Music: Orville Peck Rides Again
This article originally appeared in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
The two cowboys in Jim French’s Longhorms—Dance make an odd couple. The one on the left has dark shades and an open denim jacket. He looks cool and mean, like Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy. The one on the right is adjusting the cool one’s neckerchief. He is baby faced and blond, a cherubic Billy the Kid. Both wear Stetson hats and are naked from waist to boot. Their cocks—as long and heavy as the gun in the cool guy’s holster—are facing each other, the heads almost touching. What brought these men together? Are they doing something they’ve done before or experimenting with a new kind of intimacy? Who knows? They are cowboy archetypes rather than fully fledged people. Their backstories are whatever you want them to be.
French sold his drawing in 1969, but it keeps resurfacing. In the mid-’70s, it appeared on a T-shirt by punk-rock designers Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. And, in 2019, it showed up in “Hope to Die” a music video by the Toronto-based country singer Orville Peck, which opens with a still shot of two cowboys standing face to face. This time, the cowboys keep their dicks concealed—a concession, no doubt, to YouTube community guidelines—but the poses they strike and the clothes they wear are unmistakable: they are incarnations of French’s characters.
The guy on the left is played by Peck himself, who, like the cowboys in the original illustration, is a persona rather than a person. (Many music fans know his real name, but it hardly matters.) In concerts and videos, he appears in different versions of the same outfit: belts with chunky buckles, boots with rhinestones, patchwork jeans, or colourful Nudie suits—those flamboyant pants-and-jacket ensembles beloved of Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons. Peck never shows his face. Over his eyes, he wears a black bandit mask fringed with tassels, which cover his mouth and neck. His voice is a mournful baritone reminiscent of Roy Orbison’s, and his music is classic country with elements of gospel, rhythm and blues, rockabilly, and punk.
More than the costumes or the eclectic songs, it is Peck’s storytelling—tales of derring-do, heartache, and forbidden love in the Old West—that sets his work apart. His first album, Pony (2019), features noirish ballads like “Dead of Night,” the saga of a gay Bonnie and Clyde evading law enforcement under cover of darkness, and “Big Sky,” about a cowboy drifter who falls in love with a series of itinerant women and dangerous men—a boxer, a jailer, a rodeo king.
His second album, Bronco (out April 8), covers similar themes but with a glossier sound and a greater degree of emotional vulnerability. In “C’mon Baby, Cry” Peck counsels a lovesick buddy to drop his inhibitions and give voice to his pain. (“I can tell you’re a sad boy just like me. Baby, don’t deny what your poor heart needs.”) And, in ”The Curse of the Blackened Eye,” Peck explores the bitter aftermath of a toxic relationship. After a breakup, the biggest obstacle to happiness “ain’t the letting go,” he sings, “but the things that you take with.” In the video, he is followed around by a demon in a black duster—a shadowy embodiment of the ex-lover, played by Norman Reedus, of The Walking Dead—who sidles up to him at bar counters and slips into his bed. Being heartbroken, Peck suggests, is a bit like being haunted: you sense an absent presence everywhere you go.
Peck is himself a kind of absent presence, a masked cipher, which hasn’t stopped him from becoming famous. In the last two years, Peck has collaborated with Shania Twain and celebrity drag queen Trixie Mattel performed at Madison Square Garden alongside Harry Styles, and covered Lady Gaga’s queer anthem “Born This Way” as part of an official rerelease of her beloved second album. Critics have praised him fulsomely, if somewhat repetitively, for “queering” country music (Xtra Magazine), “subverting” it (Playboy), and “redefining” its “heteronormative” conventions (Hollywood Insider).
I’m not sure what to make of these statements. The problem with verbs like “queering” and “subverting” is not so much that they’re stilted—the language of cultural studies and the academy—but rather that they’re inaccurate or at least inapt. They imply that Peck is adapting a rigidly straight subculture and making it queer. But is this really true? Haven’t country music and the Old West been a little bit queer all along?
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.