The Afghan Whigs - 'Gentlemen'
Following a fucking devastating and cruel breakup about five years ago I was reading Nick Hornby’s high fidelity, when I had this sudden like, 50,000 watt lightbulb above the head moment of insight and realisation. I identified with the Rob Fleming, the recently dumped main character in the book, absolutely. In all his desperation and cheap shots and petty revenge, I absolutely felt like that dude.
From what I remember the Afghan Whigs aren’t even mentioned in that book, but I’ll get to that…
Flash back to the mid 90s and first seeing these guys on rage: I hated this band the first (and many subsequent) times I heard them. Singer Greg Dulli’s posing and sleazy-rock affectations really rubbed me - first a straight up pissed hardcore kid, later ‘empowered’ and incredibly confused by all sorts of sexual politics stuff – up the wrong way. Because I didn’t realise it was schtick. I saw him in the video for debonair, taking drags from a cigarette in between lines in the chorus and didn’t get that this affectation that was pissing me off was precisely that; an affectation. The video for the title song to the record exudes self-conscious ‘cool’ and sleaze to an even higher degree, and it really harshed my buzz. These days I look back at it and I feel like it’s kind of taking the piss out of that whole Urge Overkill/Pulp Fiction 90s vibe as it revels in it at the same time.
And revelling in the contradictions and it’s own ambiguities and weak points is pretty much a theme for this record. Which is I think why, returning more than ten years later to a band I once hated, I finally get it. Hey I wasn’t a bright teenager, I didn’t get subtlety. And this record has really only made sense to me in recent months and weeks, throwing all sorts of things I’ve done in the past – much like that moment of sudden identification with Hornby’s protagonist – into a new light.
When I realised back then how much I was echoing Fleming’s behaviour in the book, stumbling from hope to catastrophe with as many calculated below the belt hits as I could chuck in, I fucking hated myself. Well I hated myself already, that breakup coincided with a downward spiral into a few years of utter hell for me mentally, and my behaviour during that time fuelled the virulent self-loathing that kept me wanting to end myself. I was being petty, shitty and unfair. It was all my fault and going against everything I believed in; every aspect of my life, from politics garnered from feminist theory classes and crimethinc inspired bullshit to the way I dressed was reflecting in on my own self hatred.
These days I realise, well, yeah, some of these are a reflection of patriarchal society or whatever but also people do get bummed when their ex goes out and fucks all their friends after she dumps you, and I didn’t have to be cool with it. I was allowed to feel shitty without being some inhumane sexist monster. Of course I don’t blame punk politics for that, just my own naïvete in the interpretation, and the all consuming self hate that will turn anything against you it can that is a hallmark of the clinically depressed.
So while I still think Hornby’s anti-hero is kind of a dick, well, who isn’t in that situation?
Afghan Whigs vocalist Greg Dulli is a flat out dick. At least if this record is anything to judge him by. And he knows it, he acknowledges it…and he doesn’t care. Maybe he does hate himself some for it but he also recognizes at the bottom of the pit there’s a certain perverse pleasure to be taken in exploiting yr situation and acting on yr basest instincts; lashing out to hurt people just because you feel hurt, and so on.
Apparently during the writing and recording of this record Dulli and his partner were both cheating on each other, Dulli apparently with multiple other women. Their relationship was still stumbling along however, entering that fucked up zone when ‘love’ can become all about controlling and hurting the other. And it’s justified because you’ve existed so long within that space that the logical course of action, of getting the fuck out, isn’t the clearest option that hindsight would prove it to be.
Old mate Greg portrays himself throughout this period as in it for how much arse he can get. In be sweet he sings of being trapped in the relationship because ‘she wants love and I still want to fuck’. In the intro to the song he tells the ladies that he ‘has a dick for a brain’, and while he might speak of the shame, of knowing what, or who, he is, he isn’t crying out for help. He seems so apathetic or disaffected, that cigarette smoking cool blue eyed soul guy from the debonair video that he played throughout the course of the band, that he realises he’s a piece of shit but just can’t bring himself to care. He’s in it for the fuckin’.
And man is that what this record’s about or what. I like to refer to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers blood sugar sex magic as ‘the most utterly unsexy record about fucking ever made’. Gentlemen is perhaps one of the most disturbing records about fucking I’ve ever heard. Not disturbing in a graphic goregrind kind of way, but disturbing in the sense that it gets inside the twisted power politics of a dysfunctional relationship. The title song itself is like the perfect description of hate fucking, crass and vulgar in it’s lurid detail (‘I stayed in too long, but she was the perfect fit’) and violent and hateful in it’s intent (‘and we dragged it out so long this time, trying to make each other sick’). The overall air of the song is kind of like the feeling you get with the hateful, immediately before and after breakup sex when there hasn’t been a clean break, and emotions, shitty, ugly ones, are involved. The song is sordid and dirty, setting out for the cathartic violence expected in the act and instead finding only the shame and headfucks that are the inevitable result of such situations.
Dulli plays the arsehole dude well throughout the record. In when we two parted he refers to his partners own pain and depression at their situation with condescending pity, feigning ignorance as to what’s going wrong when he clearly knows what’s up. But like Hornby’s Rob Fleming, he’s going to milk the situation for all the emotional point scoring he can get. And he’s aware of it, aware that his lady knows it’s all an act, full of sneering sarcasm that he’ll still never admit, just to twist the knife a little more.
Yet we get to the song my curse, sung by Marcy Mays of the band Scrawl, the only non-Dulli vocal performance on the record and, perversely, the most intimate moment. Though that’s apparently not through some kind of next level smartarse calculation on the band’s part. I’ve read (as much as you can believe this shit) that old mate didn’t do the vocal on the song because it was too painful for him to actually sing. And you can kinda see why as he drops the arsehole act for a second and reveals his actual heartbreak.
A few tracks on and the record ends with an instrumental that really seems to build up and go nowhere. Everything is left somewhat unresolved. No happy endings. No closure. Just like real life.
I’ve always believed the kind of rock journalism crap that I just wrote here is utter bullshit, especially when it over-analyses a record and reflects on all the implications that probably weren’t there being deliberately planned out by the composers. No one thinks about their music as much as some dick who writes about it for pitchfork does. But listening to this record a lot I’m coming to understand that maybe the ideas some see implied are in their psyche at the time and therefore make their way into the recording somehow. I dunno.
But it’s no surprise, if I think about it for a second, why I suddenly only appreciate this record now. As a teenager I hadn’t had the experiences that would put me in a place to ‘get’ it. Things like the major label ALTERNATIVE ROCK production really put me off (that said, the guitar sound’s better than I remembered), and the bass tone. Fuck I hate musicmans, I really do. And just the general polished vibe of the record. And now at 27 when I decide to check it out again, with the things that have been going on in my life recently, I suddenly got it and got why all these people loved gentlemen.
It’s not an age so much as an experience thing in the way that you’ll relate to certain music at certain times I guess. I’d already had Jawbreaker’s dear you, The Red House Painters and Elliott Smith as soundtracks to other heartbreaks. And while this time around I’m far from heartbroken, actually perhaps because of it, this record makes a fuck of a lot of sense to me. Maybe it won’t to you. Or maybe you’ll hear it go and ‘dude…totally’.
By the way this is far from out of print but it’s a major label record so whatever.
From what I remember the Afghan Whigs aren’t even mentioned in that book, but I’ll get to that…
Flash back to the mid 90s and first seeing these guys on rage: I hated this band the first (and many subsequent) times I heard them. Singer Greg Dulli’s posing and sleazy-rock affectations really rubbed me - first a straight up pissed hardcore kid, later ‘empowered’ and incredibly confused by all sorts of sexual politics stuff – up the wrong way. Because I didn’t realise it was schtick. I saw him in the video for debonair, taking drags from a cigarette in between lines in the chorus and didn’t get that this affectation that was pissing me off was precisely that; an affectation. The video for the title song to the record exudes self-conscious ‘cool’ and sleaze to an even higher degree, and it really harshed my buzz. These days I look back at it and I feel like it’s kind of taking the piss out of that whole Urge Overkill/Pulp Fiction 90s vibe as it revels in it at the same time.
And revelling in the contradictions and it’s own ambiguities and weak points is pretty much a theme for this record. Which is I think why, returning more than ten years later to a band I once hated, I finally get it. Hey I wasn’t a bright teenager, I didn’t get subtlety. And this record has really only made sense to me in recent months and weeks, throwing all sorts of things I’ve done in the past – much like that moment of sudden identification with Hornby’s protagonist – into a new light.
When I realised back then how much I was echoing Fleming’s behaviour in the book, stumbling from hope to catastrophe with as many calculated below the belt hits as I could chuck in, I fucking hated myself. Well I hated myself already, that breakup coincided with a downward spiral into a few years of utter hell for me mentally, and my behaviour during that time fuelled the virulent self-loathing that kept me wanting to end myself. I was being petty, shitty and unfair. It was all my fault and going against everything I believed in; every aspect of my life, from politics garnered from feminist theory classes and crimethinc inspired bullshit to the way I dressed was reflecting in on my own self hatred.
These days I realise, well, yeah, some of these are a reflection of patriarchal society or whatever but also people do get bummed when their ex goes out and fucks all their friends after she dumps you, and I didn’t have to be cool with it. I was allowed to feel shitty without being some inhumane sexist monster. Of course I don’t blame punk politics for that, just my own naïvete in the interpretation, and the all consuming self hate that will turn anything against you it can that is a hallmark of the clinically depressed.
So while I still think Hornby’s anti-hero is kind of a dick, well, who isn’t in that situation?
Afghan Whigs vocalist Greg Dulli is a flat out dick. At least if this record is anything to judge him by. And he knows it, he acknowledges it…and he doesn’t care. Maybe he does hate himself some for it but he also recognizes at the bottom of the pit there’s a certain perverse pleasure to be taken in exploiting yr situation and acting on yr basest instincts; lashing out to hurt people just because you feel hurt, and so on.
Apparently during the writing and recording of this record Dulli and his partner were both cheating on each other, Dulli apparently with multiple other women. Their relationship was still stumbling along however, entering that fucked up zone when ‘love’ can become all about controlling and hurting the other. And it’s justified because you’ve existed so long within that space that the logical course of action, of getting the fuck out, isn’t the clearest option that hindsight would prove it to be.
Old mate Greg portrays himself throughout this period as in it for how much arse he can get. In be sweet he sings of being trapped in the relationship because ‘she wants love and I still want to fuck’. In the intro to the song he tells the ladies that he ‘has a dick for a brain’, and while he might speak of the shame, of knowing what, or who, he is, he isn’t crying out for help. He seems so apathetic or disaffected, that cigarette smoking cool blue eyed soul guy from the debonair video that he played throughout the course of the band, that he realises he’s a piece of shit but just can’t bring himself to care. He’s in it for the fuckin’.
And man is that what this record’s about or what. I like to refer to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers blood sugar sex magic as ‘the most utterly unsexy record about fucking ever made’. Gentlemen is perhaps one of the most disturbing records about fucking I’ve ever heard. Not disturbing in a graphic goregrind kind of way, but disturbing in the sense that it gets inside the twisted power politics of a dysfunctional relationship. The title song itself is like the perfect description of hate fucking, crass and vulgar in it’s lurid detail (‘I stayed in too long, but she was the perfect fit’) and violent and hateful in it’s intent (‘and we dragged it out so long this time, trying to make each other sick’). The overall air of the song is kind of like the feeling you get with the hateful, immediately before and after breakup sex when there hasn’t been a clean break, and emotions, shitty, ugly ones, are involved. The song is sordid and dirty, setting out for the cathartic violence expected in the act and instead finding only the shame and headfucks that are the inevitable result of such situations.
Dulli plays the arsehole dude well throughout the record. In when we two parted he refers to his partners own pain and depression at their situation with condescending pity, feigning ignorance as to what’s going wrong when he clearly knows what’s up. But like Hornby’s Rob Fleming, he’s going to milk the situation for all the emotional point scoring he can get. And he’s aware of it, aware that his lady knows it’s all an act, full of sneering sarcasm that he’ll still never admit, just to twist the knife a little more.
Yet we get to the song my curse, sung by Marcy Mays of the band Scrawl, the only non-Dulli vocal performance on the record and, perversely, the most intimate moment. Though that’s apparently not through some kind of next level smartarse calculation on the band’s part. I’ve read (as much as you can believe this shit) that old mate didn’t do the vocal on the song because it was too painful for him to actually sing. And you can kinda see why as he drops the arsehole act for a second and reveals his actual heartbreak.
A few tracks on and the record ends with an instrumental that really seems to build up and go nowhere. Everything is left somewhat unresolved. No happy endings. No closure. Just like real life.
I’ve always believed the kind of rock journalism crap that I just wrote here is utter bullshit, especially when it over-analyses a record and reflects on all the implications that probably weren’t there being deliberately planned out by the composers. No one thinks about their music as much as some dick who writes about it for pitchfork does. But listening to this record a lot I’m coming to understand that maybe the ideas some see implied are in their psyche at the time and therefore make their way into the recording somehow. I dunno.
But it’s no surprise, if I think about it for a second, why I suddenly only appreciate this record now. As a teenager I hadn’t had the experiences that would put me in a place to ‘get’ it. Things like the major label ALTERNATIVE ROCK production really put me off (that said, the guitar sound’s better than I remembered), and the bass tone. Fuck I hate musicmans, I really do. And just the general polished vibe of the record. And now at 27 when I decide to check it out again, with the things that have been going on in my life recently, I suddenly got it and got why all these people loved gentlemen.
It’s not an age so much as an experience thing in the way that you’ll relate to certain music at certain times I guess. I’d already had Jawbreaker’s dear you, The Red House Painters and Elliott Smith as soundtracks to other heartbreaks. And while this time around I’m far from heartbroken, actually perhaps because of it, this record makes a fuck of a lot of sense to me. Maybe it won’t to you. Or maybe you’ll hear it go and ‘dude…totally’.
By the way this is far from out of print but it’s a major label record so whatever.
The Afghan Whigs – ‘gentlemen’ Elektra Records, 1993
If I were Going / Gentlemen / Be Sweet / Debonair / When We Two Parted / Fountain and Fairfax / What Jail is Like / My Curse / Now You Know / I Keep Coming Back / Brother Woodrow(Closing Prayer)
