If I were into Incestuous Father-Daughter Stuff, I’d want Chet Faker to be my Lover and my Dad
The fundamental principle behind all forms of attraction is that everyone wants to fuck their dad. This isn’t an Oedipal explanation of our darker human neuroses; it’s simply an axiomatic condition of life on earth. It’s pre-Oedipal. I want a beautiful, soulful, brooding bearish man to envelop me musically and penetrate me deeply and promise me the kind of selfless dedication to my welfare fathers are biologically wont to provide, and so do you. So does everyone! It’s been with us since the dawn of time, and now there’s a new dad messiah on the scene: Chet Faker.
Anatomy of a dad
The most dad-like thing about Chet is his glorious beard. Beards are culturally and biologically evocative of things like rugged masculinity, the ability to protect, competitive ejaculate, and Gandalf, which are all in turn associated with fatherhood. Chet’s russet beard is full and virile and bristling and able to command a room. It is martially prominent but also comforting. It says “patriarchy” and “cuddles” at the same time, a delicate balance only a dad could strike.
Much could be said about the merits of Chet’s torso and promising-seeming package, but that would be missing the forest for the trees: Chet’s overall feng shui is that he looks like a really great cuddler. He’s not too skinny and has a wide frame. He has Instagram pictures where he’s wearing boxers and sweatpants. And the rampant masculinity of his mortal trace is offset by a geometrical softness in his face and body: round nose, pillow lips, plaid-clad arms that invite you into embryonic safety. Chet looks like someone who can wrap you up in a sexy, suffocating bear hug, like when you’re hugging your dad and he starts choking you out. The best dad is both a cradle and a coffin.
Chet’s brow is strong without being Cro Magnon, sheltering eyes that look sad and faraway, like an empty balcony in the rain. Surrounding this sensuous trough is an abundance of wrinkles. Nothing is more dad-like than wrinkles around the eyes! Wrinkles suggest long years of laughing with children, but also world-weariness, wisdom, pain, and suffering. Chet’s wrinkles are especially in evidence in his amazing “No Diggity” cover, where they can be seen fractalizing around his eyes in all these erotic closeup shots of him crooning and playing the piano with large, sturdy hands, hands burnished from long Neolithic days in the Australian sun, chopping down wood to build a love-nest for his child-bride…
Wait a second. Aren’t you conflating what’s really just lumbersexual appeal with this fucked up portmanteau of fatherliness and sexual conquest?
The answer is no, not at all. In fact, the lumbersexual is really just a conceptual extension of the dad archetype. Lumberjacks celebrate strength and masculinity and danger. They embrace a rugged lifestyle that denies Western values and ideals. Now, the lumbersexual is a lumberjack softened by a Byronic tendency to seek out unrequited love. This is the essence of Chet’s parts: he looks like a lumberjack, and lumberjacks are big and masculine and good at protecting you, but he talks like a poet.
Obviously, though, appearance is not enough to justify these confused feelings of raging arousal and genetic affinity. What first brought Chet’s paradoxical powers to my attention was his voice. It’s male and earnest and engorged with emotion all at once. It sings of longing and lust, but also hesitance and withdrawal, ebbing and flowing like a Schrodinger’s Dad in a flux of earnest contradictions. Can a man be at once post- and pre-partum — ready to bear youth with the youth he has borne? Let’s take a closer look at his music to get inside this dad’s head.
“Release your problems”
“Release your problems” is a great place to start digging into Chet’s hot mess of emotions. Chet is the kind of guy who would prefer to live in emotional isolation (the lumberjack), but in reality, Chet is a deep well of feelings (the Byronic lumberjack). The song starts off slow and measured but quickly gets subsumed by a deathlike siren, symbolizing Chet’s surrender of rationality. The pain of love and all its complications torment him:
You feeding me something make me start to see in the night
I’ve been poisoned
Don’t lie to my face
Despite his deep anguish, Chet remembers his true calling as Dream Dad and peers into your girl soul. His years of maturity and experience have given him the gift of parental intuition and wisdom. He wants to be a source of comfort. A mountain for your many rivulets. “Release your problems,” he wails, thrice.
Release your problems
Release your problems
Release your problems
I could be the warmest soul if I like
He is still exercising restraint. He wants to be a good dad first and a lover second. You can observe this kind of tension in many of his songs, as he performs the unresolvable conflict — to love, or not to love? — over and over again:
I hold up my ways
These thoughts are pervasive
It’s not a statement
But peace can be evasive
“Talk is cheap”
There’s something a little bit Humbert Humbert about Chet’s tormented self-awareness, but Nabokov’s Humbert is a monster, and he knows it. It’s not that H.H. doesn’t have the self-restraint, it’s that he has given up on himself. H.H. identifies as a monster and acts accordingly. Chet Faker isn’t a monster. He wants what’s best for you:
Talk is cheap my darling
When you’re feeling right at home
I want to make you move with confidence
I wanna be with you alone
Where could be more at home than with your dad? And what could be more paternal than using endearing epithets like “darling”?!?
“Darling” is an amazing word for a male singer to sing, because it’s fundamentally non-threatening. The last time “darling” was threatening was like, when Mr. Rochester was urbanely locking his wife away in an attic (which, what the fuck?).
Since then, “darling” has been co-opted as a tool of the dad. Non-threatening isn’t an idea you’d associate with most modern male singers, who mostly talk about taming women into servility or liquidating their assholes. Instead, Chet Faker talks about wanting to be part of this great, safe nurturing environment for women. He wants to make us move with confidence. When is the last time you heard a male artist sing his desire to help a girl self-actualize? Chet Faker is basically to modern music what Ryan Gosling is to memes.
Even “No Diggity”, a song ostensibly about grocery shopping but largely about wanting to get laid, is totally respectful and harmless when Chet gentrifies it with his sexy sexy voice. It’s like, the consensual version of placing females in bags. When Chet Faker sings “I gotta bag it up,” I’m like, “okay, put me in that bag. I won’t breathe until you tell me to Daddy.”
“Drop the Game”
The fact that Chet is only 27 doesn’t detract from his dadness. In his collaboration with Flume on “Drop the Game,” he says: “I’ve been feeling old / I’ve been feeling cold.” (Except it’s more like co-oh-Oh-oh-Oh-old, his voice going up and down like a sensual R&B blowjob.) Feeling old is a pretty paternal feeling to have, and being old is incredibly erotic. This song is also intriguing for its homonymic appeal to fatherhood (emphasis mine):
I’ve been feeling old
I’ve been feeling co-oh-oh-olllddd
You’re the heat that I kno-oh-oh-ow
They say you are my sun
Naturally, when I first heard this I thought he meant “son,” as in “the direct consequence of a father’s seminal production,” which provoked all this juicy imagery of dads cumming everywhere and producing life. The truth is more obscure, but one is reminded of a line in Hamlet where Shakespeare puns on sun: “Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun,” Hamlet tells his new King/Uncle/Father when asked why he’s looking so glum. The pun is that Hamlet is also sick of being his uncle’s new son, because his uncle is literally a crown-stealing motherfucker. Chet Faker is likely following in a rich legacy of summoning celestial imagery to reference intimate family dynamics.
“Lessons in Patience”
On its surface, “Lessons in Patience” is six minutes of cultish moaning that is unpleasantly reminiscent of an Edward Sharpe show. In every Edward Sharpe show I’ve been to Alexander Ebert forgets his lyrics and just sorts of sits there cross-legged on the ground, groaning and swaying, like that scene from Avatar where the Navi all undulate harmonically around their massive mother-tree-astral-spirit-headquarters. All this while the audience shouts out random lyrics, mostly consisting of church parts, for the mentally not-there Alexander.
In terms of dad material, the lead singer of Edward Sharpe is not promising. Alexander Ebert is the kind of Experimental Dad who raises his children on the road in a camper in the School of Life, inadvertently exposing them to non-monogamous free love practices because the confines of the camper are so cramped, whereas Chet Faker is the Ideal Wholesome Dad (and Lover).
Excerpt from “Lessons in patience”:
UhhhHhhhhh uhhh uhhh
UhhhhhhUmmmm OooOooohhmm Ooo
OOOOOOOOO OOOoooOOOOOOO
OOhmmmm Ohhh
It’s nice to hear Chet sexily interpolate across various vocal registers, but why does this song go on for so long? Why isn’t he saying anything? Why does this sound like goddamn Edward Sharpe. Then you realize this song isn’t Edward Sharpeian at all; it’s far more brilliant than that. You realize that Chet Faker is teaching you a lesson. A lesson about patience!
You have to listen to the whole thing in order to see it come together at the end. Or maybe the point is to exercise patience for the sake of exercising patience, and let go of the notion that everything you encounter must be parsed and digested within a framework of logical positivism. Maybe you just have to experience. Exist. You know: let go. Just learn to live in the moment. Some Alan Watts shit. Alan Watts is a big-time dad, having fathered seven entire children. Not to mention that providing a lesson, especially through subterfuge or subtlety or slyness, is a canonically dad thing to do. In fact, the song ends with a cheeky little outro, which seems like Chet’s dad-like way of telling his kids, see, that wasn’t so bad, there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to my protracted expressions of mental suffering and/or sexual pleasure, but you withstood it with the fortitude of a Zen practitioner who knows life is senseless! And perhaps you have gained something from this!
Thank you, dad. You are so wise.
A Scientific Appeal
On a more serious note, what people never talk about are the obvious emotional benefits of dating your dad. There was a piece last year in NYMag’s “Science of Us” section about a girl who is dating her dad. It’s called “What it’s like to date your dad.” The nutshell version is that this girl and her biological dad were estranged since she was a baby, re-met when she was 17, fell wildly in lust/love and ended up moving in together with the dad’s current girlfriend who totally supported the decision, got matching “Peanut Butter & Jelly” tattoos and attended her senior prom which is the same event where she was conceived, so apparently dating your dad is like if Maury decided to do a spectacular reality TV show about incest.
The thing is, their relationship sounds great:
“I think we have a better relationship than any couple I’ve met because our bond is so strong. I just feel so close to him and so in love with him. We are almost two years into the relationship and I’m still head over heels with that “first few weeks in love” feeling. Everybody says we are the cutest couple they’ve ever seen. I took him to prom.”
And:
“When I need my dad I say, ‘Hey, Dad, I need you.’ And then he’s not going to be my fiancé or my boyfriend, but my father.”
And:
“I can go to him with anything and he will listen to me and give me good advice. He helps me fix problems. I love everything about him, but the extreme closeness and the special bond is what I really cherish — most people don’t have that. Right from the start we were comfortable being so open and close because we are so similar. I’ve never felt this close to anyone.”
Amazing.
What kind of dad is Chet Faker?
Chet Faker isn’t just any dad. There are all-American dads and celebrity dads, stop-motion fox dads and post-apocalyptic dads. But Chet isn’t any of these. Chet is a post-dad. A normal dad is merely a vehicle for child-rearing, stripped of human agency and complexity: what philosophers call being “unfit for ethical inspection”. He just persists, in the most basic Hobbesian way, producing capital until the bloated parasites he has sired have had their fill. At this point the flesh-bank dad ceases to be. Contrast this bleak image with the post-dad, who has his own thoughts and feelings, his own internal life, his own fears and tics and melodramas. The rise of the post-dad is strongly correlated with the increased socioeconomic power of women. For the first time, the dad isn’t the explicit breadwinner of the house and can ascend to a higher plane of existence. Once the ascension is complete, a post-dad can never go back to not being a dad, but his dad-ness seems to recede into the background, always infusing but never inflecting his new course through life. Examples of post-dads include George Clooney, who has always been a post-dad.
Most post-dads tend to be really cool and do awesome things, though there are some notable failures, like Jeb Bush. Chet Faker is evidently a post-dad; in fact, he might even be a post-post-dad, but no one can say for sure. Since being a post-dad is all about being dad-like without letting the contemporary concerns of fatherhood get in the way, Chet may have transcended this definition by embodying the Perfect Dad without producing any children whatsoever. It’s truly an admirable feat.
(Interestingly, the facility with which a dad can transition to post-dad is not as readily available to women. Post-moms are considered controversial; see this discussion on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening for a better sense of why society reviles post-moms.)
Examples of post-dads:
Chet and his music leave us with more questions than answers. What does it mean to be a dad? Can we decontextualize the dad from the nuclear family? Is the dad a discrete cultural item? Is it okay to fuck your dad? What about uncles? Are uncles just horny dads? What a time to be a dad.
