Hipsters have a high priest. His name is Father John Misty.
Josh “J.” Tillman, known to the laity as Father John Misty, is an archetype of our generation: ironic, well-educated, idealistic, improper, and above all wary of dogmatic, unreflective zeal. Tillman released his sophomore album, “I Love You, Honeybear,” in February. In it, he transforms incongruity into a species of virtue: mingling the sacred and the profane with a sure hand, he is in turns vulnerable and inscrutable, vulgar and subtle. He brushes aside what is decent to seize what is good.
In “I Went To The Store One Day,” Tillman recounts the first time he met his wife Emma and along the way reflects on love itself. In one sense, the song reflects an imagination that is deeply idealistic, even romantic; in another sense, it is the product of a self-awareness that is soberingly realistic. “We met in a parking lot,” Tillman sings. “I was buying coffee and cigarettes / Firewood and bad wine long since gone.” But the coffee, cigarettes, and bad wine brought him to her: “For love to find us of all people / I never thought it’d be so simple.”
Her love hasn’t solved his problems — if anything, it’s made him less stable, “jealous, rail-thin / Prone to paranoia” — but it has made him happy. There is, for Tillman, a goodness to knowing and loving Emma that goes past the circumstances of their first meeting, his own continued failures, and even the dysfunctions of their relationship.
Of course, Tillman’s scope ranges beyond the personal. The album’s lead single “Bored in the USA” brings Tillman’s incisive critique to bear on American culture. Characteristically, the tone is somehow both aching and sardonic. His songwriting delivers a heavy blow to the peoples of Pinterest, to all lovers of the ambiguously beautiful and the platitudinously true: “I’ve got all morning to obsessively accrue / A small nation of meaningful objects / And they’ve got to represent me, too.”
The American culture of mindless consumption brings contentedness, not happiness. Such a culture has no meaning, despite desperate efforts to give it significance. And the ache for something more than material goods remains inarticulate: “Is this the part where I get all I ever wanted?” Tillman asks. “Who said that? Can I get my money back?” Modern consciousness has little upon which it may satisfactorily fasten its longing, few objects adequate to the task of gratifying its need to love and believe and exist.
And it would seem that love, belief, and life are a few steps removed from artists like Tillman. Model ironist that he is, the loves and truths at the heart of his artistry remain only indirectly evident. Additionally, much social commentary — particularly that of Tillman’s stripe — indulges in apathetic doomsaying. But his lyrics are laden with references and symbolism, preoccupied with the mundane circumstances within which he and we alike undergo life’s most profound experiences. Tillman’s artistic culture is saturated with sleight of hand, subtle irony, and delicate referential meaning. Indirection is the direction of contemporary culture. Why not be straightforward? Why not love and believe openly?
Our generation is confronting a crisis of morality and identity without the sure, culturally foundational resources that were at hand for our parents and grandparents. We have consequently turned not to family or its traditions — intractable and invaluable as they are — but to art, literature, and culture for our grounding. Intellectualism has in some ways supplanted piety as the mode by which we gain access to meaning and belief. Witty cultural references are a sort of social currency, the token by which one ironist may recognize his compatriots. Sarcasm, particularly when used to critique, can alienate; but it is also a way to examine tender truths and cherished realities without disturbing the universe.
To believe, to trust, to love, is to risk all. Our generation’s thought and art are not operating within a culture of action, but of reflection. We are painfully self-aware and equally self-critical as individuals and as a culture. Our everyday, like that of Eliot’s tortured Mr. Prufrock, is filled with a hundred visions and revisions; our everyman is expected to have “squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it towards some overwhelming question.”
Do we dare? Yes, but not without the subtlety and strength of those who have come before us.