Father John Misty: "Bored in the USA"
A central irony of Josh Tillman’s very likable Father John Misty alias is that he’s so often the exact person most indie rock fans totally fucking loathe in real life—a kind of mystic himbo who somehow exists outside our economy and labor force, drinking, drugging, and fucking his way through life, and yet the rent’s always paid. People tell him he looks better with age. No consequences of note are suffered. Least of all, he attracts not even a fraction of the shit Lana Del Rey gets for embodying a parallel sort of archetype. Some might call that male privilege and Tillman probably would, too. “Bored In The USA” casually drops a nuclear bomb on the entire franchise of privileged white men making their spiritual void the dark center of the universe.
Appropriately, the music teases at toxic levels of mawkishness. Tillman’s alone at his piano, doing his best Harry Nilsson and having the nerve to ask, “How many people rise and think, ‘Oh good, the stranger’s body is still here/ Our arrangement hasn’t changed,’” when most folks stay up nights worrying about dying alone. Likewise, the title itself is sung in a way that doesn’t seem to mock Bruce Springsteen—it sounds like Tillman’s mocking those who would go after that low-hanging fruit, ignoring the Boss’ complexities to show their shallow disaffectedness with the American Dream. Or maybe Tillman’s just one of us, not even sure if we’re being sarcastic anymore.
“Bored In the USA” has a tragicomic resonance, as all of our friends are on Facebook complaining about election results they find awfully scary even if they’re unsure how they’ll realistically be affected. When Tillman lays out the woes of the upwardly mobile man who had the ladder cut out from under him—”They gave me a useless education/ A subprime loan/ A craftsman home/ Keep my prescriptions filled/ Now I can’t get off, but I can kinda deal”—he pipes in a goddamn laugh track to underscore that his concerns aren’t clever. They’re clichés worthy of a terrible sitcom, and that “boredom” is like most chronic conditions, a malady of the affluent. So there you have the devastating punchline in “Bored In the USA”‘s epic #whitepeopleproblems gag—that joke isn’t funny anymore.
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