Justin Vernon: The Paradigmatic Metamodern Man
‘American cool’ has long been defined by an individual’s ability to wed the popular and the avant-garde, to appeal to the familiar and the new in a way that seems effortless and culturally intuitive. We can see this throughout the course of American musical history, as some of our most celebrated artists have heralded the introductions of radical new cultural milieus. We can look back at the great musicians of the past century and see that they possessed this mysterious prophetic gift to anticipate the changing tides of our collective cultural consciousness, both reflecting and catalyzing the deepest desires of the individuals who made up their social economies. That is to say - they were ahead of their times.
It strikes me that this is an interesting question to ask of the present: who is ahead of our time? And more importantly, what are they saying? If artists have this unique ability to presage and articulate a cultural moment, then who is speaking prophetically about our current cultural transformation of which everyone seems to be aware and yet no one seems to be able to put their finger on? I’d like to suggest that Justin Vernon may fit the bill.
Vernon – the driving musical force behind outfits like Bon Iver, The Shouting Matches, and Volcano Choir (just to name a few) – is nothing if not culturally distinct. The prolific artist has garnered heaps of critical and popular praise alike in the years following his first release as Bon Iver in 2007. One critic likened Vernon to Gertrude Stein. Kanye West called him “one of the baddest white boys on the planet.” But beyond these somewhat comical designations, Vernon seems to be offering up something that feels genuinely new, and it is appealing to cultural consumers in a way that little else is.
While postmodernism seems to have breathed its last breath in American culture, what will replace it has yet to be fully culturally realized. But as Elvis Presley emerged out of nowhere to introduce postmodernism to the popular consciousness, I believe Justin Vernon has a similar grasp on our cultural imagination at a time when postmodernism’s many obituaries are beginning to gather dust. And while a cohesive exegesis on the movement that will hammer the final nail into postmodernism’s ironically painted coffin eludes our most sincere attempts at articulation, some general characteristics of the movement have been gathered under the term ‘metamodernism’.
Without delving into the philosophical underpinnings of this movement, which I am wildly unqualified to address, metamodernism is generally characterized as an aesthetic arbitration between aspects of both modernism and postmodernism. As one artist put it, it is “an informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism, a moderate fanaticism, oscillating between sincerity and irony, deconstruction and construction, apathy and effect, attempting to attain some sort of transcendent position, as if such a thing were within our grasp” 1. All this to say, there is an essential yearning in metamodernism, a cautious pursuit of that which modernism failed in reaching and postmodernism told us didn’t exist.
Justin Vernon has been speaking into the mediation of these two forms for over a decade, channeling this essential yearning into music that is both sincere and self-defeating, intuitive and outlandish, and yet ultimately filled with hope. While For Emma and 22, A Million are separated by a great distance musically, they are united in their searching for something transcendent. Both albums are saturated with a visceral longing for change and yet confronted with the seeming impossibility of it. As Vernon sings on the closing track of 22, A Million, “I hurry bout shame, and I worry bout a worn path / And I wander off, just to come back home.” There is something endlessly appealing about Vernon’s wanderings. And I, for one, am glad that he keeps coming back home to share them with us.