Ask people for their idea of masculinity and you'll get many predictable responses: John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Cash. Strength, courage, rugged individualism. Real men.
It's something most of us can barely hope to attain. Fumbling with our more aggressive tendencies, struggling to access our more sensitive impulses, trying to merge them into a whole person, we look around for modern-day models of masculinity. Ashton Kutcher? To put it politely, a shithead who fostered a nation of mesh-hat-wearing jerks with sloppy haircuts and jackass smarminess. Russell Crowe? A hell of a great actor, a tough guy nonpareil, an almost impossible ideal.
And so we turn to rock music. Not the cartoons like 50 Cent or those bozos in the Strokes. We arrive at indie rock -- the land of sensitive wimps, not a jerk in sight. At last we see the vulnerability and intelligence that we can recognize. But we also discover qualities we men dislike -- both in these bands and in ourselves. Self-pity. Feebleness. Smug insularity. A whiny discontent born from reading the right books, seeing the right movies, hearing the right albums, knowing all the right cultural references and yet not being happy, not being fulfilled.
Despite its great limitations, nerd rock (or emo or wussy rock) has been a successful cottage industry, trumpeting the latest twentysomething boy to be admired for his sweet, dorky ways. But it hasn't given us many men -- it hasn't shown us anti-Kutchers how we can grow up and not settle into a self-defensive, self-congratulatory bitterness.
Until now.
He wasn't the most obvious candidate, but Ben Gibbard has taken the first dramatic step forward for all wimp rockers. And, by extension, he speaks for all of us who once looked to indie rock for intelligent, multifaceted portrayals of real lives, only to learn that these loser songwriters were mostly still harboring resentment because they didn't go to the prom. Thanks to his work with his band (the unfortunately named Death Cab for Cutie) and on an imaginative side project (the Postal Service), Gibbard is a deserving candidate for Man of the Year. Smart, tough, tender, romantic, wise -- he's the perfect amalgam of masculinity that many of us are shooting for.
Two years ago, Gibbard was just another appealing write-off. The Photo Album, Death Cab's third album but the first to get them some attention, was one more perfectly adequate response to macho rock radio. Songs about girls who won't hook up with you, songs about dead dads, songs about girls who won't hook up with you -- it was all so cute you chuckled at its utter irrelevance. And the music matched the words shrug for shrug -- tuneful guitars, drums that express nothing, a little distortion on occasion to keep everyone honest, utterly unassuming and weightless. Gibbard was your prototypical "nice guy," and you know what girls mean when they say you're a "nice guy," right? Was this our only alternative to Fred Durst? Did not being a dick mean having no dick at all?
The trick to the turnaround -- as it is for many self-pitiers -- was for Gibbard to get over himself. A through-the-mail project between beatmaker Jimmy Tamborello and lyricist Gibbard, the Postal Service seemed to introduce Death Cab's frontman to the novel idea of music as entertainment. Although there contains a confessional aspect to Give Up, the Postal Service leads with its sound -- Tamborello's warm fusion of techno-pop and ambient atmosphere. Receiving the music in the mail, Gibbard would craft a narrative, and what he came up with was, to that point, his most provocative work. Those percolating beats and swoops of keyboard brought out Gibbard's storytelling side -- the freak dreamscape of "Sleeping In," the casual immediacy of an airline passenger's landing on "Recycled Air." And on "Clark Gable," Gibbard seemed to take on his (and a sensitive-men nation's) notion of pure love -- debunking the idea that ardor is something dramatic, perfect, fleeting, doomed. Not that the listener would have necessarily noticed; the swell of the chorus was so beautiful as to disable rational thought.
This notion that songs are music first -- hooks bringing you in to a deeper meaning -- must have stuck with Gibbard when he set out to do the next Death Cab album, his crowing achievement. Transatlanticism is your normal two-guitars-bass-drum band record in design only. Mostly, it's just a terrific sonic achievement, wonderful to hear -- the angst and romantic tumult don't weigh you down. Oh, his love life is still a fucking mess, but he's getting wiser about it all the time. He's getting nastier and funnier about it, too.
This tougher approach has informed the music, complicating it, enlivening it, making it more startling and touching. (His band responds with a vitality that stands up for itself against the bullies.) Thus, "The Sound of Settling," an uneasy power-chord blast of existential worry, Gibbard wondering if old age brings wisdom or mere resignation. Thus, "Passenger Seat," a swooning piano ballad haunted by the memory of a car ride shared with the one who got away.
And, perhaps most impressively, thus "Tiny Vessels," a shockingly bitter story about a girl who was merely a prop to occupy Gibbard's time. As if throwing away the wistful cuteness of his earlier albums, he looks back on the brief hookup with something bordering on revulsion. "You are beautiful," he sneers, "but you don't mean a thing to me," dispensing her as unceremoniously as Michael Stipe did on "The One I Love." Behind him, the guitars flail between delicacy and violence, between remorse and contempt.
Abandoning the literal niceties of The Photo Album, Gibbard explores more mysterious terrain on Transatlanticism, ricocheting around different emotions, sounding older and more unsure. In essence, the new album musically and thematically achieves the sort of emotional heft emo only pretends to cultivate. The echoing percussion in the distance on the title track, the staccato picking of strings in "Title and Registration," the fragility of that acoustic guitar on the despondent "A Lack of Color" -- Gibbard (with producer and band member Chris Walla) consistently mute and amplify particular sounds, giving indie rock significance. While many prefer the novelty factor of the Postal Service's successful collaboration, Transatlanticism is the greater achievement, a sign of a songwriter breaking out of his shell to express meaningful fears in a dramatic, accessible way. But I don't doubt that the real key to Transatlanticism was Give Up's very existence.
For a band whose name derives from a reference in the Magical Mystery Tour film, Death Cab is becoming more comfortable with the real world. Inspired by his fascination with Woody Allen's Interiors, Gibbard offers us the sweet generosity of "Death of an Interior Decorator," loving the film's depressed, difficult matriarch enough to offer solace and understanding. Whether it's the feminine-centered "Death of an Interior Decorator" or the objects of love in "Lightness" and "Expo '86," Gibbard has evolved to a point where women are neither virgins nor whores, neither victims nor bitches. As he learns more about his own worst impulses, he's seeing romantic interests in more full-bodied ways as well. He's willing to show his uglier side, but his tenderness has also deepened, become more poignant.
Struggling for maturity, most guys go through awkward phases of macho stud and lovesick puppy and charmer and hard-to-get, hopefully to come out the other end as a well-rounded man: handsome, smart, dependable, emotionally available, sexy. For us guys, our choices of music go through such transitions as well, while our songwriters grapple with their own issues of masculinity. In an era where it seems the only choices are Jay-Z or John Meyer, dog or wuss, it's encouraging to know that, every once in a while, a guy like Ben Gibbard manages to find his bearings. "This is fact, not fiction," he sings near the end of Transatlanticism, "for the first time in years." He freed his mind, his ass followed. Angry, vulnerable, honest, and confidently musical, he's that rare "nice guy" with something to offer.
