Conor Oberst has always been a man about mythology. Not only has he played the figurative deceiver with stories of drowned brothers, endless detox stints, and the parallels between mental degeneration and time travel, he’s also been granted the unique position of rewriting American tradition in his own image.
His new album, “Cassadaga,” attempts to reconcile the simple antagonisms of Bush or anti-Bush, patriot or liberal, culture or subculture, by embodying his views on the deterioration of the American value in mixed vignettes about the only true citizens left: choir singers, co-dependent mothers, pious businessmen with hollowed-out marriages, and the rest of the American detriment left out by black-and-white distinctions.
“Hot Knives” presents a faux-puritan “American” couple caught between its own pseudo-Christian rhetoric and the incursion of a mistress who “feels God” when she “does wrong.” There is a changing of empires in “Cleanse Song,” as the eventual fall of all great societies into a self-indulgent opulence is compared to the chemically addicted youth looking for one last truth to break up the drone of the “madman’s drum.”
The push for psychedelic and personal escapism seems to be the response to Big Brother media confusion, as the Bob Dylan-esque “Coat Check Dream Song” shows an interior confusion as one preferable to propaganda.
These pastoral cuts of the mundane may seem a far cry from Oberst’s self-indulgent earlier work, but still evident is his appreciation for the rural simplicity of the lower classes. Before it was the isolated love of “A Song To Pass The Time,” yet now it seems to be the conflicted appraising of the few earth-deigned people left in our own “superior” country between interconnected highways and skyscrapers.
A steel twang here or there and the recurrent image of the “soul singer” further solidifies this album as a step for Oberst’s newfound country-folk identity. While the birthing pains of growing apart from the symbols and nightmares of his youth, or the quantitatively maddening scales, psychosomatic fevers and other delusions of a youth overwhelmed by attention have already passed, the voice of Oberst is instead made plebeian to reach out to the everyman audience folk left behind.
Just as Bob Dylan sang about only being a “pawn in their game,” Oberst makes an admission of his own place among his people. He has finally become a singer for the people rather than a singer for himself.
There is a willful and solemn farewell to the Oberst of the past, as “Classic Cars” seems to pine for a James Dean-like ending for his own lost American heritage, claiming, “I made a new cast for the death mask that’s going to cover my face.”
Perhaps something may be ending, but it certainly isn’t the continual living dead of Dylan’s irreverent prophesy, Neil Young’s perceptive songwriting, nor the Arcade Fire’s tired patriotism, and Oberst intends to continue that voice himself.
And it remains a voice heard by people still waiting for clocks and retesting their own image in the warped mirror of American identity.
““ Casey Henry
E-mail Henry at chenry@media.ucla.edu