All the Young Dudes
What the world needs now is another Gord Downie, but we might be alright with Jesse Welles and MJ Lenderman
Jesse Welles keeps popping up in my feeds. Granted, when your favorite subreddits are r/davidberman, r/jasonmolina, and r/altcountry, that’s going to happen. I’m usually skeptical of RIYLs, and though I’ve only listened to a bit, there is something I identify with in his approach to the art. There’s some of Dylan’s nasal wail in Welles. Some of Woody Guthrie’s strum. A bit of Townes flavor. It’s of another era, and unabashedly political—something I don’t find a lot of in the age of the influencer.
I’m a good Canadian boy, and I grew up on Gord Downie and The Tragically Hip, where music was more than virality, rooted in a keen sense of place and belonging. Some review I came across calls Welles’ work, “[a] mix of old-fashioned folkie signifiers and trending-topic populism, delivered in hooky snippets on social media several times weekly, has taken Welles from obscurity to 2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram in under a year,” a criticism which is riddled with faux-hipster cynicism, from a writer who co-wrote one of the funniest pieces of unintentional parody I’ve read in my life, entitled, “How Much Does It Cost to Live Like This? We asked young New Yorkers about their dream futures. Then we calculated exactly how much each would cost,” from Curbed magazine in which the writers truck in bitterly out-of-touch New York is the greatest city in the world sentences like, “Tarek wants ‘absurd parties’ in a Bed-Stuy apartment, no kids, and monthlong trips to Europe” and “An apartment with Audrey’s exact parameters will be at least $4.5 million, and it might not even be that nice — you’re paying for the address.” The writer’s (whose X claims he’s an Epistemologist ffs 🤮) bad take on Welles is the assumption that the singer-songwriter’s politically intoned and personal lyricism is artifice, as if having opinions is in and of itself appropriation. His emphasizing the metric of “2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram” is exactly the kind of bullshit that perverts contemporary art where value is only found in commodification, and it angers me to tears.
It’s that type of pedestrian cynicism that keeps a New Sincerity from hitting the mainstream, which got me thinking: I can’t listen to The Tragically Hip without crying. Every once in a while, my beloved Silver Jews elicit some tears. Jason Molina can get me misty on the right kind of night. Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs” gets me pretty good. I have no problem crying. Happy or sad, I’ll shed tears. But there’s something very specific about the emotionality of my reaction to listening to The Hip, Canada’s national band, and the voice of their late, great lead singer, Gord Downie. And I think it’s because Gord was a fucking good man.
There’s a great story that Stars’ Torquil Campbell tells about The Tragically Hip when they played together in Calgary a few years ago:
[...]the beauty that you hear in their art is reflected in their personhood, and that there is literally, without any exaggeration, Gord Downie is the single most generous, passionate, supportive, committed, loving person that I've ever encountered in my career. [When our band (Stars) got to the festival backstage], there were trailers for all the bands, but there was a big fence up around The Hip’s. Somebody said to me, I guarantee you within ten minutes of those boys arriving on sight, that fence will be taken down. And sure enough, the van pulled up, they all got out, they kind of looked at the fence as they walked into their trailer, and 10 minutes later, not only was it coming down, they were out there taking it down. And that embodies who they are as people and as professionals and who their whole crew is. There is no more gentlemanly, kind, supportive, loving group of people than the people who make The Tragically Hip happen. And most of all, Gord, as their commodore and their leader, just exemplifies what an artist and what a citizen should be. He takes responsibility for his soul, and he shares with people.
It’s this kind of humanity that I feel is absent in prominent male voices today, at least at the volume and scope that can have a direct effect on the greater cultural discourse.
I don’t know what makes a “man”, and on most days, I don’t care. This week, I’ve been—almost reluctantly—watching the NHL playoffs, where the old boys’ club of Canada’s national sport will tell you that a man displays character, grit, sandpaper, and missing teeth. This, of course, while five players are on trial for the sexual assault of a young woman, while other men watched and other men ignored. The Christian fundamentalist right will tell you that a man is simply not a woman, which seems reductive, but that’s their deal. I’m pretty sure I only became a man about eight years ago, and there’s no good metric to qualify that belief. ChatGPT didn’t want to get into it, preferring to direct me to supplement subscriptions and Neil Strauss courses.
But we are having a crisis of masculinity, and it’s not the one that Joe Rogan and the Men's Rights Activists will tell you about, or that they’re manifesting. The real question isn’t what makes a man, but rather: Where has the humility, charity, and empathy, once essential components of humanity, gone? Where’s the kids’ Gord Downie?
MJ Lenderman is another artist I’ve been told I’ll dig and, like Welles, feels like the bastard child of my late 90s CD collection, though where Welles leans towards folk, MJ leans indie rock. He grew up listening to Mark Linkous and Jason Molina, got his start as a landscaper (along with partner and sometimes collaborator Karly Hartzman of Wednesday) for War on Drugs bassist Dave Hartley, and is known for live covers of Neil Young, Bill Callahan, and Silver Jews. His pedigree is a soup of my favorite artists, but he is not simply a reproduction. As Pitchfork notes, “If his folk-rock forebears, like Neil Young and Jason Molina, were drawn to the mystics of the natural world, Lenderman is drawn to the mystics of the shitty apartment, simple and unvarnished songs born of small screens in small rooms in small towns.” In that simplicity is a vulnerability, a display of humanity that, “They say one day they're gonna round up Well, that shit might fly in the city, good luck” from Jason Aldean’s MAGAnthem, “Try That In A Small Town” lacks, and, in a way, takes a shit on. Real men don’t have feelings in America, MJ. They have guns and intolerance, like Aldean.
Aldean’s influence is disappointing. The men I looked up to were musicians. They were the poets people cared about. I found myself in their lyrics, exposed and vulnerable, even if those were emotions I had yet to find the strength to share with anyone other than the bottom of a bottle. Young, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Bob Dylan, Tom Morello, the Beastie Boys, and the brethren of boomer/GenX artists seemed not to be content with the simplicity and celebration of stardom. They believed in something, and they weren’t shy about standing up. Neil kept us rockin’ in the free world and hosted Farm Aid (where Welles was a performer in 2024). Eddie and Pearl Jam fought Ticketmaster. The stories of Cobain’s kindness outlived him, and his outspoken advocacy against racism, sexism, and homophobia is often left out of our nostalgia for Nevermind. Previous generations’ musicians were often defined by acts of charity and political engagement, which to me is tethered to character. The music of the 1960s was characterized by anti-establishment and civil rights activism, an essential component of a movement, and while that movement included bloodshed, it feels like mainstream contemporary music is absent of cause. In the 1980s, “Do they know it’s Christmas,” “We are the World”, and “Tears are not Enough” were not just radio staples, but important records that artists made to voice opinions and give their time and celebrity to charity, while today there are no socially motivated singles and now no USAID. Look, I was born a curmudgeon, yelling kids off my porch before I could walk. I used to do a fair amount of writing for FLOOD magazine, but now, when I surf their digital pages, the crisis of masculinity and character deeply concerns me. Admittedly, I don’t listen to much popular music or engage in contemporary pop culture. I’ve aged out. I’m going to see Wilco next month. My playlists still feature old dudes/dudettes or dead dudes/dudettes, and when I find “new” music, it’s usually just old music I missed for some reason, filling in algorithm-sized blind spots. Like, I get Okkervil River now, but still can’t figure out LCD Soundsystem.
In January, on David Berman’s birthday, I went to a reading featuring writers celebrating his work. One of them, a poet whose name escapes me (apologies), said that when he was young, Berman was one of the writers who taught him what it was to be a man. The comment struck me because, as a longtime Berman acolyte, such a connection had never occurred to me. I was partly jealous, partly curious. So when listening to Berman’s work later that night at the DCBDay annual benefit concert, I tried to take in his lyrics through that lens. And sure enough, there it was, plain as day. Berman’s lyrics take responsibility for his speakers’ actions, especially in their relationship with women. Whether in the accountability of Purple Mountains’ “She's making friends, I'm turning stranger” (“I see lots of normal men yearning to obtain her / I'm a loser, she's a gainer / That's one thing of which they're dang sure”), the matriarchal lineage of The Natrual Bridge’s “How to Rent a Room” (“'Cause I'm a man who has a wife who has a mother / Who married one but she loved another”), or the isolation of gracefully accepting unrequited love in “Wild Kindness” (“I wrote a letter to a wildflower / On a classic nitrogen afternoon / Some power that hardly looked like power / Said I'm perfect in an empty room”), Berman’s work revels in personal responsibility and liability. I can see kinship in Lederman’s work, like in Manning Fireworks’ “She’s Leaving You” (“It falls apart / We all got work to do / It gets dark / We all got work to do / She's leaving you / She's leaving you” or “Bark at the Moon” (“You're in on my bit, / you're sick of the schtick / Well, what did you expect?”)
Perhaps this awareness is born of the freedom of independence. I’ve spoken of indie sensibilities before, and in an era of monetized and atomized spaces, what do indie spaces look like? Where are they? Because I believe these spaces are where the quiet, essential voices have retreated. The vast, infinite realities of digital music make seeking out these spaces a challenge. Diversification and discovery—proponents of character—are at the mercy of the bots, where in the past, we shared art and music through community. Playing on rec league teams, music lessons in some garage, the church/synagogue/mosque, and getting stoned during lunch hour in Erin Gould’s basement were entries to revelation and discourse. But in the digital, post-COVID age, our isolation has left us to our own devices, and our devices. Music has always been a vehicle for emotional regulation and socialization, but when the social is removed from the equation, our emotional temperance is left without influence other than the self, the bots, and TikTok.
Unless, of course, you live in a world where TikTok’s floating hearts are as emotional as you can get. The article that explored Welles’ work confronted the performer's messaging, noting, “Many of Welles’s fans told me they are into other artists they see as political, citing Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, riot grrrl, punk, and other folk” as if he had ask ChatGPT what “political music” was and this was its response. Cut, paste, command-S. That his touchstone for engaged contemporary music was the “organic virality” of Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond” shows a tacit lack of understanding of where music comes from. He continues to write, “It’s probably helped that Bob Dylan has been in the air, in no small part due to last year’s biopic starring Timothée Chalamet” which reminds me of the line from Mike White’s Orange County, “Now, when I say Romeo and Juliet, who comes to mind? Claire Danes?” Yes, an indictment of the Vulture writer, but more interestingly, it dismisses the genuine authenticity of Welles’ work.
Music is not just a way to express or amplify our emotions, but also an essential mode for shaping and declaring our morality. A recent study suggests a link between our musical choices and our moral compass.
It is a part of the holistic human experience influencing our emotions and cognitive performance, such as thinking, reasoning, problem-solving, creativity, and mental flexibility. Besides, research has shown that people often select music that aligns with their empathy levels and personality needs and enables them to express their values. Such knowledge has proven to be effective for music recommendation systems and their diversity.
Without stable “real” communities, our musical choices and influences are corrupted, and by extension, our morality. Artificiality digitally influences our morality and, by extension, homogenous/populous world views. We are overly susceptible to art that aspires to wealth and fame over substance, and fanbases whose morality is shaped by those leanings. Males are at the mercy of this cultural deformity, and their isolation has led to introspection and depression. “The suicide rate among males in 2023 was approximately four times higher than the rate among females. Males make up 50% of the population, but nearly 80% of suicides.” While I understand that a direct correlation between the popularity of MGK and Kanye and male depression can’t be made, I would argue that a lack of substance in prominent pop culture male voices doesn’t make things any better.
For Welles and Lenderman, whose influences read like playlists I made in 2012 and still lead my rotation, I’m led to believe that there are strong, positive male voices out there making music. You just gotta find them. It takes some effort. Like back in the day, sifting through albums for something that caught your eye, then asking The Guy about it. And you measure your affection for it not in followers or stream counts but in finding some connection to the music, some line that feels like you wrote it, and some lick that gets you dancing. Music that says something, voices that aspire to some truth beyond aesthetic and artifice.
It’s like Gord said, “Music is the ultimate medium for expressions of love, and those expressions find a beautiful backdrop in the environment. Music is also a popular rallying point — at its central core, it’s a way for people to get in touch with the best parts of themselves and to voice the love in their hearts. And the environment is one of the great loves of our lives — when we think of the best parts of ourselves, the environment is always there, informing us, as a backdrop.”
Gord Downie passed away in 2017 from glioblastoma, but not before The Hip did a cross-Canada tour to say goodbye after his fatal diagnosis. From coast to coast, Canadians were united by music and a love for a band that always spoke its mind and stood up for equality. Even in these last days with his best friends and family, Gord addressed indigenous rights and his hope for our future. There’s a saying amongst Hip fans, “In Gord We Trust,” the deification of a man who never saw himself as anything other than one of us. The kids need someone like that to trust. I hope they find them.