Lambchop - Live at XX Merge (Merge, 2009)

Every southerner with aspirations of leaving the south has an exact, definable moment where they realize that their dream is an improbability. Mine just happened to take place in Nashville. I was taking a tour of Vanderbilt University at age 18. I was being shepherded around the campus with a group of other high schoolers from a variety of different states. I didn't talk much. I didn't ask many questions. I already knew that I was meant to go to Vandy. How could I not be? I was captain of the (laughably horrible) debate team at my school. I was editor of the (shockingly award-winning) newspaper. I was even president of the National Honor Society. Vanderbilt is the Ivy League school of the south and I was the prized student at Starkville High School. I was third in my class, but it was the strongest third you could imagine. I belonged there.

After tours of lecture halls, cafeterias, and dorms, our guide led us to a room for a presentation on the acceptance requirements and financial aid aspects of the Vanderbilt application process. It was boilerplate college tour stuff, generally the kind of thing that makes the kid's eyes glaze over and makes the parents sweat. My mother's eyes widened at the tuition expenses and small likelihood that my distinctly middle class family would qualify for any sort of financial aid. I remained resolute. I knew it was a done deal.

Then they showed me the map.

It was a map of the United States, with different sections of the country highlighted by how many students they accepted from each state. Every state had a number that reflected how many students they had accepted from it in the last four years. Mississippi's was 0-1 per year. 

My heart sank. I had become so used to being the biggest fish in a microscopic pond that I hadn't stopped to consider the greater cultural context of Mississippi. I realized that I was the only kid in the room with a nametag that boasted he was from Mississippi. These were kids from far off places like New York City, Chicago, and Boston. I was only the third best student at Starkville High, disqualifying me from being that year's top Mississippian, let alone the best of the last four years. I didn't sit in on a class that day. They gave me the opportunity and my mother rightly attempted to hound me into it, but I was crushed. I had the Mississippi Stink on me. I ended up visiting a few record stores and going home with a No Age CD and no hopes that I would get into Vanderbilt. 

That same story applied to almost every college I applied to. I got into every school in the south that I applied to, aside from Vanderbilt (which, let's be real, is barely southern) and absolutely nothing above the Mason-Dixon line. This felt like accepting my own mortality, in a sense. For the first time in my life, I was seeing my own existence through the eyes of someone who didn't live in Mississippi. I was talking to a friend who still lives in Starkville recently about how he and his wife went to Outback Steakhouse on their honeymoon. To anyone else, this might seem sad. To him, it was a good meal that he knew he couldn't get at home. The realization dawned on me in the presence of God, my mother, and a completely oblivious tour campus guide that I was more or less the Outback Steakhouse of high achieving high school students.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Starkville. I had a a great life there, the kind of childhood that leaves you with enough privilege to even have the opportunity to be disappointed in a Vanderbilt classroom like I was. I had friends. I played Black Keys and Kings of Leon covers in bands. I played Magic: The Gathering until 2 AM on Fridays. But I was angry. I felt angry every time I opened Pitchfork and read a tour schedule. I felt angry every time I heard about some new food trend, knowing that it wouldn't hit my part of the world for an entire presidential term. Going to college in another state felt like my only way to escape living in a three street town.

I feel a lot differently about it now. I live in Memphis. I ended up going to Ole Miss in Oxford, MS for college, which is about two hours north of Starkville. Memphis is about an hour north of that. I've been joking for years that I'm slowly making my way to Canada, one southern cultural exchange at a time. At this point, I don't think I'm leaving Memphis until I have to. I don't know if it's the existence of craft breweries, real concert venues, drinkable tap water, or the record store where the clerks know me by name, but I've grown to like it here. A large part of making that workable is the slow acceptance of my southern identity.

I, like most people from the south, have an extremely complicated relationship with the concept of being southern. This is not unique and my struggles with it are borderline milquetoast at this point; the south, itself, is a conceptual chunk of land that still prides itself on waving the Confederate flag and voting for ultra-right wing politicians that hold maskless dinners and act shocked when they contract Covid. This is not news, and not particularly interesting coming from a 27 year old white guy who lives in the hip part of a B-Level city. There's a struggle there, but that wasn't the main source of my discomfort when being confronted with that map. I had the fairly unique (for this part of the world) experience of actually learning about these atrocities in school. We studied maps of the Trail of Tears and actually talked about slavery and the Reconstruction. They infuriated me and still do to this day, but that's an aspect of being the flavor of southern that doesn't sing Dixie and call it The War of Northern Aggression. You just kinda get used to it after a while. It's terrible, but it is what it is. All I can do is work for a brighter future.

There's this perception of the south that the rest of the US has that's always bothered me. Despite being the birthplace of American music, we are left out of cultural conversations of historical relevancy and artistic value. It's the Mississippi Stink. You can attribute it to a wide variety of things (racism, namely, considering art forms like blues and jazz were created and pioneered by Black artists) but there's this cultural miasma that lingers over the south when viewed with a wide angle lens: it's stupid, it's bad, and there's nothing of value to be found there. I internalized this, obviously. Even though I was sitting in the capitol of a southern state, I saw that 0-1 students per year statistic and felt stupid, bad, and like I could offer nothing of value. Mississippi is the south of The South.

Maybe it's because I'm older now, but I have to hold less anger in my heart than I used to. The South's negative side is an unchanging monolith that lives in the category of things that the Lord grants me serenity to accept. Fully accepting it has meant acknowledging and embracing the positive aspects of being a southerner, though, and a big part of that is feeling a spiritual and philosophical connection to any art made by Southern Weirdos. I like to see them win. In many ways, the guiding lights of luminaries like Lambchop's Kurt Wagner have shown me a path to actually playing with the cards I was dealt instead of looking to bright lights and bigger cities for a form of enlightenment that doesn't exist. Two strong facets of anyone who has Fully Embraced Being Southern Late In Life (capital letters because it's a real stereotype, I promise you) are feeling that connection to southern art and artists but, moreover, being proud when those artists succeed. In a small way, for a small moment, Lambchop succeeded on Live at XX Merge.

Lamchop is a musical conglomerate based out of Nashville, TN (ironically enough) fronted by Wagner, who leads his band through twisting songs blending soul, country, lounge, indie rock, and electronica. They're most often categorized as chamber pop, alt-country, or ambient pop, but none of those labels have ever fit for more than a song or two. Lambchop fits in with the 1990s chameleonic, everything-at-the-wall approach of contemporaries like Yo La Tengo and Joan of Arc* that the Wilcos and Drive By Truckers of the world**. 

Wagner and Lambchop make a very specific type of southern music. There are obvious notes of country and soul in a lot of their work, but Yankees have been ripping off both of those for years. At this point, fake southern accents are so ubiquitous that the twang of a pedal steel drawling enunciation of the contraction "y'all" doesn't actually connote much real southern allegiance. Bad, fake southern accents are almost like the Mid-Atlantic accent at this point: fake cultural signposts that are meant to point to a status that doesn't actually exist. Wagner doesn't sing with one, even at his most country. What makes him southern is the way that he has synthesized disparate influences into one shockingly consistent sound. I don't know much about Wagner, but I do know a lot about being someone in the south with weird interests and no one to relate to. You tend to develop a unique obsession with these things in a way that is singularly You. When you don't have people to talk to or anyone to show you what a normal relationship with certain records and sounds is, even ones that are ubiquitous cultural signposts, you start to see connections between them that others might not. Why can't you combine lounge and country? If you have both kinds of records sitting next to each other in your collection and no one tells you it's wrong, the two will be tied together for you and you alone.

Wagner is a perpetually underappreciated workhorse, having released 12 studio albums, five live albums 13 EPs, and over 20 singles throughout Lambchop's almost 30 year career. They haven't reached much commercial success in the US, but they have absolutely thrived in the UK. Their breakthrough, Nixon, actually spawned a charting single across the pond with Zero 7's remix of the anthemic "Up With People." American music critics gave the album great reviews, but the British ones absolutely ate it up. This is a common trend among British journalists, they fucking love weird slices Americana. Sub Pop tried to tell Kurt Cobain to dumb down his reviews and wear even more flannel so that British interviewers would think he was a stupid lumberjack that Sub Pop just found roaming the Washington woods with a Fender Jaguar in his hand. British journalists are always in search of "true" Americana, which exists to them in the form of weirdos from far off, exotic lands like Tennessee who make songs with nine-piece bands for no one with titles like "Grumpus." Lambchop was selling out 2,500 capacity venues with something that could be referred to as "lounge pop." When comnpletely divorced from the omnipresent, spiteful lens Southern culture is viewed through in America, southern art can thrive.

This curse followed Lambchop throughout their entire careers: critical success and commercial disappointment. It seemingly hasn't stopped Wagner and crew, though, who have released new music as recently as 2020****. That's the curse of being southern in  American art discourse; your art will always be seen as southern and, therefore, will always have a Southern Stink to it that no amount of showering or glowing reviews will ever be able to scrub off. No other band sounds like Lambchop, no other band is blending this mix of genres like Lambchop, and no other band is underappreciated like Lambchop. Non-American listeners can see this, clearly, so why can't Americans? 

Lambchop walked into XX Merge, Merge Records' 20th anniversary celebration, as losers. The played night three, sandwiched in between the freshly reunited Spent and similarly underappreciated (but for different reasons) math rock nerds Polvo. Spoon, a band that mines the same soul/indie rock fusion as Lambchop***** were the headliners. Lambchop was an afterthought. 

Jon Wurster's introduction sets the tone. "I bet you can't tell me what band is up next?" Someone in the audience guesses correctly, and Wurster groans. The joke is that Wurster is playing a fool, obviously, but the subtext is that no one is there to see Lambchop. They're all there to see Spoon, who Metacritic had recently named the "top overall artist of the decade," whatever that could mean. The band starts timidly, with the slowest number in the entire set, "I Will Drive Slowly." They sound hesitant, unsure if they're even allowed to play yet. William Tyler's guitar fades in as two guitars play dancing descending figures around him. The arrangement is a stark contrast from the percussive, running paced version that shows up on Lambchop's debut album I Hope You're Sitting Down. There's no space in that rendition of the song, every single nook and crany is filled with clarinet, banjos, and all sort of percussion. It feels very homespun and unique, but a little too sure of itself. The song is about a nervous first date, so why does Wagner sound blasé?

The new arrangement of "I Will Drive Slowly" serves as an invitation. The band sounds as unsure of itself as the narrator does. It takes a full two minutes for Wagner to finally come out of his shell but from that moment on, he has the audience in the palm of his hand. That's the real beauty of Live at XX Merge: it's a triumph. At his core, Wagner is a showman. It may not seem like it because of his penchant for sitting down while he plays, but Lambchop is a show-and-tell style band. The records aren't the whole story. Husker Du lived by the adage that the records were the menu and the live show was the meal***** and it's clear that Wagner has taken that to a new level: if the records are a print, the live show is a painting. There's space, there's movement, and there's interplay between every note of the live arrangements of these well worn songs. A print is nice and you can hang it in your house, but wouldn't you want to see the real thing?

Live at XX Merge is the sound of an entire audience falling in love with the 11 piece band over the course of 50 minutes. By the time the tempo picks up with rave-up version of "Sharing a Gibson with Martin Luther King Jr." the crowd is enraptured. By the time Wagner drops a quote of Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime" into a spirited performance of "Give It," you can practically hear them rushing to the merch table. They're literally screaming before the song even finishes. That night, a merry band of Southern Weirdos proved themselves. For one single night, the Southern Stink was vanquished. Turns out we're worth something after all. Lambchop may have gone back to toiling in relative obscurity after this, but it didn't matter. They won.

* = starting a new thing where I have footnotes in my essays because i got tired of doing parentheticals. i feel like i rely on them too much. anyway, the comparison to joan of arc*** is worth expanding on. while lambchop never crossed into emo like joa did, both bands started out in a fairly rigid genre (emo/alt-country), expanded to borderline-post rock sounds in 2000 (live in chicago 1999/nixon), moved back into singer-songwritery stuff after that didn't really pan out, then somehow started fucking around with drum machines in their late careers (he's got the whole this land is your land in his hands/flotus). neither band is readily categorizable unless you put some vague label on them like "post-rock" or "chamber-pop" and, like, what the fuck do either of those mean anyway? also both have semi-rotating lineups fronted by someone who has clearly read too many books. this is definitely not a "if you like this, you'll love this!" kinda situation where if you liked yo la tengo i'd recommend lambchop pretty easily, but that's why this is a bonus footnote.

**= absolutely not a diss. "outfit" by the truckers is the best song ever written about being from the deep south and no one will ever write a better one.

*** = another band i should write about at some point

****= it's a covers EP titled TRIP. it's fine. for some reason there's a really, really long cover of wilco's reservations on it. i'd recommend it to existing fans. i enjoyed it, but it's probably a bad starting place for anyone new to this world. 

*****= but, like, infinitely worse

******= i'm 99% sure this is a quote from our band could be your life but if it's not, it should be