When Billy Met Barbara

Q: Where do Donald Trump and my band intersect? A: Barbara.

I was going to write about the Oasis reunion today. I’m not generally up for negging on anyone who adds something creative to the world, but I do draw the line - one that looks like a long hairy eyebrow, perhaps - at Wonderwall.

But, that’s going to have to wait. Today is going to be the day that I try and figure out what the fuck just happened. By now I should’ve somehow realised that nothing can be taken for granted. There are many things that I would like to say to everyone responsible for the US election result, but I know in some wearying, hard-to-put-my-finger-on way, that I’m one of them.

It’s 2017. I am answering a message on Facebook from a middle-aged American lady - let’s call her Barbara - who writes eloquently and at length about her love for the band I’m in, Sweet Billy Pilgrim, and her frustration at not being able to order a copy of our fourth album, Motorcade Amnesiacs, on vinyl. With all the business acumen of a two-year old, I offer to send her a copy; “just tell people about us,” I say magnanimously, packaging up the double vinyl and dropping it off at the local post office.

A few weeks later, I see a post from her on Twitter enthusing about the band and thanking me for going to such lengths to get the album to her, and we have a lovely little exchange. Then, chest swollen with karmic expectation and curious to know more about our new biggest fan, I click on to Barbara’s profile.

Jesus Christ…

…it turns out, is her close friend and saviour. Except that now he seems to be job-sharing with one Donald Trump. Her account timeline blossoms, fiery, over and over; low altitude napalm streaks of all-caps colourful invective, flag emojis (US and Confederate), death threats and shrieking pizza-gate adrenochrome batshit, often directed at public figures who will never read, let alone respond to, her untethered fury.

I feel like this guy…

…with this guy’s eyes.

I know what you’re thinking. Someone’s made a bunch of easy assumptions about the sensibilities of the MAGA faithful, while creating a (really) Weird Science blueprint of the archetypal Sweet Billy Pilgrim fan. It should be noted at this point that this is only a few self righteous steps from policing the kind of person who might be appropriate for membership of our exclusive little club. Because of course our members are liberal. Of course they’re progressive. Of course they’re supportive of women’s reproductive rights; allies of the LGBTQ community; engaged in and capable of examining their male / white / heteronormative privilege if needs be. Of course they know a bit about granular synthesis and aren’t shy around the hummus pot with a stub of carrot. Goes with the territory, right? Wrong.

Because, despite a wealth of hard-to-ignore online details relating to the band: sub-Alaskan flurries of online liberal snowflakery, casual wokery, shameless libtardery incorporating atheism, some direct criticism of her heroes and - lest we forget - an album called Motorcade Amnesiacs, Barbara likes our music.

I’m stunned at the time and care she likely invested in making an emotional connection to what we do. That’s quite something. Anyone here will probably know that we err towards the esoteric. The songs take a few listens to sink in; possibly even require some patience, emotional sensitivity and openness to get the most from them. We don’t write the hits. In fact, if we tripped over one we wouldn’t know what it was, and even if we did recognise it, we’d probably try and arrange it 7/8 around some sampled cutlery. Christ, just finding our music requires some keyboard grunt work.

Here’s an example of our oeuvre (I think Donald would be delighted with my use of ‘oeuvre’) from that album; one that fairly explicitly condemns much of the ideology apparently espoused by Barbara.

So, what the fuck is going on?

How do you reconcile being moved by something that someone made - a commitment that requires trust, imagination and a certain emotional curiosity - with loving a man who cares little for any of these things. Recognising the value of humans creating something with little thought of financial recompense, what’s the value of a man who’d doubtless think that was ridiculous?

Somewhere near an actual Swamp, where the golf courses run long and green, there lives that man who doesn’t seem to like anyone or anything very much unless it involves a large crowd of people adoring him collectively, and this is the bit I find particularly hard to understand. Everyone sees that, surely? Before I even suggest that he might be petulant, vindictive, vengeful, transparent, humourless, petty, vain, secretive and quick to lie, there’s already almost nothing that might chime with our shared sense of what it is to be human: you know - that thing that music strives to express, even as politics strives to dismantle it.

How can someone who likes my band; a musical duo with more hand-wrung grey areas than a washload of old tea-towels, not see it? It’s not giving in to spin and propaganda if you witness all of those subtractions on the big screens at one of his rallies, and - really - who could fail to?

Well… Barbara, for one; her unwillingness to see through the bronzer carries stubbornly through to her unwillingness to acknowledge the individual lives, struggles and rights of those trying to make a home in America. I guess she’s consistent at least. But she’s not. She likes my band.

Godammit Barbara.

Thanks to you, when I’m angry at the next wave of ugliness about to crest over the US, it’s harder for me to turn and sweep my hand melodramatically across an anonymous mass of idiocy that’s to blame. Now I have to ask questions. Now I have to think about understanding. Worst of all, I have to put down my latest self-actualisation book and, ignoring the obvious irony, actually look at myself.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in my unwillingness to acknowledge that there’s social context that I have the privilege to be able to ignore. Perhaps the missing humanity that I seem so hung up on is a luxury I have the time and the inclination to give weight to, given my professional and personal background. Dammit, I’m probably going to have to look at the failure of the Democrats instead of shouting down the victory of the GOP. Finally there’s my terrible snobbery at the lack of dignity with which this cultural desert of a man conducts himself, and which sometimes extends to those who follow him too.

UK journalist and author Oliver Burkeman had this to say in his recent newsletter (thanks for sending this over

Jana Carpenter

):

We’ve lots of work ahead to try to understand how large swathes of the population – people like us, in so many ways, who love their kids, and so on – could embrace viewpoints we find so bewilderingly abhorrent. And we’re going to have to be willing to accept the possibility that some of the failings might be, at least partly, on us.

To achieve some semblance of balance, this is Kenneth Stewart, a black Republican from Chicago interviewed by the Guardian after the election result.

The other side, they’re only talking about feelings. They’re talking about Trump’s bad. But come to me with tangibles. A lot of Black men just want tangibles. We just want jobs. We want to see what our fathers had. We want to see what our grandfathers had, especially in the Rust belt.

That’s a harsh, pragmatic economic truth, felt deeply by someone. I might be prepared to overlook more than I currently do, zoom in on specific useful policies and ignore the macro (trans rights; the climate; abortion; whether a person is nice or not) if I thought it was going to put food on the table. But I can’t ignore that stuff. All I can do is try to reframe my understanding, the key to which is stepping away from the commentators on both sides who are - let’s remember - often monetising their online rage-farming.

What’s also interesting is that if you listen to music with any passion at all, you’re likely to click / drag a bunch of left-tumbling libtards into a playlist before too long. Very rarely does it work the other way, and coming from the Right it must be hard to always have to separate the artist from the art that you love; forced to ask over and over, ‘why are they all like that?’ Are they so divorced from reality with all their money and fame? Maybe. They must have too much spare time if they can spend it worrying about other people’s problems and interfering in things that they don’t understand. There might be some truth in this. Often though, in exploring - through their work - what it might be that connects us, they are just reacting to a country eagerly turning towards the opposite impulse, because that quite rightly should be anathema to anyone who makes things.

Look at, say, a Springsteen concert. Tens of thousands of people enacting a shared experience to build a brief ad-hoc community and an understanding of some kind of universal commonality. Often, the latter can be simply summed up as joy. There’s no spittle-flecked jeering. There’s no singling out of people because of where they come from or what their political persuasion might be, or what they look or even sound like. Oh Barbara, are those last two examples not enough to give you pause? I don’t believe that anybody feels the way you do, consistently and without a second thought. Not when you’re lying awake in the dark again, in the early hours of the morning like so many of us at the moment. Not when you put some music on to understand why you feel sad.

And maybe that’s where the hope lies. That in a corner of that same heart there’s a part of you that understands beauty; that is kind, curious and open; that wants to feel love and give love, rather than screaming into the digital abyss. How about we just climb out of that hole in the ground and start frantically shovelling empathy and compassion into it? Hope, even? To (badly) paraphrase Schwarzenegger in Predator, if it has a bottom, we can fill it.

Burkeman again:

One implication of all this for politics, I think, is that while it’s important to argue for the world you’d like to see, through activism and advocacy, it’s perhaps even more important to live it. To “start from sanity”, as I’ve termed it, by taking the way you want life to feel – sane, generous, meaningfully productive, embracing of difference, and everything else – and treating it less as something to strive towards, and more as a place to start from.

So, can we be friends Barbara? I doubt you’d want to be, even taking our strong start into consideration. I’m still angry too, which doesn’t help. But there’s at least some common ground. I promise not to set up a gazebo on it to sell artisanal cheeses, if you’ll leave your gun in the pickup. I also promise to try and stereotype less.

This is the song we wrote for our next album Wapentak, post-Barbara, in an effort to understand Donald’s last victory, the Brexit car crash, and the continued emergence of the Far Right in Europe; all of which seemed to ooze from the idea that things were so much better (usually meaning: whiter) at some strangely-hard-to-pin-down moment in the past. It’s called Ash on the Blacktop and we tried really hard, but - even with all this talk of conscious reframing - it’s important to note that in the end some people are just assholes.

‘Cause after all that, I’m pretty tired of walls; be they remembered in Cold War monochrome, fascist firing squad blood-spatter grey, bleached out and dusty on Southern borders or draped in fake-ass paisley inside the heads of the Gallagher brothers. If we can bring some more of those down, then there’s hope for us all. Maybe.