on life’s beauty to agony ratio, reasoning with memories from before his friend’s death and after. I Hate Music acknowledges music’s power to bless us with meaningful distraction. It can distract us from our mourning, too, though that’s all it can do; grief and music both have the power to distort reality as much as they cut through the bullshit of it all. Title aside, I Hate Music eventually (thankfully) comes down on the “everything” side of the argument.

All this is a heavier orbit than the usual “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old” sentiment of post-punk forty-somethings singing of their disenfranchisement from the scene they built. Chalk it up to the liberation of middle age or the certainty of an audience that has held fast (and aged with them), but the band clearly feels no compulsion to keep it light; they trust their music to hold up under all the heaviness of such examinations and trust us to be able to handle it as well.

All the frustration and anger at play on I Hate Music energizes songs like “Staying Home,” wherein the Hüsker Dü echoes that have trailed McCaughan since 1991’s “Cast Iron” have never been louder (the last thing you expect 10 albums in are Superchunk breaknecking like it’s Land Speed Record or bust). Ironically, it’s an anthem about not going out—the ultimate geezer cop-out—set to hardcore, the very sound of youthful vigor. Out of step, indeed. Other songs sit in awe of death, alive in the fresh hell of it, McCaughan’s eager-teen squeak of a voice still stretching toward those high notes. His voice is full of love and restless sadness, which tells as much of a story as the lyrics do, atop heartbreaking lines like “Oh, what I’d do / To waste an afternoon with you.”

It’s a perfect place for Superchunk to wind up, given this is a band that initially wooed us 25 years ago with “Slack Motherfucker,” indie rock’s quintessential bratty-kid anthem. Now, just as confidently, they have given us songs that map adult life, even if these anthems are more a mortality blues. But with I Hate Music, Superchunk prove that it wasn’t naive to believe in what music could do.