Bon Iver’s i,i and indie rock’s environmental apocalypse
Image: Photo: Cameron Wittig and Crystal QuinnGraphic: Libby McGuire Music Features Music
Bon Iver albums are not known for their scrutability. Justin Vernon has long favored words’ sounds over their meanings, peppering his albums with neologisms like “dedicoding” and “paramind,” and encrypting the lyrics further still with a dense inter-album mythos of numerology and religious arcana and autobiography. And so it is not hyperbole to say that when, on the new i,i, he sings, “How long will you disregard the heat?” it is one of the most legible lines in his discography. He is talking quite specifically about climate change, and not just on “Jelmore,” with its images of gas masks and slow-moving depopulation, but on “Holyfields,” which features the prayer-like incantation “Dawn is rising / The land ain’t rising,” and on “Naaem,” in which he declares us all “young mastodons.” The desert imagery on the cover makes clear that “Hey, Ma” is not a Cam’ron interpolation but an invocation to the planet as it slowly chokes beneath our feet.
If you are of the disposition to hear a little climate change in everything, filtering through the news and in the dawn chorus like an uncorrected room noise to daily existence, moments like this can be a little, shall we say, whelming. We are living through the early symptoms of a vast and long-developing chain reaction that very well could, but will not necessarily, lead to the death of all life on Earth. That’s a lot to handle, sometimes! It is a reality that has increasingly shone through the cracks of our monolithic popular culture—a throwaway line here, a baked-in understanding of impermanence there—and that has, in the past year, taken particular root in the world of indie rock, on albums by Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Weyes Blood, among others. The despair has begun taking increasingly strange shapes. Lana Del Rey’s latest single juxtaposes rising temperatures with other signs of the apocalypse, like Kanye dying his hair blond. With deranged glee, Grimes has declared her impending Miss_Anthropocene “a concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate Change.”
Still, it feels a little different coming from Bon Iver, an artist who has always had a singular relationship with the environment. He first emerged as an almost folkloric manifestation of the Wisconsin wilderness, where he had retired, some years prior, to recover from a bad breakup in his father’s hunting cabin, and maybe record some solo songs. A few weeks out in the woods turned into a few months, hunting deer for sustenance, getting beer deliveries from his dad, and going through day-long working trances that ultimately produced one of the all-time great breakup albums. For Emma, Forever Ago’s evolutionary advantage over all breakup albums previous—besides having “Skinny Love” on it—was to manifest its heartache as a specific, imaginary place. “Emma isn’t a person,” Vernon told The New Yorker in 2009. “Emma is a place that you get stuck in. Emma’s a pain that you can’t erase.” It is also a place richly described through its flora and fauna, its wolves and crows and deep banks of snow.
Over his next two albums, Bon Iver took a second evolutionary leap, but remained fixated on this idea of songs as specific, individuated spaces. Bon Iver, from 2011, further blurred people with geography and era, dreaming up hallucinatory non-places like “Michicant” and, on “Holocene,” situating specific drunken memories within a geological timeline. (“At once I knew: I was not magnificent,” he sings of this vantage point.) Even real places, like Perth, Australia, become metaphysical, its “furling forests” promising life out of time. On the album’s unlikely, schmaltzy finale, a lovers’ dissolution is juxtaposed against the heat-flares of a distant star, and a computerized Vernon chirps, “This is axiom,” transcendence from human heartache achieved alongside transcendence from the planet. He declared the Bon Iver project “winding down” a couple years later, although 2016’s 22, A Million proved that even turning into a star didn’t free him from the human hurts and yearnings that instigated the entire Bon Iver project.
Indeed, Vernon was spurred to restart it by a panic attack while traveling in Santorini, Greece, where the phrase “It might be over soon” lodged itself into his head and then his OP-1. Was he talking about the apocalypse, or another breakup? When people are places, the answer is both. “The bad stuff might be over soon, but maybe the good stuff might be over soon,” he told The New York Times. “So you’d better figure out how to enjoy this life and participate in it.” The album obliterates the old framework, blasting Vernon’s signature falsetto into mechanized bits and scattering all those densely imagined places into far-flung scraps of binary code. He’s still in the woods, observing herons and lying face-down in the reeds, but they seem to be glitching, unreal, with pockets opening far elsewhere. His hometown of Eau Claire becomes a hallucinated fellow traveler; an Ace Hotel becomes a garden of Gethsemane. Were it the final album by the band, the narrative might merely be one of an artist struggling to exorcise his demons and also doing increasing amounts of DMT. But i,i returns to Earth—or, more accurately, it alights for the first time on the same Earth as the rest of us.
There are, of course, those sunburst moments addressing melting glaciers, references to coal mines and misogynists, even “Sh’Diah,” a track which is not named after some gnostic figure but, instead, the “shittiest day in American history”—that is, when Donald Trump took office. Other singers are layered over Vernon, such that his typical concerns—the roadmap to Emma, to Michicant, and so on—become almost imperceptible within the greater chorus. This is by design: It is an album about direct action, because, as he told Pitchfork, “You can’t do shit on your own.” After the attempted self-obliteration of 22, A Million, he embraces community in the face of apocalypse. I,i reflects climate anxiety but rejects climate despair. Vernon follows the black-sky desolation of “Jelmore” with the declaration that he is “not all out of” faith; the album concludes that “Some life feels good now, don’t it?” before warning, “But if you wait, it won’t be undone.” Even “Sh’Diah” feels like a moment of prayerful stillness amidst the hooting MAGA faithful. In lesser hands, this sort of DNC 2020 sloganeering could read as corny, but Vernon has always had an alchemical touch with sincerity. He turned heartache into Emma, Heath Ledger’s death into “Perth,” anxiety into math.
In one of the band’s ARG-like press releases, which typically serve as skeleton keys to deciphering each album’s more cryptic qualities, i,i is positioned as “autumn” in a four-album cycle that began with the winter of Emma. Even if that feels like a bit of a stretch for the middle two albums, it makes sense overall: I,i is as informed by the vast dying-off of the natural world as Emma was the snow-blanketed forests of Wisconsin. The digital bedlam of 22, A Million sounds better as the climax of a story that returned from druggy transhumanism with a more still and humane worldview. Vernon’s willingness to wildly transform between albums is part of what has made the Bon Iver project so consistently rewarding this past decade. That it has managed this without diminishing the emotional directness that initially drew our attention is why i,i can position itself not as an ending but merely as one turn of a cycle. It points, despite everything, forward.
24 Comments
It would be tragic if our species weren’t so reprehensible.
Artists like Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty and Bon Iver have certainly moved me away from big city ambitions like LA, SF and NYC and shifted me to a goal of living in rural or semi-urban areas like Mediterranean France, Northern California and rural British Columbia.Plus, 5G Internet’s gonna be great.
I’d never considered that deglamourizing big cities might be an effect of artists like those, but I’m glad to hear it. As a person raised in a mid size city well off the beaten path and lived most of my life in even smaller cities or towns, I feel a sense of pity for people thought bought in hard on LA, SF, or NYC in the way so many do. Many of my wife’s college friends are that way and their worlds have shrunk down so small while at the same time they think that their horizons are broader because they can go to a restaurant from any country. The internet exists, people. You can be cultured and live anywhere and you don’t have to live in a rat infested apartment for $1,000 a month.Glad you made it out of that trap.
Well, it’s still a goal.I’m still living in a massive Asian city. I’m saving money and finishing my Bachelor’s for a Master’s Degree in a rural University in either Canada, West Coast America or Southern France.
Gotcha. I may be biased, but avoid northern California. To be anywhere outside of the Bay Area you need to go a decent ways and then you’ll be surrounded by suburban sprawl and vineyards until it becomes industrial agriculture or super redneck no man’s land, and then eventually you reach Humboldt county which is it’s own particular brand of awful.
It’s not all that bad, at least when it’s not on fire and the tweakers aren’t stealing your lawnmower.
You’re right, I was too harsh. It’s also got a great white boy raggae scene and some wonderful parks to be homeless in with your pitbull.
You should come try Norway! Oslo and Trondheim are great university cities with 20 minutes travel from downtown to wilderness.
I’d eat a grown man’s ass on a hot summer day to find a decent apartment for under $2000 a month in LA.
People in NYC, LA, and SF would kill to only pay $1000 a month in rent.
There you go, I’ve been so busy paying less than half that to own over an acre of land that I didn’t even know that rent was that high. If you’re not from those places, don’t move to them, you’re just making it worse.
$1,000 a month won’t get you a broom closet in LA, NY or SF nowadays.
I live in British Columbia and have spent lots of time in the rural parts of it and, hate to break it to you, but that shit is only enjoyable if you’re super rich, or have a well paid job where you can work 100% remotely, or don’t mind being very poor.Also there are a *lot* of rednecks.
Another band that should be part of the “indie environmentalism” angle is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Sure, they’re doing their same old goofy shit, jumping genres and writing crazy plot-heavy album stories, but both Fishing for Fishies and Infest The Rats’ Nest are quite similar in their messaging. FfF is a blues-rock album with an anti-plastic bag jam called “Plastic Boogie” and has an underlying theme of the music getting less natural until “Cyboogie” ends it, literally a song about people becoming cyborgs to survive climate change. Then there’s ITRN, which is a thrash metal album about the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to climate change, with multiple songs playing off “there is no planet B” and an underlying story about the rich colonizing Mars and leaving the poor to rot on Earth, with the few poor who manage to escape an antibiotic-resistant superbug trying to colonize Venus and either burning up in the sun or burning to death on the surface of the gas planet, then being sent to Hell where the Devil allows them to destroy the rich colonies on Mars.I mean, I’m just a crazy stoner who loves weird rock and environmentalism, so maybe it’s just me, but this is good stuff.
You beat me to it. I was gonna post spomethign very similar, so I can assure you, it’s not just you. I see Mars on TV. I see people happy.
Thats cool, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake is a great articulation of some the existential crises that are crushing us in this dark ass timeline. And it rocks, unlike Bon Iver.
I started my music discovery with Bon Iver, earlier listening to just rock, I guess. I went through many genres and bands and Justin still surprises me with all of his projects (The Shouting Matches, Big Red Machine, Volcano Choir and of course Bon Iver). Still one of my favorite artists. More Love. Luke.
Midnight Oil was so very ahead of their time.
I’m finding it really REALLY hard to think of an artist that, after their first album, so quickly jumped up their own ass as Justin Vernon.
One of my favorite inscrutable Bon Iver songs is Brackett, WI. I love how Justin Vernon chimed in at songmeanings.com to correct the lyrics: https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/3530822107858761681/
As a resident of Eau Claire, WI, I’d wager the old truck he drives around town for the hipster aesthetic isn’t exactly up to emissions standards.
A Bon Iver song came on my playlist while driving to work this morning and I suddenly thought that he sounds like a ghost chicken.
Just wish the album was as good as the other three. I think he’s transitioning into doing movie soundtracks ala Danny Elfman in the 80s. These are better soundscapes than songs.
Sorry but I’ll go OT on this one. I don’t listen much to Bon Iver but I noticed reading this article that he has a bunch of ‘lyric’ videos.
Is it just me who consider adding the lyrics of a song to a music video is something an angsty teenager would do? It hurts my eyes and senses as much as seeing ‘Carpe Diem’ in big white wooden letters.
More concretely I just find that it takes away from the video/song by making your brain focus on reading a text (that you’re already hearing) instead of enjoying the visual feast music videos often provides.