by Mark Gurarie (@emgeeteevee)
Bonged on the con of capitalism and its cruelties, Stoner Will & the Narks’ album A Narxist Critique catches us snoozing on the job and is hoping we’re committing time-theft. It’s fitting—in a time when the contradictions of our failing society are laid bare daily, when market demand drives up death counts, when we’re on the brink of environmental collapse, and so on—to be asked, “Which side of the gun are you on?” as we are in the opener, “Windy Rhetoric.” On a bed of rollicking indie rock that straddles post-punk precision with bright, slacker-forward riffs—somewhere on a vertex of Jonathan Richman meeting the Vaselines meeting Gang of Four, Delta 5 et al. (or, it being 2021, perhaps on a vertex of younger/current bands that wear those t-shirts)—the quartet takes rhetorical aim and shoots. The bullets here are long, vivid vocal lines laid on beds of lush harmonies: clever burns, snapshots of outrage and absurdity, quips, and catalogues of social, political, economic—and even personal—contradictions.
In the sights of principal songwriters, “Stoner” Will Meyer and Brian Zayatz—with the two joined by Steph Jacko and Anya Klepacki—the targets of their critique are all too familiar to some of us. They’re on our feeds or on TV or writing NY Times columns calling for war, for privatization, for surveillance and borders. They’re knocking their carts into your ankles at Whole Foods, or babbling about “selfcare to boost productivity” to crowds of bored banking regulators in Davos, or putting up BLM signs while voting for racist sheriffs and politicians. Sights are set on cops, bosses and their threatening auras, concern trolls, tech evangelists, “some masshole named Matthew, who probably works at a hedge fund, listens to Dave Matthews and thinks he is a hipster,” landlords, centrists, imperialists, fascists, libertarians, and car-centric infrastructure. Chuckle all you want at the pot-joke in the title; A Narxist Critique is dead serious, and this precisely isn’t about comfort, civility, or calm. It’s a selfie taken next to the settler-colonial, capitalist project as it shrugs and slouches and devours and kills.
With A Narxist Critique, Stoner Will & the Narks give us not just an album, but an engine for analysis, if you will, a blueprint for a Narkolectical science. A stoned Marxist—the one you are seated next to at the party—might then posit a dialectic (a historical advancement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis) for understanding this:
Thesis: The songs (bongs) are dialectical weapons, offering critiques of capital, of liberal hypocrisies, of policing, imperialism, financialization, austerity, and their effects. This is ground down and packed into a bowl, and, achieving a certain temperature, eventually ignited.
Antithesis: The critique, Narxist and/or otherwise, is then pulled out as smoke and chilled and filtered in the bong (song) water of self-consciousness, self-awareness. The tongue articulating the analysis is occasionally embedded in the cheek; masks are worn; speakers include hedge-funders seeking self-care, fashionista/influencer “activists,” a New-Age ecofascist prepper-type, others.
Synthesis: An exhale, a puff, a boogie, a good and beneficial cough. A moment of self-reflection and self-critique. If only songs could raise the agrarian revolt we no doubt need in Massachusetts and beyond (“but with regards to the role of the rural in revolutions/ I’d say don’t discount it” the Narks counsel Stoner Will on the hidden track, “Will, Don’t Move to New York”), but alas we’re well past believing. The hegemony holds on, clings tenuously; you can dance if you want to.
What the songs do raise? A mirror, and a damn fine one. And what makes A Narxist Critique special and particularly unique is that it’s thoroughly and proudly a product of its location: the Connecticut River Valley (sometimes called the “Pioneer Valley,” but, as home to several Native American Massacres and outright genocide, we steer clear of that nomenclature). This area, East of the Berkshires, West of Boston and Central Mass, is a mixture of burnt-out, poorer, post-industrial cities, lush rural regions, farms, and affluent college towns (including Northampton and Amherst). An area with a long and proud tradition of liberal and left activism (ahem, also indie rock as the home-base of Dinosaur Jr. and where Speedy Ortiz got their buzzy, fuzzy start, among others), the Valley—as depicted here, especially—is rife with contradictions. There’s comfort and good vibes, brunch spots, nice trees, Crunch gyms, and all the vaguely New Age sorts of things you can want to add charm, but only if you can pay. There are also tent camps for the houseless, migrant farm workers struggling for drivers licenses and recognition, ICE raids, opioid problems, and several very large tanks in the garages of small town police departments.
Indeed, in the Valley, organic farms, breweries, dispensaries, and farm to table restaurants dot increasingly gentrified areas, and despite lawn signs that say BLM and “All Are Welcome Here,’ the police are very well-funded, most typically tasked with chasing away houseless folks from small businesses. There’s a veneer here that Stoner Will & the Narks are all too aware of. The cities in the south of the Valley—Springfield and Holyoke—are suffering from years of neoliberal austerity and poverty, while towns to the North, like Greenfield and Turner’s Falls, are epicenters of the opioid crisis. It’s a mess that Zayatz and Meyer—also journalists and founders of a DIY, non-profit local news site, The Shoestring—know all too well and refer to in their songs. And it’s that specificity that makes this a kind of documentary indie rock. “Oops! I spilled my police department in your ethnostate” Zayatz sings referring to revelations that members of the Northampton Police Department were planning on receiving “counter-terrorism” training in Israel. (Notably, public outcry and efforts by activist groups halted the trip). “But what do you do when your police department and keys /Are in the only democracy/ In the middle east?” This muckraking rock gets at the ways even in a liberal bubble, you’re still serving Empire; cops are and will be cops, and yes several of them live in your head, dad.
There are many Valleys like this in the world—seemingly comfortable areas, liberal pockets outside of cities, areas where “Biden 2020” bumper stickers paper over that subtle, New England-y kind of racism. “The coexist sign/ that’s displayed at the door/doesn’t seem to define/who this establishment’s for” goes the refrain in “(The Externality of) Cheap Beer (is Tacit Consent to Empire),” before landing on a description of microbrew beer that may as well encompass the dominant political mode of the Valley: “I like my beer how I like my politics: nominally inclusive and prohibitively expensive!”
Out of the muck and the horror depicted here, out of the inevitable drag, slip, and slide of late-capitalism, Stoner Will & the Narks are able nonetheless to project warmness. They’re neither yelling at us nor sloganeering in the way of some other political-oriented bands. Rather, in a sometimes understated or even deadpan manner, they lacerate their subjects with humor and jokes: “Cause I can’t wait to leave town and spend the weekend in the Catskills./ We’re gonna get an AirBnB and do Ayahuasca in a sweat lodge,/ ‘cause I don’t like the energy of my morning commute,” Stoner Will sings, channeling a banker, in “Neocolonial Self-Care in the Anthropocene; or the Vibes at Goldman Sacks.” We really shouldn’t have let the yuppies take psychedelics, but anyhow…
As carried through in A Narxist Critique, this approach functions a bit like a defense mechanism—a means of coping with how fucked we are. In this sense, the laughter and absurdity on display here are deployed to re-inject joy into the joylessness of capitalism. Though not the entire project for creating a better world—we’re long past believing that songs can “change the world”—this work is critical; without humor, without human warmth and connection, without music, those struggling for a better society would have less, or perhaps even nothing, to fight for.