Playing Arena Rock For An Audience of 10,000 People: Born to Run Like a Rolling Stone Where Pop Music Reigns

Titus Andronicus-A PRODUCTIVE COUGH

Merge Records, March 2

It’s not exactly news that rock music is rapidly losing its cultural force. The two rock songs to become massive hit singles in 2017, Imagine Dragons’ “Thunder” and Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still” are awful dreck that don’t actually feature any guitars. If I were a teenager whose idea of rock music was those bands, I would listen to nothing but EDM, R&B and hip-hop too. More credible and accomplished artists like the National, Ghost, St. Vincent, Queens of the Stone Age, Spoon and Grizzly Bear are still managing to land their albums in the top 20 of Billboard magazine’s top 200, but it’s hard to imagine a cultural climate where songs like the National’s “The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness,” Spoon’s “I Ain’t the One,” Ghost’s “Square Hammer” or even St. Vincent’s electronics-driven “Los Ageless” could now become top 40 hits. A lot of this has to do with the rise of poptimism and the somewhat justified perception that rock music is the purview of white men while pop music is more open to women and/or people of color, but worthy bands fronted by women like Big Thief, Downtown Boys, Heron Oblivion and Sheer Mag are just as far from having hit singles or going gold.

Titus Andronicus are an odd band in this moment. They combine indie and arena rock influences and first made a splash with their second album, 2010’s THE MONITOR, which was heavily influenced by Bruce Springsteen or even Meat Loaf. It had heavy conceptual aspirations, seeking to connect the Civil War to the present. Were it released in the late ’70s, it might have been a hit, but it sold so poorly that it got them dropped by XL, the label that released it. Since then, their past three albums have been released by Merge. Merge made stars out of Arcade Fire, who started out with a sound that similarly combined indie and mainstream influences in a far less self-conscious way and actually brought their debut album, FUNERAL, to the attention of a wide audience in a way the label never expected.

Titus Andronicus would clearly love to, but instead they’ve been dissed on Twitter by David Crosby. Still, their new album, A PRODUCTIVE COUGH, sounds more like ’70s Springsteen than BORN TO RUN and DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN actually did, if that makes any sense. Production-wise, they pull out all the stops, throwing piano, backing vocalists singing “sha-la-la,” strings and horns onto their songs. They also can’t resist extended song lengths. While the album is only 47 minutes long, four of its seven songs run more than seven minutes. The first single, “Number One (In New York),” is eight minutes and 14 seconds long.

When Springsteen emerged, he was fairly self-consciousness about his sound’s mix of Chuck Berry, rockabilly, Phil Spector, Motown and Bob Dylan. Titus Andronicus are way more meta. They cover Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but re-write the lyrics, changing it so that it’s partially about the Rolling Stones. Their brand of bombast is the kind of thing punk originally started as a reaction against, but they’re influenced by that movement too. The title of “Crass Tattoo” shouts out that band, who pioneered the anarcho-punk scene. The level of aggression running through songs like “Home Alone” distances Titus Andronicus from their classic rock influences. In some respects, what they’re trying to do is parallel to the Pogues’ folk-punk, and in fact, they have covered that band.

Beyond THE MONITOR, Titus Andronicus have an attraction to conceptual frameworks. Their last album, THE MOST LAMENTABLE TRAGEDY, was a self-described rock opera that spans 29 songs and 93 minutes. Singer/guitarist Patrick Stickles says it is a “complicated metaphor about manic depression, melding elements of philosophy, psychology, and science fiction through the plight of one troubled protagonist’s inner demons.”

Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” recorded in 1965, now seems like a premonition of the runaways who would crowd the Haight-Ashbury and East Village a few years later and often became drug casualties. Titus Andronicus’ version changes the song’s perspective to first-person; Stickles sings it as though he’s experiencing everything happening to the woman Dylan sang to rather condescendingly; in fact, Titus Andronicus changed the title to “(I’m) Like A Rolling Stone.” This is the album’s highlight; it benefits from the strengths of the original song, whose organ, harmonica and guitar parts it faithfully replicates, and starts off with a rare amount of direct passion for the band. On the rest of the album, Stickles performs with a level of intensity that should sound real but ends up filtered through several levels of irony. Elsewhere, A PRODUCTIVE COUGH seems like a statement about rock’n’roll history and the band’s place in it more than an expression of emotion most of the time, apart from this song.

But can you blame Titus Andronicus for this? Putting your heart on your sleeve doesn’t reap many rewards right now. Halfway through “(I’m) Like a Rolling Stone,” the passion drains away in favor of an intense self-awareness as Stickles sings about how he feels like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, etc. while performing this song. It’s nice that he remembers the Stones’ current backup singer Lisa Fisher and bassist Darryl Jones, who replaced Bill Wyman, but it is impossible to simultaneously feel like the character in “Like a Rolling Stone” and a man as privileged as Jagger, and the reality of Stickles’ current life is probably somewhere in between.

I don’t think that the meta path Titus Andronicus is following is the only way to play rock music in 2018. Even this early in the year, No Age, U.S. Girls, Loma, Shame and Khruangbin have released first-rate rock albums. None of these artists are free from the anxiety of influence, especially Khruangbin (who mix garage-band psychedelia, crate-digger beats and Middle Eastern music) and U.S. Girls (who are consciously sugar-coating leftist and feminist sentiments in a catchy mixture of rock, pop, jazz, funk and disco that evokes late ’70s Blondie and Talking Heads), but they’re not paralyzed by it the way A PRODUCTIVE COUGH often seems to be and they never sound like tribute acts. THE MONITOR was an exciting way to approach rock music’s past, but its path has turned into a dead end for Titus Andronicus. A PRODUCTIVE COUGH would like to be the indie BAT OUT OF HELL, but it’s closer to MIDNIGHT AT THE LOST AND FOUND.