Tuesday 8/18: Bartees Strange - "Boomer"
Today we share our thoughts on the new single from D.C. musician and songwriter Bartees Strange.
Welcome to Endless Scroll, the brainchild of Eli Enis (he/him) and Eric Bennett (they/them). Since Feb. 2019, we’ve been a weekly podcast about music, the internet, and where those two things intersect. Now we’re, also a M-F newsletter about songs. Our format is simple: a link to a song and a short take from each of us about what we think of it. Each day of the week has a corresponding genre: Monday is indie, Tuesday is punk, Wednesday is hip-hop, Thursday is pop, and Friday is misc.
This week, while Eli is away on vacation, the newsletter will feature contributions from a series of writers we love.
Today, we share our thoughts on a new song from the D.C musician and songwriter Bartees Strange. We’re joined by Portland, Oregon based music writer Keegan Bradford. You can read the most recent installment of Friendship International, Keegan’s column on emo, and alternative music in Asia, here.
Keegan Bradford:
There is one simple reason Bartees Strange chose “Mustang” as the lead single for his upcoming debut full-length Live Forever: if he had gone with “Boomer,” we would have all spontaneously combusted. “Mustang” had a handful of sonic analogues to the best of the late Aughts indie rock. It has TV on the Radio’s sensual confidence; the lyrics quote Hospice. There were enough seemingly familiar touchstones to help ease us into Bartees’s world. “Boomer,” however, is the wardrobe into Narnia, a doorway into a world so much larger and more fantastic than we could have prepared ourselves for.
That’s actually a horrible comparison. It’s more like getting on the back of the motorcycle and clinging tightly to a sexy and dangerous bad boy with a heart of gold who peels out, racing the two of you into the expanse of the night. Or it’s like whipping an adderall into the espresso like a café Cubano. It’s fucking wild, is what I’m saying.
Much has been made of Bartees’s love for The National and his excellent EP of covers, but he’s also been open about the ways that his indie rock fandom reinforced the issues with the faces he was seeing on stage. In an essay for Talkhouse, Bartees writes, “It hit me how few black folks were in the crowd, and how this genre (indie rock) seems to exclude the contributions black people have made to it.”
He’s right. Coverage of “Mustang” and his new single, “Boomer,” have avoided direct comparison—I assume for the same reason I’m hedging around it: because we don’t want to expose ourselves by trotting out our usual reference points trying to describe something much richer and more expansive than whatever group of four white dudes holding guitars we liked in ‘08.
Much ink has been spilled over vague praise like “massive,” “propulsive,” and “unapologetic” (?). Live Forever is going to be described as innovative and genre-bending. You’ll see the pointless phrase “defies categorization” more than once. All of those things are true, but it shortchanges the depth of what’s happening. This is guitar-forward indie rock being scrapped for parts and reconstituted into something searing and salient. It’s a sound clearly in the lineage of the indie rock greats, but not beholden to them. Bartees himself said as much to Billboard in March: “For the LP, I try to show how everything is connected: rap, country, hardcore, post-rock. To me and a lot of people of color who grew up making things, those genres are blurry. The lines don’t really make sense to me.”
This type of statement is normally an enormous red flag. Typically after a musician says something like this, the subsequent release is a lukewarm, unappetizing stew—a limp attempt to substitute Having A Lot Of Ideas for Having Interesting Ideas. “Boomer” is somehow A Lot Of Interesting Ideas. The rap bars of the verses are legitimately #bars, endlessly quotable lines that I’ve been guilty of startling my cats with as I abruptly yell them around my house: “DRIPPIN’ SINCE A YOUNGIN’ / I’VE BEEN EATIN’ SINCE A TEEN, BRO.”
Listen to the warbling lead guitar sashay through the verse, and how much space the bass gives it: deliberately terse, hitting only when absolutely necessary. Listen to how the bright jangle of the guitars in the chorus get louder without distorting, leaving room for that powerhouse of a voice to belt it out. Listen to the twangy riffs and country warmth of the bridge as it builds. Don’t worry about what other bands it sounds like, just run it back as soon as it ends. The point is not to trace how distant influences may have been melted down and alchemized into “Boomer”s surging, electric rush. That does a disservice to what Bartees is doing—he’s not paying homage to the white indie rockers who have come before him. He is reaching further back into a deeper pool of resources, making something completely new and, in many ways, better.
I’ve had the same conversation about this song a lot lately, where I show it to some friends and they remark on how easily this kind of thing goes south, how quickly blending disparate genres with rock becomes corny and stagey. “Boomer” walks a precarious tightrope, one not visible to most people, where any misstep brings the whole thing tumbling down into schmaltz and self-parody. The success of “Boomer” is the proof of Bartees Strange’s clarity of vision, the sound of a songwriter taking risks because they know they’re going to stick to the landing. And goddamn it: he does.
Eric Bennett:
Alright look I’m not going to try to follow that, just know that I agree with Keegan, and aggressively nodded my head reading that.
Here is what I had to say around 8:56 PM last night before I put this together:
It isn’t everyday one gets such an unobstructed view of an artist whose years of work are about to meet a deserved payoff. Since his EP of what are technically covers, but feel more like reinventions of songs by The National, it’s clear Bartees Strange is ascendant. That EP served as the amuse-bouche for fans and critics alike. His debut, out in October, is striking, and “Boomer” is just one reason why. He soars through a freewheeling, mesmerizing flow in the song's verses, then delivers the towering chorus of a true rockstar. It’s nearly impossible to fight off just how much the hook makes you want to completely lose control. There’s a lot of music from this year I feel truly robbed of the opportunity of seeing live, but “Boomer” is among the highest tier of those. Strange’s use of synths on this and prior single “Mustang” is evocative, each with a tone that songs like fluorescent neon. If you wait on listening to this because there are a lot of people praising it, know that I am judging you.