Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Able Brown
There was a time, oh, five years ago, when Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss philosopher who looked kind of like Jim Walsh—Brandon and Brenda’s dad from “Beverly Hills 90210”—dressed up as George Washington, wasn’t someone I read for fun. (As a side note, if recollections can be trusted [they can’t], Jim Walsh actually did dress up as our nation’s father in an episode. There’s a chance that never happened, but if it did, maybe we were all wrong and he was actually in costume as Rousseau.) You read Rousseau out of obligation, out of pressure, but there’s one thing that obligation gives way to – the same as a rock that gives way to a constant drip of water upon its surface. It gives way to eventual curiosity and interest. There are millions of church-goers who, not that long ago, were testaments to atheism, but forced into the guilt of worship and belief, now there’s nothing they can do about a faith that seems like it’s been there all along. They’re joining Bible study groups and the whole shebang. Along the line, obligation was usurped by interest. The idea of Rousseau ever progressing from a quickly fading memory to a dude I’d be scouting library shelves and book stores for remnants of his work seemed to be a long-shot at best, but there I was listening to Craig Finn sing about Kerouac’s classic protagonist Sal Paradise being right about the kids of America and thinking about social behaviorism and Rousseau. It was a blast from the past, you could say, but it wasn’t a shock. Midlake’s “The Trials of Van Occupanther” forced me to go hunting down the meaning of Tim Smith’s reference of The Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’ work based on the social contract just months ago. But back to Rousseau.

This guy died in 1778, but don’t try to tell me that these few following ideas of his haven’t been mulled over by Finn a time or two – possibly drunkenly in a bar as every snippet of writing about the Steady would have you certain of. Rousseau believed that man was good by nature, but that society – getting out there among those other boys and girls, having them influence his or her mind, dirty them up to unrecognizably different peeps – corrupted it. Man was better people without the pressures heaped onto it by outsiders. It plays into another thought of Rousseau’s where he cites the reason for society’s negative force on man as being a transformation of healthy self-love (amour de soi) into pride (amour-propre). This move into a vain sort of thinking comes when people start comparing themselves to others and soon enough, it leads to men and women taking pleasure in the pain and weakness of others.

Finn talks this kind of game in Boys and Girls In America, a fascinating personal take on social behaviorism that goes from one boy to the next girl and gives us evidence that even if we aren’t all making each other unhappy, we’re trying. There’s an attempt being made to find the black cloud in most situations, and even when characters are seeding those clouds in hopes that the whole sky will open up and ram some wet sadness down their throats and all over their clothing, a massive night or two will break out to keep spirits steady. There is an attempt by those populating the record to find goodness for goodness sake, but it doesn’t come without serious effort. The flaws in everyone always come to the surface, and there’s no denying that through everything, they’re the hurdles to maximizing the act of living. There’s a jadedness to the songs (an overall jadedness to Finn, perhaps) where everyone’s pained because they can’t get as high as that first night, that first time. There’s no going back and there’s always a sense that things used to be much better. Finn, with his sing-talk way about him and his lively but unflappably cool cadences, is a brilliant speakerbox for these wayward souls. You feel that he’s kind of one of them too. There are more than a couple of times when Finn and his keen eye for the details of teenagers (how he does it, stays so in-step with the youth of today is a trade secret) show themselves to be forms of magnificence, the way they touch on the peculiar desire to want more of what you used to have. He sings, “I see Judas in the hard eyes of the boys working the corners/I feel Jesus in the clumsiness of young and awkward lovers,” in “Citrus,” where the mood’s placed into the hands of some sort of clarity, a mythical confidante that usually whispers back with beer or whiskey on its breath. Well, it does in this case, if no other. And then in “Massive Nights,” during which the band belts out a “Living on a Prayer”/Bon Jovi pose with some arena “WHOAS,” there’s mention of those bigger than life nights of unspeakable victories and the fallouts, with their crushing lows. It’s the centerpiece for this record that speaks on so many levels. It’s all in the first lines Finn uses in the song, “The guys were feeling good about their liquor run/The girls were kinda flirting with the setting sun.” It feels like it’s all there.

The Hold Steady
Vagrant Records