Retrospectreview: On You Are Free, Cat Power Read The Flayed Corpse of Alt-Rock Its Last Rites

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[The following is an interpretation.]

The first track on Cat Power’s You Are Free is a one-sided conversation. It’s not a summoning, but it bears the quietude of a seance. Playing plaintive, purposed piano, Chan Marshall sets the scene: “Last time I saw you, you were on stage/Your hair was wild, your eyes were bright and you were in a rage.” The descriptors narrow in specificity; guitars swing around, a wicked history looms in the background, and a sweeping misunderstanding settles as the audience dances, swallowed in the sound but wholly unappreciative of its source.

The subject of “I Don’t Blame You” is not named, but the way the details unfolds it’s hard to imagine it being anybody but Kurt Cobain, whose grave had been dug nearly ten years before. And if Marshall is indeed talking to Cobain, then what, exactly, does she not blame him for? Several reasonable answers surface, but the way she bends the response across the track is what makes it magical. It’s the first of many on the album that demonstrates just how far she’s come in her artistry.

The true answer, non-coincidentally, is also perhaps the darkest one you can come up with. Ironically, it’s hard not to blame her either for asking it.

When Nevermind hit #1 in January of 1992, pundits and executives and nearly everybody in the industry had come to grips with the idea that everything had changed forever. No longer were label heads fixated on pumping manufactured acts with cash in an effort to arbitrarily game the system; for a moment (a camera flash in retrospect), it seemed as though giant acts could realistically be carved from the ground-up in an organic process couched in ethos and community and real, honest interest. But outside of that, Nirvana’s sudden rise lent an inkling of hope to the spread of Cobain’s progressive ideals: a mitigation of homophobia in the continuing AIDS era, an extension of the feminist power underneath the rising riot-grrl movement, and (to a lesser extent) a reprimanding of the racism that had resurfaced after the crack epidemic.

A full decade later, all that supposedly-limitless potential had been squandered. We had learned the wrong lessons. Nirvana may have been the auspicious spark that set fire to fifteen years of tinder laid by underground musicians and DIY space holders, but once that fire burned down to coals only the lingering sound remained. The sound was heavy, violent, gritty, nihilistic; though it wasn’t explicitly masculine, it thrived in the destructive proclivity of the male voice. It was a sound destined to be replicated through a fleet of congruous acts: first the Seattle trailblazers, then the torchbearers that spawned until Pearl Jam released a DNR in No Code, then the carbon copies, then the spillover into nü-metal and rap-rock and ball-cap posturing. Though a collective spirit bearing a diaphanous purity had awakened, it wasn’t long before it had succumbed to corruption, the underground unremitting and churning beneath.

Marshall does not owe her success as much to Nirvana as many other electric guitar wielders of the ‘90s; instead, like Nirvana, she owes part of it – a part outside of that vision and that voice – directly to its harbingers. Her first three albums were collaborations with Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley, and the melancholy dust coating her ‘90s output has its roots both in the same bluesy dourness that fueled the nascent Seattle scene and the arty dissonance of the Northeast post-punks. Her embracement of well-worn styles like blues, Americana and country would also set her apart from contemporaries who aimed solely to replicate what had worked years ago. Yet even in her young age she would likely be wise enough to follow what was happening with grunge, to understand why it was happening, and to critique the toxic runoff spreading in its wake.

On her first three records (1996’s What Would The Community Think? gemlike among them) she came across as a classic songwriter in the sense that she endeavored to tap into what made songs classic; the myriad covers she arranged furthered that notion. It wasn’t until 1997’s Moon Pix where she started (albeit subconsciously) demanding something more of her music, something that went beyond a mood and a sentiment. Until then, she wrote as though she were living through a nightmare; by Moon Pix, she had learned how to conjure one out of thin air, coloring in the specifics and penning a vivid backstory.

But even Moon Pix, in retrospect, was embryonic. You Are Free, which she released nearly six years after, marked an arrival: of a heightened narrative maturation, and of a commitment to thematic cohesiveness. This is apparent even before listening; notice the antique wear and the fuzzy darkness of her previous album covers, and then consider how this one is all brightness, sunlight, verdancy and pastels. It’s still mostly Marshall and one instrument of choice, but the songs more than ever feel like full arrangements, several fleshed out with drums, strings, piano, bass, percussion, and (for the first time) guest vocals. And while the focus is still drawn intensely inward, there’s an allegorical edge to her tragic visions that feels tied up in the state of the art at the time.

It’s important to remember, in the years bordering the millennium’s fulcrum, how many artists seemed to be writing in direct response to the shitshow foregrounding contemporary rock music. The acts that carried the torch of alternative rock (Creed, Live, Candlebox, etc.) had done nothing to quell the budding relapse of the ultra-macho, which came about in part because of a backlash towards the assumedly “inauthentic” acts that were suddenly dominating the charts – boy bands and the Spice Girls among them. The coinciding rise of casually-misogynist gangsta rap – which, to be fair, had its share of balancing social commentary – also didn’t help.

The year of Moon Pix’s recording, arguably, contains the peak of aggressive loutishness in American music history. Over a two-week span that summer, Limp Bizkit released their debut record, Insane Clown Posse dropped what would become their breakthrough, and “Smack My Bitch Up” writers The Prodigy put out eventual multi-platinum rave-up The Fat of the Land: this doesn’t include (pardon the pun) seminal releases by Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth. By the 2000’s, Limp Bizkit were selling millions of copies a month of their inelegant, bashed-out Chocolate Starfish and the Hot-Dog Flavored Water and the incidences of violence and sexual assault at Woodstock ’99 had formed a head-shaking cap on the boneheaded, testosterone-fueled craze that had somehow swept the nation.

This is the spirit you hear when you go back to a record like Destroyer’s Streethawk: A Seduction and hear Dan Bejar envision an alternate reality where difficulty is a virtue and no one practices “the bad arts.” It’s what fueled the rising bile of Sleater-Kinney’s All Hands on the Bad One and Karen O’s microphone-swallowing reclamation on The Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Bang.” While Rage Against The Machine were literally devolving into fist fights about the smallest decisions, onlookers like Cat Power were watching, waiting: drawing meaning.

You Are Free, when it’s explicitly about anything, is about the dream of breaking out of a prison. In song – and especially in blues – a prison can be anything, and here it’s all but the jail itself. It could be the price of fame (“I Don’t Blame You”), it could be drug addiction (“Babydoll”), it could be lust (“Werewolf”) or a shitty love (“Shaking Paper,” “Keep On Runnin’”) or a love that’s not shitty but destined for failure (“Good Woman”). Outside of a few unrelated tracks included likely because Marshall was simply proud of their execution, this theme of imprisonment runs through You Are Free with a focus previously unknown to Cat Power projects.

Most importantly, that dream normally stays a dream. Marshall merely provides the framework and asks the listener to imagine the alternative without easy resolution. The one song where that answer is clear is also possibly her most devastating song: the solitary “Names,” on which Marshall runs through dead ends like passing gravestones, each immortalized in a handful of grim lines that leave enough to the imagination. It’s fittingly cruel that she arranges the track to come after “Maybe Not,” the record’s thesis statement and its most uplifting track.

The shadow of the grunge explosion makes for a curious motif in a record about being trapped in your circumstances, but it’s certainly there if you look for it. Marshall’s never been closed off to the possibilities of stylistic variance, something that her exposure to New York’s experimental music in the early ‘90s helped spur, and though You Are Free is still primarily a blues record with simple song structures and even simpler sentiments hidden underneath her quasi-inscrutable lyrics, there’s a notable alt-rock edge to songs like “Free,” “He War,” and Speak for Me.”

The former two made up the album’s lead singles and the latter two features drums by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl; before that, Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder makes an appearance as the brokenhearted on “Good Woman” and again on solemn closing track “Evolution.” “Babydoll” could be about anybody, and considering her eventual addiction it very well could be her version of “Gold Dust Woman,” but the damning subject matter and the title itself – pulled from Hole debut Pretty on the Inside – summons the image of Courtney Love. Amid the diversity of the record’s rumination on liberation, an ensemble develops that links what Marshall is singing with the grand drama that unfolded a decade before.

I don’t know Chan, and so I don’t mean to speak for her (there’s honestly been quite enough of that over her career), but I assume that, like me, she’s hyper-aware of her surroundings and fascinated by the implications of their presence. She, like all of us, probably romanticized Cobain’s death for what it represented: a loss of innocence, the crushing weight of expectations and the machinations of a soulless industry rendered symbolic. The song that follows (again, pardon the pun) is a hypothetical alternative, as “Free” pairs an off-kilter kick-and-snare combo with aspirational lyrics about discarding the arbitrary scaffolding holding up genuine music appreciation. “Speak for Me” addresses it less directly, in impressionistic verses that describe a relinquishing of agency; to what is unclear, but there are enough clues to infer the embarrassing realization of a collective regret (“Pick us out of a line up/Stranded and strange just as innocent as kids/The found are leaving and they’re trying to forget”).

It’s around this time that onlookers began to assume Marshall as a “difficult” performer. What does “difficulty” mean here? I guess it means not giving ticket holders what they paid for; several writers in the past had covered her on-stage ramblings, her delay tactics, her breakdowns, and her seeming inability to look comfortable playing in front of an audience. One piece by Hilton Als in the New Yorker, released in the same year as You Are Free, cemented the image. The continuing thread between these observations was of Marshall as an object, scrutinized for the way her statuesque beauty clashed with her unprofessional on-stage behavior. Contrast this with Nirvana’s European tour, during the time Nevermind was skyrocketing up the charts and Cobain was spitefully sabotaging his shows without consequence, and you’ll notice the discrepancy.

Marshall hesitated to criticize the double standard too vocally – it had only been a few years since Fiona Apple was essentially blacklisted for that very reason – and from listening to her you generally wouldn’t get the impression of Marshall as a misandrist. Nevertheless, You Are Free’s search for agency feels backgrounded by the same masculine oppression that triumphed over American culture by the turn of the century. On its blues-indebted songs, men are sources of danger and destruction even in the best of contexts. “He War” is about a rift formed between someone whose only method of understanding is violence; “Shaking Paper” speaks in such a language, menacing in its emasculation (“Big shotgun with no guns/Big shot army with no army at all”); “Half of You” criticizes a vague, if commonplace, emotional unavailability. This doesn’t just happen on the individual level either; in classic blues fashion, it’s immutable human behavior at large that Marshall laments. On “Speak for Me,” the earth turns unfeelingly; on “Shaking Paper,” people emphasize the way of the world as if powerless to change it.

That grandiose scale comes back on “Evolution,” which functions like a State of the Union in how Marshall and Vedder takes the failings of the status quo to task. Vedder, who in 2002 had his own grievances against what had become of the movement his band helped kickstart, backs up Marshall’s smoky alto with his soft bass as, in unison, they address each facet of an allegorical navel fleet with a casually withering tone. The two elegize a non-functioning disaster reduced to its individual perversions (e.g. “Better call the guys on the deck/They’ve been caught with no feeling”) and conclude on the precipice of change, the problem so entrenched that waiting for a solution to arise would prove fruitless.

That the record ends with such an enigmatic, disquieting moment further emphasizes the record’s big picture. Over her parapet, Marshall eulogizes the passing of a virtuous idea lost to greed and brutishness and wonders if it were a pipe dream to begin with. With its pointed bookends, skewering of masculine oppressiveness, and subtle aesthetic lapses into alt-rock, she (whether intentional or not) designs You Are Free as a post-mortem for what has transpired and an acknowledgment of the myriad structures its participants had trapped themselves in. It’s all just hidden underneath a grander examination of immutable circumstances and the touch of fate’s guiding hand, which listeners other than musicians like Marshall can easier relate.

The tide would turn eventually, though it would take another full decade of strong voices breaking down existing power structures to achieve a semblance of real change. In the meantime, it would get worse for Marshall before it would get better; her lapse into alcohol addiction would lead to years of lost time (and one excellent album in 2006’s The Greatest) until a 2007 stint in rehab would leave her with a both a defiantly optimistic view on life and an unwillingness to return to her darker roots. Her status as an outsider faded more and more into the background as her records climbed higher up the charts and a prospective contract with Chanel came into focus; these days, the music she makes is grounded in gratitude, her original image as a nerve-wracked chanteuse actively rejected by a devoted, growing audience.

Meanwhile, apart from the current renaissance of third-wave ska, no one relishes what was eking out of our collective speakers. We largely choose to remember it, as we do the respective nadirs of hair-metal and boot-clad indie-folk, as a collective lapse in judgment that we’re undoubtedly destined to repeat. It’s just music of course, but music is a spirit that calms and incites in turn, with the rare power to change us on a fundamental level. The future that Kurt Cobain envisioned, whatever utopia he held in his mind that remained unresolved until his death, never came to pass; the choice Marshall asked of us, after all had settled, was whether or not to put any faith in its feasibility.