Ladies, Let Me Tell You About Myself

Twenty years after its release, Gentlemen works entirely too well as political allegory.

The way Greg Dulli told it to Bob Gendron for the 33⅓ books series, the vocal track for “My Curse” was one of the more troublesome of the session that produced his band’s major label debut. By bringing in guest vocalist Marcy Mays, The Afghan Whigs had recast the song’s narrator as a woman, the only feminine voice on an album dominated by men. After multiple takes and repeated attempts to explain what he wanted, though, Dulli still wasn’t satisfied.

Mays, having grown impatient, ordered him out of the studio while she recorded the track her own way. It was unusual for Dulli—who not only wrote and sang most of the album but was also producing it—to relinquish control. Nevertheless, he took a smoke break and let Mays have momentary reign over the studio. The track she laid down was raw and aching, a torch song every bit as self-immolating as Edith Piaf’s were resolute. Hearing it, Dulli was properly chastened.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Gentlemen, the album on which May’s version of “My Curse” appears. Nowadays we’d see the dispute over the song as a classic example of “mansplaining”: a man telling a woman how she ought to present herself, the woman putting him in his place. In October of 1993, though, the contemporary vogue for portmanteau had not yet caught up to the need for a term like mansplaining. Had things gone a different way, we might have never needed the term at all.

After all, from the vantage point of the early 1990s, the future looked comparatively bright. Never had more that two women served in the U.S. Senate at any one time, until the election of four female senators in 1992 brought the concurrent total to six. While high profile harassment cases drew attention to the treatment of women in unequal workplaces, both Congress and the Supreme Court delivered victories to women fighting for entry into occupations previously reserved for men. Passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act helped ensure that discrimination would not force women to choose between family and career, while the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), drafted by then-Senator Joe Biden, established an office for investigating and prosecuting domestic violence and sexual abuse.

Third-wave feminism was in its defining early phase. Inheritors of second-wave gains, like Rebecca Walker, Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner, pushed at the boundaries of feminist thought and founded the Third Wave Direct Action Corporation. The exuberance of Gen-X’ers determined to attain gender parity on their own terms blasted through in the music of Riot grrrl bands like Huggy Bear, Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. (Though founded in the mid-1980s, Mays’ own trio, Scrawl, is sometimes grouped with the movement.) The emergence of glossy magazines like Bust and Bitch ultimately subverted the mainstream conception of what a women’s magazine could be, while a spate of ‘zines opened up a grassroots intellectual space where women could theorize the movement and grapple with popular culture.

The Afghan Whigs ran against that tide. Forming in late 1980s Cincinnati, the band determinedly explored the sordid hinterlands of American music, where the mystique of blues and rock resolves itself into a document of self-destruction. While the defining bands of the era were crunching out three-chord grunge or post-metal alt-rock, guitarists Greg Dulli and Rick McCollum, along with bassist John Curly and drummer Steve Earle, snaked their instruments around one another in songs that pitted rhythm-and-blues in a tug-a-war against the overdriven snarl of white rock. As frontman-cum-impresario, Dulli seduced and provoked like some purgatorial Elvis, often with hardly a breath between the two postures.

When Seattle came calling in 1990, the band recorded their most straightforward rock’n’roll album, Up In It, as a concession to the sound of Sub Pop labelmates like Mudhoney. Two years later, Congregation reasserted their intention to entangle the branches of the blues family tree—everything from funk and glam to rock opera and 60s girl group pop. The band toured relentlessly behind the album, even as Sub Pop’s finances grew increasingly thin.

When label support finally gave out, Dulli found himself stranded in L.A. and sorting out the aftermath of a relationship marred by mutual infidelity. “I think I reacted in the way someone raised in a patriarchal family in Ohio would react,” he told Gendron. “It was in retrospect that I began a closer examination of my contribution toward the dysfunction of the relationship.” He began to flesh out songs that the band had worked on during the Congregation tour.

By the time Elektra Records added the Whigs to their roster, the band was ready to record their fourth—and arguably best—album. Gentlemen, as the title would suggest, is a collection of character portraits: men primarily, each an enlargement of impulses that Dulli had tolerated and sometimes even nurtured, during the slow-motion implosion of his relationship. The slinky, distorted roar of McCollum’s guitar interrupts and insinuates. Like an rebuttal, it bursts forth in an angry shard of a bridge after one verse, bleeding into the second while the voice confesses, “Now that I’m ashamed / it burns / but the weight is off.”

That internal argument between word and sound accounts for much of what makes Gentlemen so riveting. As Dulli’s lyrics alternate between naked honesty and self-serving accusation, the acid urgency of the music reflects each gentleman’s accusation back onto them. Uniting the songs are the twin themes of fear and contempt for women. So while the entire cycle is almost stiflingly psychological, the title characters wind up making passable analogues for gentlemen of another social strata: politics.

When California Representative Darrell Issa organized a hearing to discuss on the scope of contraception rules in the Affordable Care Act, for example, many pointed out that the panel was almost uniformly male. That put Issa in much the same situation as the speaker in “If I Were Going,” trying to explain to his partner why the dynamic of their relationship is consistently turned against her.

Or consider Anthony Weiner, rebounding from one sexting scandal with an election bid, only to lash out acrimoniously when that’s tanked by a second revelation. He’s all too easy to imagine as the seducer in “Be Sweet,” bragging, “I’ve got a dick for a brain / and my brain / is gonna sell my ass to you.” That song ends with the ultimate condescension, advising women who would understand his attitude to “be sweet,” as though all along the problem had been callousness on their part.

Likewise, in the scapegoating rake of “When We Two Parted” may be discerned some echo of gaffe-prone conservatives, like Missouri’s Todd Aiken, Georgia’s Phil Gingrey and Indiana’s Richard Mourdock, shooting themselves in the foot to rhetorically soften the consequences of rape. Some went so far as to introduce legislation that distinguished “forcible rape” from other, unnamed varieties.

Indeed, the most worrisome aspect of those attitudes is the frequency with which they seek to translate them into law. The possibility of interpreting Gentlemen as political allegory may have seemed remote in 1993, when the third-wave was riding high on victories earned during Clinton’s first term and the threat of impeachment over the Lewinsky scandal was still five years into the future. Despite the return of the Senate and Presidency to Democratic control after the Bush years, though, the political landscape has turned against interests that were ascendent in the Nineties.

So it was that House Republicans last year used a procedural point about revenue to delay a vote to renew VAWA. At about the same time, Governor Scott Walker repealed Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, dismantling penalties that had long helped protect women from workplace inequality. Efforts to defund organizations like Planned Parenthood have meant not only decreased access to abortion, but also to other services intended to improve and safeguard the lives of women. In doing so, they’ve demonstrated willingness of some politicians to endanger the overall health of their female constituents in order to undermine federally protected procedures. There is a scrambling, mercenary quality to such proceedings, like the claustrophobic misanthrope in “What Jail Is Like,” who warns, “If cornered / I scratch my way out of this pen.” Having failed to win constitutional challenges, states have lately settled on a strategy of legislating abortion indirectly, passing 135 bills relating to reproductive health in 2011 alone.

If those reversals signal the revanchism of the gentlemen of politics, then we must also admit that the situation is not quite the same as it was 20 years ago. The number of women in Congress has consistently increased since 1992. Twenty currently serve in the Senate, 82 in the House. Yet for every Wendy Davis, recapturing the Riot grrrl spirit by filibustering a Texas Senate bill that would drastically reduce access to women’s health centers, there are others, like Minnesota’s Michelle Bachmann, stepping up to forward the gentlemen’s agenda.

You can almost hear Marcy Mays as the voice of the complicit lover. “You look like me,” she howls. “I look like no one else / We need no other / As long as we have ourselves.”