Album Review: Short Sighted People In Power: A Home Recording- My Politic
I am hungover. Not like...in the sit down in the shower way, though. I am writing this just days after watching the hopeless horror show that was our first Presidential debate of 2020, and just a few hours after watching the Vice-Presidential Debate. I am emotionally dehydrated. Thankfully, My Politic’s latest effort, “Short Sighted People In Power: A Home Recording '' is serving as my intellectual Pedialyte. This raw, unfussy collection of songs wades through the View-Master of the current American consciousness and I think it’s safe to say that most people feel concussed in two very different ways right now. The point of Kaston Guffey and Nick Pankey’s latest release is not to convince the listener of anything, but rather to put antiquated and learned ways of thinking next to facts and have them duke it out. It takes the overused rebuttal of “yA gOtTa sEe iT fRoM bOtH SidEs” to its most literal level and, well, it is as uncomfortable as it should be.
The title track puts music to all the things that bounce around in your head before you lift your head off the pillow. “Short Sighted People In Power” morosely lists the “bigger than me” bullet points of anxiety that coyly creep over one’s shoulder; all those annoying flashbulb headlines that run on a constant loop in the ticker of your brain. No matter who you are, those weary inner voices are louder now more than ever. Earth’s environmental ticking clock, the ageless, nationwide opioid crisis, the pockets that have been stuffed because of it, and, ultimately, the devastating wake of greed are all on display here. It’s a blunt brick to the head. Am I supposed to feel hope or the lack of it from the line “It’s gonna take every one of us to get what we want”? I haven’t decided yet.
One of the most compelling things about this album is that it plays like a conversation at the dinner table. It’s Thanksgiving. There you are, surrounded by your family and all the strings that both bind and divide you. You and your cousin in the “Feel the Bern” shirt keep exchanging glances at each other as the temperature of the room rises. If the previous track was the hushed, corner mouthed conversation you had with each other before dinner, “Wrong Side” is the one shouted from across the table at a horrified Grandpa Rick and drunk Aunt Sharon. It’s a hailstorm of a chorus that cries, “Fuck the President. Fuck the GOP. Fuck the folks at Fox News spreading lies on TV. Fuck you for getting us into this and refusing to see. It ain’t no side. It’s one side. It’s your side and it’s the wrong side.” The rotating solo at the end of the track perfectly encapsulates the cyclical nature of conversations like this. It’s hard not to feel like a hamster in a wheel of our collective frustration right now. Nothing seems to ever get done, but we are worn the fuck out.
As the conversation continues, Rick and Sharon get their time, too. Told from the perspective of someone who prefers their hats red and their presidents orange, “Fantasies of a Fox News Viewer” is perhaps the rawest and most uncomfortable song on the entire album. It’s every baseless argument you’ve ever heard in all its glory, lacking all logic and overstuffed with emotion. Xenophobia, white nationalism, homophobia, blind Biblical trust, and just straight up, cold-blooded fear are Pollacked all over the dinner table and you’ve completely lost your appetite. (Whew. I really need to get out from under this Thanksgiving metaphor, folks). The thing that struck me the most about this song was my inability to stop my head from bobbing to its anthemic chorus. It proudly chugs along and would pair very nicely with a drink of choice being held high above my head. I don’t even recognize what I’m saying when I sing to myself, “Yeah, I miss America the way it used to be. When I turned on my TV all I saw was people just like me.” I stop singing for fear that my neighbor or my dog may think that I *actually* believe the words I’m saying. But, isn’t that so indicative of how the web gets spun so easily? When information gets dressed in the gown of performative politics, reality distorts. Sarcasm is lost, truth is lost, context is a bug to squish and you’ve decided how you feel about something based solely on how someone else is telling you to.
As the funhouse mirror stretches on, “Voter Suppression” welcomes us deeper into the Conservative Carnival. The whispered countdown ushering in the listener sounds as if the narrator is hatching a plot. It’s both sinister and tantalizing, two classic ingredients for manipulation pie. This song could be invited to hang out with the satirical company of South Park and Saturday Night Live (on its good nights) and more than hold its own. I can’t help but picture Trump, McConnell, Pence, and Barr in little ill-fitting barbershop quartet outfits, cigars flopping out of their mouths, singing this while bouncing around a fake saloon in the middle of Silver Dollar City. However, “Voter Suppression” doesn’t lean on cartoonish exaggerations of the truth to get its message across. One person’s satire can very easily be taken as another person’s doctrine. After all, the best and smartest comedy is rooted in life’s uncomfortable truths.
I think we can all agree that the one constant of this year has been the unveiling of a lot of those aforementioned uncomfortable truths. In “All American Way”, the narrator, in two minutes, lists over thirty examples of absurd and very real reasons why Black people have been targeted by the police. The track opens with, “Can’t go jogging. Can’t go walking. Can’t watch TV in their own fffffuckin’ apartment.” (That isn’t a typo. Listen to it and you’ll see what I mean). Each verse is more hurried and breathless than the last and you can practically smell the smoke coming from the pencil marks on the paper when it was written. As each example rolls on, a new name scrolls across your mind’s eye. “Can’t get caught with a broken tail light (Sandra Bland). “Can’t get caught selling loose cigarettes” (Eric Garner) “Can’t get caught playing with toys” (Tamir Rice). Then, we turn to the names we wish we never learned at all and ones I refuse to type here. “They can shoot up Black churches. They can shoot up the schools… White folks can shoot ‘till they’re blue in the face and you can bet they’ll walk away. It’s the All American way.” That last line is sung like a salute. Hand over heart, chin in the air, hat off the head. And most likely, someone out there doesn’t understand why that’s disturbing.
Track 6, “The Experts Told Us”, sounds like how we all felt about a month or two into quarantine, or as the song says, “when we traded hope for darkness.” Knowing what we do now about the president’s negligent withholding of information about COVID-19 and the impact it was going to have on every aspect of American life, this song sits heavy on the mind and heavy on the chest. “The experts told us. The science showed us. But the ego of the POTUS was too big to fight off again.” The sleepy harmonica woven through the last half of it is forlorn and exhausted. It sighs in and out at the bleakness of it all like it’s sitting in the driveway with the engine off; at the house, but far from home.
The wit of Prine, the gusto of Cash, the fire of Guthrie, among others, are peppered seamlessly throughout this album. But make no mistake; My Politic’s voice is all their own. Nowhere is that more evident than on the closing track, “Talkin’ RNC Blues.” Here, the listener is taken on an anxiety and alcohol-induced fever dream that plops the narrator right in the middle of this year’s Republican National Convention. It plays like a comic book; vivid and distorted. I wish I could hear this for the first time again so I won’t ruin anything for you, but be prepared for some well timed laughs to lift you out of the funk, even for just a moment.
Through the inexplicable fog, we forge on to another day of 2020. But we shouldn’t keep acting like this is some kind of “cursed” year that we just need to get through. To suggest that the problem is the year on the calendar and the solution is the page after December would be flippant, to say the least. Despite all of it, meaningful art and the fearless depths it dares to go will always rise above the silence and drown out the static. My Politic’s “Short Sighted People In Power: A Home Recording” is now available exclusively on Bandcamp and is set for a wide release on all streaming platforms this Friday, 10/30. Just in time for you to play it over Thanksgiving dinner….or not.