Hippie alternaculture ate a friend of mine some years back. When I first knew her, she was to all appearances a competent, functional adult. She had a responsible job; she participated in a competitive sport with discipline and enthusiasm; she paid her bills. And then, in the space of a year or so, it all dissolved in a haze of vague spiritualism and patchouli. She ditched the job to be a bike messenger and ditched all the rest of it to smoke pot and pursue her inner puddle of bliss. Inevitably she ended up in Sedona, Arizona, practicing some vague mystical healing art and doing circus tricks. As the Horse’s Ha say on “Hidey Hole,” a song from the new Waterdrawn (Fluff & Gravy), “There’s nothing dearer than free will.”
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My friend’s self-devolution can be seen as an implied critique of (or backhanded tribute to) the Horse’s Ha and all they stand for. Janet Bean (Freakwater, Eleventh Dream Day) and Jim Elkington (Skull Orchard, Brokeback) are quite clearly making music for feral hipsters—songs by which to go out on a full-moon night and transform into Stevie Nicks. The duo’s genre is, broadly, “freak folk,” and the Platonic freaky folk that it’s for are circus people and bike messengers. You don’t sing these songs while working on the railroad or in the fields. You listen to them while sitting cross-legged on the floor of a coffeehouse or college auditorium.
You could see this decidedly bourgeois and modern circle of reference as decadent delegitimization—as a sign that the folk revival has revived itself right into the ground. The Horse’s Ha, though, are consciously committed to the idea that that very odor of decay can indicate a different kind of ominous fertility. In “Parachute Voluntary,” for example, the spooky, exhausted Nick Drake dream seems spooky and exhausted not because it’s poetic and evocative but because it isn’t. “What are the chances of being hurt,” Bean and Elkington ask in quavering tones, and then answer, “Someone says three to one. I’ll take three to one.” This is a world where the bleak calculus of murder ballads has been reduced to the bland calculus of extreme sports. “Square jaw, cleft chin, and clear eyes / No less the emperor of the skies / I tried so hard to move along,” they confess, “but I ended up in sales.” You start with endless vistas, you end up with marketing copy; everything transcendent and authentic is already commodified. They’re writing sad poetry about the fact that volunteering to sing sad poetry means you have no sad poetry to sing.
Thu 8/22, 9 PM, Hideout, $10.
