Bright Eyes
Justified
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As well they should. Last spring ‘N Sync and Oberst’s main project, Bright Eyes, hit Minneapolis (where I was living at the time) within a couple months of each other. Justin and the boys played a basketball arena, and, aside from the occasional gay couple or harried dad, I was the only man in the audience. But though the din at the Target Center was of the same pitch and volume as when I’d seen the band there in ’99, the tone seemed off. The older girls acted self-conscious, as if nostalgic for how they’d screamed for Justin or Lance or Joey when they were younger, and the little sisters they were instructing in the ways of concertgoing emptied their lungs as if nothing were at stake, as if luxuriating in noise for its own sake. There was no such lack of devotion in evidence at the small theater where Oberst performed. There were also more guys, though those bespectacled and besweatered fellas hardly seemed as transported by Oberst’s undeniable dishiness as their dates. But some quick research on my part before the show suggested similar fan attrition. I mentioned to a friend, a 22-year-old indie-rock type, that I was going. “Conor’s cute and all,” she said, “but I’m really glad I grew out of that stuff.” Later that same day, another friend told me almost the same thing. She was all of 21.
For Timberlake, maturation is a calculated career move–since his album dropped in December, he and his flacks have been pumping the story of Lil’ Justin All Growed Up to anyone with a running tape recorder. In Oberst’s milieu such blatant machinations are unseemly, but his more assured sound is the leap of someone aspiring toward adulthood, and his lyrics, drained of maudlin kiddie ickiness like “I sing and drink and sleep on floors / And try hard not to be annoyed / By all these people worrying about me / So when I’m suffering through some awful drive / You occasionally cross my mind / It’s my hidden hope that you are still among them” (from “Oh You Are the Roots That Sleep Beneath My Feet and Hold the Earth in Place,” on 2001’s split EP Oh Holy Fools), are restlessly forward-looking. “I don’t know what tomorrow brings / It’s alive with such possibilities,” he sings on “Method Acting,” though on “Big Picture” he’s not so optimistic: “If you want to see the future / Go stare into a cloud.” But it’s not a question of whether his glass is half-empty or half-full–the point, as he later adds, is “I’m just too afraid of all this change.” Since both artists have maintained their following–even increased it–with these new records, the ways they navigate the rituals of maturation are hardly incidental. Each has found an image of manhood that strikes his audience as authentic and recognizable and acceptable. Oh, and sexy. Definitely sexy.
This is curious, because Oberst rarely relies on the depressive singer-songwriter trope of blaming ex-girlfriends for his misery. Nasty bits of obsessive love-hate like “The Calendar Hung Itself,” from 2000’s Fevers & Mirrors, are the exception. His main subject is the unbearable fragility of contact between humans, as a solution for which he’s often encouraged us-against-the-world snuggling: “Now that it’s June, we’ll sleep out in the garden / And if it rains we’ll just sink into the mud,” he sings on “The Difference in the Shades,” from 1998’s Letting Off the Happiness. His songs are the typical reports from a bohemian dating scene where the boundaries between befriending and fucking blur uncomfortably.
