Notes on Mellencamp1. Many musician given themselves new names; many times, these names are ridiculous, even more ridiculous than their birth ones. Arnold George Dorsey changed his name to Englebert Humperdink; Robert Allen Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. Stefani Germanotta’s bubbed herself Lady Gaga.
2. One of these appellations—unmistakably showbiz, a variant of CB handle but hardly identical to it– goes by the name of “Mellencamp.”
3. Mellencamp (as distinct from Cougar or Couger) is one of the easiest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Mellencamp is hardly discussed. It is not a natural subject of conversation, at least since the late 1980’s, to really care about Mellencamp.
3a. The essence of Mellencamp is its love of the excessively realistic: pea coats, denim, acoustic guitars, yelling loudly about something that is fake or not genuine.
3b. Each example of Mellencamp is proletarian—something of a public image, a badge of identity among large suburban areas.
3c. Apart from an aside by Doc McGhee in 1989, it has hardly been committed print or video.
3d. To sing along to “Pink Houses” is betray Mellencamp, since he is completely sick of the song.
3e. If that sickness can be defended, it will be to work and somehow rise, and to tell someone that one day they’re gonna be President.
4. I am as strongly drawn to Mellencamp as I am repulsed by it. Like everyone else, I bought Mellencamp’s second full-length LP, American Fool, in 1982. It wasn’t a private pleasure: I bought it on cassette to make sure I could hear “Hurts So Good” wherever I went.
4a. There is no taboo in Mellencamp if this love is displayed. No one who fully shares Mellencamp can really analyze it; to name it, to air-drum along Kenny Aronoff’s snare, the listener embodies Mellencamp.
5. These notes are for Nina Blackwood.
6. To begin: Mellencamp is a specific stripe of Americana. It is one way of seeing America as a capitalist democracy that is capable of allowing each of its citizens to wear a faded denin jacket without shame or affectation. The way of Mellencamp does not concern itself with beauty but in the appearance of comfort. The stages of stone-washing denim is not Mellencamp, but stone-wash jeans are.
7. Mellencamp not is not concerned with beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.
8. To be Mellencamp is to emphasize comfort over style, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to style.
9. Is should be said that in a Mellencamp sensibility, politics is a way of talking about things, as opposed to Doing Something About It.
10. There are “Mellencampy” t-shirts, furniture, songs, novels, people, buildings.
10a. An NPR fundraiser with a Marshall Crenshaw concert in Mellencamp.
10b. A plastic Adirondack chair bought at a local hardware store is Mellencamp.
10c. The HBO series Treme is Mellencamp.
11. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Mellencamp:
Hazelnut-flavored coffee
Beeswax candles
Fanny packs worn without irony
In-and-Out Burger
American Spirit cigarettes
Bruce Springsteen post-Lucky Town
Bob Roberts
Wilco side projects
Roseanne Cash
12. Mellencamp is usually found in popular culture, as opposed to “high culture.” Other than perhaps Aaron Copeland, one cannot think of a piece of classical music that is Mellencamp. For Mellencamp aesthetics is always in the service of supporting the ideal notion of country. That being said, country music is rarely Mellencamp, unless it is a middle-class male listening to country music after he has turned 30.
13. This isn’t to say there is anything wrong with being Mellencamp. Some people can’t help it. If someone looks good in khakis and a blue t-shirt and complains about media coverage of the most recent race-baiting trial, it’s more of a way of a life than an adopted one. It is Mellencamp.
14. More specifically: if a writer is a product of boarding school and Ivy League college, and does not wish to acknowledge or divulge that this privilege has warped the way he or she sees the world, often to the point where the writer is deluded that they are a.) working class or “salt of the “earth” because he or she is a writer; b.) disadvantaged, oppressed or, even worse, “the other” simply because he or she made the decision (or, worse, answered the “calling” to be a writer); or c) feels compelled to speak on behalf of huge swathes of humanity with whom the writer would have nothing to do with in real life, then that writer is Mellencamp.
14a. Mellencamp, in this sense, may be seen as a proletarian noblesse oblige, if it weren’t already the case that upper-class people weren’t already acting according to the tenets of Mellencamp.
15. Each Mellencamp thought goes through a trial and error where certain criteria must be met. Does it “feel unnatural” or “processed”? Was it ever “popular” or “best-selling”? Could the thought in any way come across as “corporate”?
16. The artifice of Mellencamp is no artifice.
17. Urban and rural Mellencamp alike are hand-made, hand-pickled, hand-manufactured. If it is manufactured, its provenance must be accounted for from the point of raw materials.
17a. All raw materials are Mellencamp. Raw anything is Mellencamp.
18. Mellencamp sees the country as not a “country,” but the idea of a country. This is important. If the country is given a name, it is disqualified as Mellencamp.
19. Mellencamp answers to the call of authenticity, of acting old when one is young and acting young when one is old, of mono over stereo, analog over digital, or hand-pushed over motorized.
20. Mellencamp is not a strictly male phenomenon. The female Mellencamp instinct is as strong as the male. To be sure, most Mellencamp activities—supporting failing businesses with fundraisers, acoustic guitars, mandolins—are not gender-specific in any way.
21. Mellencamp is not sex-less but it is also not sexual or, worse, sexy. Nowhere does the Mellencamp impulse mention the sexual act.
22. Mellencamp sees everything as handwritten, hand-mailed.
23. Anything event that occurs after the Fall of of Saigon in April 1975 will never be Mellencamp.
24. Examples of Mellencamp: Rounder Records, free blues festivals, 8-tracks, vegetable oil as auto fuel, day-old newspapers, ticket scalpers with hears of gold, backpacks, Salon.com, Bic pens, mix tapes, college reunions, college sports, sweatshirts.
24. A complete history of Mellencamp, too long to appear here, would include Russian novels, Baudelaire, the British invasion, Alan Lomax, and Marilyn Monroe.
25. To have a Mellencamp sensibility is to be always on guard with how something is somehow fake, middle-class, or purchased through Amazon.com.
26. This is why microbrew beer is Mellencamp, as well as cheap beer. Any beer that is lemon- or lime-flavored is not Mellencamp.
26a. The same applies to light or “lite beer.”
27. To use Mellencamp as a verb, or “to Mellencamp,” means that you are trying to make something more authentic. Growing a beard, then, is to Mellencamping one’s face. To restore old furniture is to Mellencamp. To join a food co-op to buy food that is three times the price at a local supermarket is to Mellencamp-shop.
28. All Mellencamp is distinctly on purpose. Like the singer-songwriter for which Mellencamp is named, Mellencamp refuses to do things the easy way, if the easy way sounds like the Animals with reverb. If something cannot be made better with a violin or an African-American back-up singer, that things is not Mellencamp.
29. The height of Mellencamp: John Cougar Mellencamp’s 1986 album Scarecrow, a collection of songs that sound at once like early Billy Joel and mid-period R.E.M. The cover depicts Mellencamp standing at a fence at the edge of a farm. He stares at one arm draped over barbed wire. He is wearing a bolo tie, its medallion the size of a policeman’s badge. Like the sensibility that is Mellencamp, critical reception centered around the ideas behind the songs, the quest for authenticity and the loss of the American dream, anything, it seems, besides the songs themselves, which actually weren’t that bad, even if they have not aged that well.
30. That last observation may be construed as ironic, if irony at all figured into Mellencamp. It does not.
31. So, again, Mellencamp rests on loss of innocence. Mellencamp reveals innocence, but also beatifies it.
32. Mellencamp is completely innocent or, more likely, exclusively intentional. An example of the latter: Johnny Cash’s necrophiliac acoustic records.
33. Pure Mellencamp is fun that fails to exaggerate itself in any way. Each note, each gesture, each piece of clothing, is within bounds of what is expected and pure.
34. When a thing is simply authentic (rather than Mellencamp), it’s often because it doesn’t know about Mellencamp or Johnny Couger, Johnny Cougar, John Cougar Mellencamp, or John Mellencamp.
35. Anything that is fancy or goofy or passionate in a way the implies blacktop pavement is not Mellencamp.
35a. This explains why the name of San Diego punk rock band Jon Cougar Concentration Camp, while hilarious, is also not Mellencamp.
36. Mellencamp pays special attention to the ordinary, not so much to observe, but to say, “Look at that ordinary thing—we should do that more often.” Mellencamp is a way of indicting that which is not ordinary.
http://danielnester.com/2013/07/05/notes-on-mellencamp/
