Unless we’re talking about, oh, I
don’t know, Ken Mehlman’s sex life, there are no guilty
pleasures. If pleasures could induce guilt, confessing them
wouldn’t be the hipster’s favorite parlor game, the
subject of so many self-aggrandizing/self-effacing conversations in
which Totally Unique Rockdudes strive to outdo one another by
professing/confessing their not-so-secret love for Hall &
Oates, Shania Twain, Air Supply, and other noted crapmongers. The
guilty pleasure is yet another consumerist fantasy based on the
fallacious (and profitable) premise that we can assert our
identities through our tastes, that autonomy and authenticity are
only an iPod click away, that Totally Unique Rockdudes are not, in
fact, interchangeable earbud-sporting sheep. The guilty pleasure is
the bling of the anti-establishment establishment: “My
unironic love for Ashlee Simpson makes my love for Amon
Düül richer, less suspect, more . . . me.” But what about Guilty Pleasure’s homely
stepsister, Acquired Taste — the band that your favorite
Webzine scribe is always going on about, the band that you know you
really ought to love, according to your best friend and the Amazon
customer-recommendation software, but somehow just can’t? OK,
enough hemming and hawing: Despite disciplined effort and
self-examination, I’ve never been able to muster more than a
lukewarm appreciation for Iron & Wine. Embarrassing! What
chromosomal deficit prevents me from joining my friends and
colleagues in extolling the genius of I&W mastermind Sam Beam,
who, by all accounts, seems like a smart, nice guy with excellent
taste who attracts listeners and collaborators of a similar mien?
It can’t be the fact that he never sings above a whisper, that his idea of rocking out is to layer on a
couple more banjos, that he likes to sing about kisses from tall stable
girls, about red dust and gray stallions and dusk and autumn and love
that speaks beyond the grave and all manner of folk-tested,
poet-approved hokum. Although some might legitimately rag on
Beam’s old-timey locutions, hyperstylized imagery, and flagrant
Cormac McCarthy-isms, I know that my ambivalence can’t stem from
any of these reasonable reasons, because I love plenty of other bands
that commit all these crimes and then some. So I must confront my inner
bigot: Is it Beam’s full-on Jerry Garcia beard that bums me out?
Is it that fat, pubic chin chum that makes me free-associate about the
last glistening glob of his wife’s vegan casserole; Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young’s Déjà
Vu; my anxious hippie childhood; communal
toilets? Because I know that it’s deeply and
unforgivably stupid to hold a fella’s facial hair against
him, I’ve spent a good two years trying to either drink of
the I&W Kool-Aid or find a less embarrassing reason for only
sorta kinda liking a band that I’m pretty sure I’m
supposed to love. And now, just to up the ante, along comes
Calexico, one of my very favorite bands. By collaborating with
I&W on an album (billed as an EP, although it’s 10 songs
and 28 minutes long), one that consists entirely of unreleased Beam
compositions, my idols have thrown down the gauntlet: “Love
Sam Beam,” they seem to say on In
the Reins, “or admit that
you’re a fraud.” And so I [diligently] admire the
decorous wordplay of [that long-lost Eagles outtake] “A
History of Lovers,” and I [try to] groove to the
[suspiciously jam-bandish] swamp boogie of “Red Dust,”
and I remind myself throughout how much I love the [tragically
wasted] contributions of Calexico, whose undulating desert vistas
[almost] persuade me that my I&W problem is a mirage. And I
hope it’s not the beard.
This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2005.
