the mountain goats and anthems of revolt

I’ve had a historically fraught relationship with folk music. It starts with the name, derived from the Old German for “people.” The first hurdle I had to climb was that most of what Americans call folk music isn’t talking about my people. This isn’t necessarily bad on its own, but the symbolic, historical, and experiential reference points that form the foundation for most mainstream folk music are distinctly connected to an idea of “Americana” that is distinctly unfamiliar to someone who isn’t white.

I don’t think that every work of art needs to have a universal resonance. Putting aside the specific fraught history of the Black American’s relationship to the notion of folk Americana, there are some things that are not for me, and that’s fine. Working under the assumption that John Darnielle’s several decade old folk project The Mountain Goats was firmly in the “not for me” category, I was in no rush to dive into his absolutely gargantuan discography. That remained the case until late last year, where I developed what seems to be a prototypically male fixation on the Roman Empire. Specifically, I was focused on the process by which the Empire adopted Christianity and abandoned the old gods. I wondered what that period was like to live in. I wondered whether the people who experienced it recognized it as the world-changing paradigm shift that it was. I wondered if it scared them.

Upon discussing this fixation to a friend who had up to this point been evangelizing The Mountain Goats for months, they promptly informed me that there was an entire Goats album about exactly the subject I was fixating over. I was so caught off-guard by this surprise offensive that I finally caved and gave it a listen. I’m glad I did.

The album in question, Songs for Pierre Chuvin, was released in 2020 to a quiet, but softly positive reception. Goats frontman John Darnielle, a man with over a dozen critically-acclaimed albums to his name, is not in a position where he needs to chase trends or try to top the Billboard charts. As such, he’s the sort of guy who can drop an album based on an obscure Roman history book — namely Chronicle of the Last Pagans, released in 1990 by the titular Pierre Chuvin — and fill it with songs containing just his voice, his guitar, and the occasional synth, all recorded in vintage fashion using his world-famous boombox technique.

I will admit that this sparseness was challenging to come to terms with at first. The historical period under discussion is one of truly cosmic proportions, and I initially thought that Darnielle’s choice to depict it with a campfire song ensemble was far too restrained. When I heard that there was an album depicting a tale as grand and tragic as this, I imagined something closer to Kamasi Washington’s “Fists of Fury” or D’Angelo’s “1000 Deaths”. Those songs are bold, cathartic anthems of vengeance that give voice to the fiery rage that injustice stokes in us. I still think that such an approach applied to the tale of the pagans would be interesting, but I gradually came to recognize the genius of Darnielle’s restraint — a genius that I would come to learn is the through line between all of his work.

Right around the time I was introduced to the album, the governor of my state, Ron DeSantis, was in the midst of prosecuting the latest of his authoritarian offensives: this time directed at Florida’s education system. The environment for educators — which was already precarious, as public sector strikes remain illegal in the state of Florida — rapidly deteriorated to downright Orwellian levels. This was the latest flash point in a long process of democratic backsliding that’s wreaked havoc across the country over the last decade. While there’s certainly a time and place for the retributive triumph of “Fists of Fury” or “1000 Deaths”, the current political moment doesn’t make me feel like the valiant crusaders that those songs depict. I instead felt like Darnielle’s pagans: desperate, aimless, and forced to cope with the daily indignities of powerlessness.

It was in the process of coming to terms with this powerlessness that I finally understood what was so compelling about Darnielle’s approach. The album is not intended to be a cathartic release or an aspirational dream of victory. It’s first and foremost concerned with the emotional truth of what it is like to have a sinister, overawing force rip your world away from you — starting with a sense of bold resistance, then confusion and bewilderment, then defiant hope, and finally, mourning. There is nothing aspirational about the Darnielle’s depiction of the last pagans. To score this story of cultural genocide with blaring horns or distorted electric guitars may have been cathartic, but it would be decidedly inauthentic given that we already know how the story really ended. And if there is an artistic value that Darnielle prizes above all else, it would be authenticity.

However, in spite of the fact that Songs for Pierre Chuvin is decidedly a tragedy, it is not interested in merely wallowing in the pain it depicts. The pagans from whose perspective Darnielle sings are not reduced exclusively to totems of suffering. They love, they fight, they weep, and they laugh — and it is no song in the album that encapsulates their fully-formed, humanistic portrayal better than “Hopeful Assassins of Zeno”. It was the standout song from the album for me, a song so rich and dense that it warranted enough listens to skyrocket to the top of my Spotify wrapped. In it, Darnielle takes the role of an advice-giving narrator, instructing their comrades about how to cope with the new political reality.

Get familiar with affairs of state
Foretell the future
Get a pretty good success rate
Notch some wins, take some losses

Be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses
They will stab you in the back
You gotta turn the other cheek
You gotta learn to love Jesus, so to speak

The song is undeniably grim in its implications, but even in their now-disadvantaged position, the pagans refuse to fully submit. They do not deny the reality that they are now on the back foot, or that their agency in deciding their own destinies is slipping away — but they nonetheless continue to resist. They stand by each other passing along wisdom and advice through the generations, because even if the political battle has been lost, their spirits refuse to yield.

It is this refusal that makes Songs for Pierre Chuvin feel like it has that universal resonance that I felt was lacking in my previous exposure to mainstream folk. Darnielle has accomplished the truly impressive feat of making the trials and tribulations of a two millennia old conflict feel as deeply familiar as any contemporary account of resistance and revolt. The album demonstrates an ironclad commitment to portraying history with a human face — and while specific references to Roman history are certainly present throughout the album, his lyricism always places the interiority of his subjects pride and place in such a way that allows anyone, anywhere who has struggled to defend their community against forces beyond their reach.

For me, the height of that identification came towards the last verse of the aforementioned “Hopeful Assassins of Zeno.” For a moment, the narrator’s frustration with the duplicitous hypocrisy of their new masters bubbles to the surface.

Watch with wonder
Fail to discern
These people never learn
How long until the snake devours its tail? Longer than we think

At first, the lyrics evoke a truly crushing sense of futility. Here we stand, two thousand years after the fact, and the snake has still not finished devouring its tail. Not only that, it has destroyed innumerable human lives and cultures in the slow process of its own self-destruction. But just before the frustration boils over and the narrator gives in, we’re given this flourish to end the song:

Still it’s gotta happen sometime
Until then, raise a drink To the hopeful
And the cunning
And the faithful
The well-positioned
Filthy but graceful

Even with the walls closing in, even when their story is over, Darnielle’s pagans refuse to surrender their hope.

And it made me feel like we shouldn’t either.