MUSIC
Supergroup in Reverse: The Afterlife of cLOUDDEAD
/ Ben Bush
11.13.07
WHY?
Yoni Wolf
Most immediately striking is Yoni Wolf’s much ballyhooed departure from hip-hop into psych-folk-pop. Wolf surrendered his longtime rap moniker “Why?” which instead became a signifier for the band formed along with his brother, drummer Josiah Wolf, and fellow Cincinnati native, multi-instrumentalist Doug McDiarmid. Born Jonathon Wolf, he reverted back to an earlier nickname, yoni, the ancient Sanskrit word for vagina.
The band came into its own with 2005’s Elephant Eyelash, an album packed with up-tempo guitar hooks and a lyrical abundance that exceeds anything Wolf concocted in his previous collaborations. Its title is Wolf’s odd metaphor for male sexuality: imagine an enormous curved hair from a pachyderm’s eyelid, the length and shape of a boner.
If at first glance the lyrics seem non-sensical, an autopsy of the album’s exquisite corpse reveals a broken heart as the cause of death. In this baffling, romping elegy for a failed relationship, each song develops a curveball poetic conceit worthy of a slacker John Donne in a bomber jacket. Each line is an indelible image; specific, surreal, sensual, funny and emotionally engaging––“It moves slow like an exercise bike on an airport walkway.”
The song “Fall Saddles” is an epistle to Wolf’s father, a Messianic Jewish rabbi within a sect that believes Jesus was the messiah. In his youth, Yoni Wolf was forbidden to listen to secular music and, at age 15, when he first heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” it came as a transgressive revelation. Some of this mystique clings to Wolf’s approach to pop music while his themes of love, death and the afterlife (or probable lack thereof) seem handed down from his early infusion of sacred songs.
On “Light Leaves,” the album’s final track, Wolf asserts his desire to lie exposed and rotting on the ground after his death, rather than inside a casket. Thinking of the physical legacy he will leave behind, he includes a shout-out to the sperm shed in his various masturbation sessions: “My smaller selves down the sewer somewhere/under Berkeley, Cincinnati or on tour/(Airplane rears/and hotel lobby ladies rooms beware.)”
“I feel the more straight-up you are about the way you live and the secrets you have, the more you realize everyone is the same and has the same hang-ups and the less-likely you’re going to war with people,” Wolf said in an interview with the UK Guardian. “It’s political to me that I’m being so honest and saying shit to people that’s very personal to me; saying: ‘This is me, I jack off in the back of airplanes and so do you.”
Yoni Wolf
Most immediately striking is Yoni Wolf’s much ballyhooed departure from hip-hop into psych-folk-pop. Wolf surrendered his longtime rap moniker “Why?” which instead became a signifier for the band formed along with his brother, drummer Josiah Wolf, and fellow Cincinnati native, multi-instrumentalist Doug McDiarmid. Born Jonathon Wolf, he reverted back to an earlier nickname, yoni, the ancient Sanskrit word for vagina.
The band came into its own with 2005’s Elephant Eyelash, an album packed with up-tempo guitar hooks and a lyrical abundance that exceeds anything Wolf concocted in his previous collaborations. Its title is Wolf’s odd metaphor for male sexuality: imagine an enormous curved hair from a pachyderm’s eyelid, the length and shape of a boner.
If at first glance the lyrics seem non-sensical, an autopsy of the album’s exquisite corpse reveals a broken heart as the cause of death. In this baffling, romping elegy for a failed relationship, each song develops a curveball poetic conceit worthy of a slacker John Donne in a bomber jacket. Each line is an indelible image; specific, surreal, sensual, funny and emotionally engaging––“It moves slow like an exercise bike on an airport walkway.”
The song “Fall Saddles” is an epistle to Wolf’s father, a Messianic Jewish rabbi within a sect that believes Jesus was the messiah. In his youth, Yoni Wolf was forbidden to listen to secular music and, at age 15, when he first heard David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” it came as a transgressive revelation. Some of this mystique clings to Wolf’s approach to pop music while his themes of love, death and the afterlife (or probable lack thereof) seem handed down from his early infusion of sacred songs.
On “Light Leaves,” the album’s final track, Wolf asserts his desire to lie exposed and rotting on the ground after his death, rather than inside a casket. Thinking of the physical legacy he will leave behind, he includes a shout-out to the sperm shed in his various masturbation sessions: “My smaller selves down the sewer somewhere/under Berkeley, Cincinnati or on tour/(Airplane rears/and hotel lobby ladies rooms beware.)”
“I feel the more straight-up you are about the way you live and the secrets you have, the more you realize everyone is the same and has the same hang-ups and the less-likely you’re going to war with people,” Wolf said in an interview with the UK Guardian. “It’s political to me that I’m being so honest and saying shit to people that’s very personal to me; saying: ‘This is me, I jack off in the back of airplanes and so do you.”