The Song: Modern Rube

The Song:  Modern Rube

Modern Rube is the first and greatest song of the Trump presidency. Of course this statement is bullshit, but that’s my lead sentence nonetheless... We’re only a year and three months into the shitstorm and Pitchfork has yet to weigh in on the issue as far as I know. But this, this boil in the form of a song started raising itself in my brain prior to the 2016 election. As with all of my creative forensic efforts, the exact month is unclear. I don’t keep a diary or journal (David Sedaris would be pissed!)  But I do remember kicking the idea around in February 2016 at my brother-in-law’s wedding out on a beach park in Tarpon Springs. The primary race was already getting ugly and I was trying like hell not to drink at this gathering. (I succeeded, by the way, and this is what the AA folks call a white-knuckle, dry drunk sober-- detached, distracted, and freaked.) On that day the mixture of NPR coverage in transit, and feeling out (pretending to get to know) new relations created a vertigo which guided me in the direction of Modern Rube. Am I saying that my brother-in-law’s new family is a bunch of hicks? No, far from it. But when I meet new people under (semi) formal circumstances, I go into a kind of socio-anthropological studies mode. I realize that this may not be a very endearing character trait and it doesn't make me look smart-- just jerky. But hey, I get it, nobody likes to feel like they’re being watched or judged for sport or diversion-- or watched at all. Sorry. Defense mechanism! But that’s what I did and this is the moment that the song started brewing.

I don’t want to get all etymological on this joint, but let’s suffer through a minute to use our Circle K feet and slash through the rube/reuben word idea and who I stole it from. (Don’t wash your feet or clean your toenails before we do this.) Here’s the reveal.  It was Hunter Thompson, and there you go. The carnival metaphor and its associated vernacular has lots of precedents in social and political criticism because… It works. It goes really good when you’re writin’. I’m just the latest jerk to come and grab onto it. But the current show is, well, unique-- and much freakier than the administrations of Nixon or Reagan (or Clinton, if you have a Libertarian/Anarchist worldview). This song is focused on the enraged dunce mentality that feeds the chaos magic shit storm of our current reality. This is a jam about the mechanisms of disorder, which of course is very punk (even if I sing like a pussy). It was after all, the responsibility of a carny to let the other grifters know when shit was going south. Here's what I’m talking about: universal complicity, everybody’s got bad teeth in the scenario and seemingly cannot find happiness, with the exception of doing micro-sadisms. But the micro-sadistic junk adds up and here we are. As for the Modern in the title, that’s a dumb joke that won’t play very well here, but I’ll try. It’s something along the lines of a hypothetical magazine title. Because, you know, nobody reads print magazines anymore and nobody uses the term rube anymore. Hilarious! Time as a concept is weird and hard to understand and it’s hard to relate to each other, but we kinda try (Not really. We’re self-centered animals) We will certainly fight about anything and ain’t it a thing to put your personal fury/fear/grudge into the most simple of social interactions. Yeah!

I had already done some work on the subject of rubes. (I’m like a scholar, majoring in Reuben Studies, man. Don’t that just bleach my karate trousers, yeah?) The song That Yellow Flag, took a shot at the behavior of the Tea Party movement in the wake of the 2008 Obama election. (I remember talking to my dad about it at the St. Pete Grand Prix.This felt exactly like explicating the plot of the Empire Strikes Back, which was another real one-sided conversation with dad, decades earlier.) As Modern Rube was taking shape, I realized that another chapter was required. A sequel of sorts. These true believers seemed to be skewing even more closely to the observations of Eric Hoffer A pattern was emerging and of course I’ wasn’t the only jackass to notice. It was more than just the trappings of rage that had changed... [For that matter, does anyone remember neo-conservatism? That seemed to end with the Tea Party uprising. It was the Tea Party coming up that led to the creation of That Yellow Flag. For now, let’s park that thread for another post on that song and/or the disappearance (and inevitable return) of the neocons. No one has gone anywhere. Except Cohen, Bowie, and Lemmy. They’re not here to help anymore.]

But there I was writing Modern Rube & thinking again about the weird self-hypnosis of the human animal and noticing the change in the branding of discontent (Not that the anger ain’t real. We can all feel that.)  Fast forward to an unnecessarily hot Thanksgiving at another set of in-laws: I remember running through an early version of Modern Rube. I was wearing a yellow Old Navy flannel (Uncool! Unfair trade!) I rolled up the sleeves. It was too hot for that shirt… Anyways, sometimes I drag an instrument to family gatherings (What the hell am I expecting to happen performance-wise anyways? Really! I have no idea how that’s supposed to go down. Sometimes I don’t even pull the guitar out of the case. I just show up and-- futz about non-musically, anxiously for hours.) Okay, here we were, and it was well over 80 degrees and I had overdressed based on seasonal expectations. My niece was less than impressed with my song craft. She was my main audience because she’d been taking piano lessons, so it’s like kinda related to her musical interests (Not really!)  Mom was supportive. She always is, but performing for her does much different work-- for both of us. This experience, as awkward as it was, still felt like something. I had made an effort in real time to describe what was happening as a songwriter. Modern Rube is important to me for that reason: a somewhat newfound ability to  articulate ideas in song form. (For most of my thirties it was a neo-beatnik word salad shooter routine. I think most writers go through this.) It’s still clumsy, but I think the effort matters in terms of moving forward with my craft.

Between these two stories (the Wedding and Thanksgiving) there’s my weird tale of the NYC vacation. We all have our version, our personal experience of the 2016 election night. This is mine. Before Thanksgiving, DL and I went up to New York because we could. We stayed downtown in the financial district; and, for Florida natives it’s nice to get a little piece of winter in the city (Please no more than a week though. Thanks much, that’s enough.) It was a great vacation, although the instinct to attach terms like, overall and, for the most part do seem all kinds of wrong when considering the end of 2016. But we really did have a good time up there. Looking back at the pictures, I had a huge mustache and a desire to consume lots of processed cheese. Museum visits happened. On the night of November 8th, I left the clock radio going, not really knowing how to set the alarm or the sleep functions. Like everybody (Popular vote!) in the US, I thought things would sort themselves out.

Me and DL go to sleep early, even in NYC. I wanted to drift off into the expected outcome and boring acceptance speech noises. Wake with a normal level of new president jitters. Needless to say, shit did not go down as most people (Hello popular vote, again!) expected and there were multiple fitful episodes throughout the night. This is the true beginning of the song. The outcome was an imperative for me. Real chaos had been unleashed and nothing-- no assumptions of human decency, rule of law, or conventions of conduct -- would ever be the same again.