Deerhunter Were My First Queer Salve

Photo by David Walter Banks (via Rolling Stone)

It happened on a snowy night in February. Valentine’s Day 2012, to be more precise. I was twenty years old.

The day had worn down to nothing. I was a ball of nerves in my dorm room, sitting in front of a cheap laptop screen and tingling with artificial energy. An acoustic guitar sat perched on my leg, my fingers mindlessly searching its fretboard for unlearned, unformed chords that sounded pretty.

A year to the day had passed since I ended my first relationship (something I had taken the full year to bury deep, deep, deep inside until the sight of her brokenhearted gaze had dried into an inert crust on my heart) and I had spontaneously traveled to a cafe up north to find some sort of connection with some stranger, any stranger. Three hours and ninety ounces of black coffee later, I had returned without a single human interaction, and on the cusp of a panic attack. I struggled to breathe. My head felt leaden. My face tingled and my legs threatened to give way. Zombified, I had thrown open my laptop and did what I thought might make me feel better, as I opened iTunes and pressed play on the record that still buzzed in my eardrums from the walk over.

Halcyon Digest opens with a dream. In a mist-swallowed cul-de-sac, through a bout of post-blackout amnesia, Bradford Cox paints a scene scant on detail but heavy on mood. Its guitars, peaking and dipping, begin to stretch out formlessly as the track’s heavenward chorus blankets his vocals like the dewy air of a warm Georgia morning. I knew every line from months of playback and, in a voice as loud as I could muster without worrying my neighbors, sung the lower harmony to Cox’s guttural reminiscence as I tried to play along on the guitar. I needed the air to leave my chest, to bail the waves of nervous energy out of my lungs as if I was a sinking ship. 

The song’s second half, when it blooms open, finds Cox’s words shifting from the pictorial to the personal. Like a love letter, everything is either “you” or “me.” The words subtly turn: lewd, prospective, hopeful, discreet. That central couplet repeated at its end (“how long was he/how long with heat?”) is clumsily worded – even as it pulls off the same mush-mouthed trick as their previous hit single – and yet that clumsiness makes it more honest. It’s sexual but not sexy, its stance green but not naïve. It’s like somebody learning language for the first time, parsing out desire in a series of crude images.

I spent the whole night drowning in music. With my roommate mysteriously gone for the night, I was free to indulge in one logical transition to another: Halcyon led to 2008’s Microcastle, which then led to Atlas Sound’s Logos, which then of course led to Stereolab’s Dots and Loops because of Laetitia Sadler’s feature on “Quick Canal,” and then to the myriad video game OSTs that aligned with the breakneck tempo of “Parsec.” Music back then wasn’t just a creature comfort; it was a way to approach lucidity without the strength required to live life honestly.

As the sun threatened to arrive and my pulse has finally quieted, I made the decision right then that I was done wasting my life chasing something I knew couldn’t ever be captured. I would come out as gay to a close friend two months later.

All my energy during that time went to breaking down the internal barriers I spent nearly half my life erecting, and in that prison of shame and regret, Cox’s words started to click together like puzzle pieces. I felt my Catholic background haunt me in “Revival,” the year I spent “Sailing” in isolation, the “Memory Boy” I deigned to crush on as a teen, the tragedy of “Helicopter” rendered mythic. Late at night in the first-floor bathroom of Tobin Hall, the door locked for privacy, I would drunkenly stare at myself in the mirror like a jury would a convict on trial, and Cox would be the stenographer verbalizing the energy between us.

What was I shamed for? What was I regretting? The more I sank into the music, the less it mattered. Cox asks not what we remember, but if we remember, and more importantly what it would mean if we didn’t. And because he posited that the alternative was a viable option, I could become the boy in “Earthquake” living some ruttish idealized freedom, the sense of adventure and possibility as vast and nebulous as its cavernous guitar waves, as the fog that swirled across the lawn.

If this is a lot to share with you out of nowhere, I apologize for that. I feel extremely hesitant sharing anything about my past with people I don’t know, and I especially blanche at sharing such details, name signed and everything, on a place like the internet. Or, to put it another way, I’m not at all like Bradford Cox, a man who spent the early years of his band’s rise in full blogger mode documenting everything from his band’s tour shits to his inability to cum on antidepressants. Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt a distanced kinship with him, the same way you’d feel towards an artist when their work touches you on a personal level.

Unlike me, Cox has never been afraid to be himself, warts and all. And just like me, he was a kid lost in a hall of mirrors, the weight of death hanging over his head like a sword of Damocles, safe only within the confines of a mental construct of fantasies that could nurture and betray in kind: able only to reflect that dynamic in a collage of unlearned, unformed chords that sounded pretty.

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When Halcyon Digest dropped in the fall of 2010, conversation centered almost exclusively on its adjacency to the explosion of “indie” bands that suddenly dominated the alternative market. (I use “indie” in quotes because the whole thing was a term invented by industry execs to market bands with diverse sounds under one umbrella term, the same way their predecessors used “new wave” to define a slew of similarly-indefinable punk bands – Blondie, Talking Heads, B-52’s, etc. – in the 80s.) In America it marked the band’s shift to a heavy-hitting indie label, London’s 4AD, who in two short years had signed future “indie” darlings like The National and St. Vincent. Its producer, trendy engineer Ben H. Allen, lent a new bass-heavy, high-fidelity sheen that further invited the comparison. Lockett Pundt’s meek presence certainly didn’t hurt, as did the massive and enduring centerpiece he penned for the record, “Desire Lines.”

Over a decade later, those who discuss Halcyon Digest do so with the knowledge that its rumination on nostalgia meant more than just the trend of the year. It started in earnest with Jamieson Cox’s summary of the album on Pitchfork’s half-decade best-of list, on which he declares that Digest pushed the band’s underlying queerness (here and onward referring specifically to non-normative sexuality) to the forefront. Ever since, I’ve noticed articles in mainstream magazines specifically highlighting that singular aspect. A recent Washington Post article noted the ambiguity of “Revival’s” object of worship. Reflections on its songs in places like Vulture and NME now point out the obvious link to Dennis Cooper in “Helicopter” and the slanted, elegiac romance embedded in “He Would Have Laughed.”

Frankly I find this recent appending a little odd considering how the overwhelming majority of mainstream critics failed to identify it properly in 2010. Never mind the fact that Pitchfork’s original review contains not a hint or mention of the “queerness” that their decade list so blatantly capitalized on. Technically every Deerhunter record in a way is distinctly queer, because they’re Cox’s records at the core and Cox strives to be all of himself at every point. Even a record like Cryptograms, the most opaque album in Deerhunter’s discography, cannot be extricated from its preoccupation with male adolescence. Cox said as much when he explained each song’s meaning on his blog back in 2007 (I’ll give you three guesses what “White Ink” is supposed to be).

What I do believe is that Digest tackles queerness in the same fashion as something like Cryptograms, appealing to those outside its boundaries by positioning itself within the half-blind labyrinth of adolescent memory. It survives because it resonates with a much larger group of people than the one it’s supposedly designed for; the specificity, the stuff I would come to relate to, is extra. But Cox has always been boldly, unapologetically queer. His band’s blog and his earliest-recorded interviews find him as cavalier about the inner workings of his sexuality (and, to a lesser extent, his gender) as he is now. What’s changed is the way it’s represented in the piece: where old blogs and city mags would throw his queerness in as part of the sideshow element that he potentially encouraged, today’s VICE and Rolling Stone articles treat it with the respect that a new, more understanding audience demands.

Because Cox writes from a position of unfiltered consciousness, that which courses through his lyrics can’t be ignored once you discern it. That rings true for every queer-fronted circumferential rock band that Deerhunter shares a lineage with, from Michael Stipe’s ambiguous lechery in R.E.M.’s “Bang and Blame” to Bob Mould’s pointed omission of gendered pronouns in Hüsker Dü songs to Morrissey’s constant deployment of the “handsome” trope. It may have been significantly easier to speak about queerness in the era of Deerhunter’s rise, but where it pertained to his music Cox remained subversive, as careful as his influences to keep that aspect of his identity hidden between the lines.

Well, mostly hidden: besides the caustic title of Deerhunter’s disowned first record, Cox finally endeavored to bring his sexuality to the forefront of the conversation in 2013’s Monomania. But before that, what cemented me to Deerhunter’s music was how that queerness weaves itself naturally into music that is so obviously powered by the alchemy of the inner voice. Deerhunter and Atlas Sound records have been described by many as psychedelia – a term that Cox actively rejects in regards to his own music – and I find the label sticks not because of any association with the genre’s hammy origins but because of its invocation of the developmentally-arrested psyche. Or, to be more specific, its portrait of the damaged feedback-addled psyche, of which a thoroughly-repressed individual could innately understand.

Deerhunter caught flak early on for their reliance on delay and reverb pedals, two sets of mechanical cheat codes that can artificially endow mediocre music with a heightened sense of mystery and depth. It’s easy to be skeptical about fresh music you don’t know front to back, especially when it’s pushed by blogs with an ulterior motive and a sense of self-importance. But in Cryptograms’ formless haze, in Microcastle’s spiraling middle section and Weird Era Continued’s impressionistic appendix, I found myself consistently stunned at the familiarity of their spaces. Fresh out of the closet, my mind was still a storm that needed time to settle, and the tumult of those records helped me realize what was raging in me, and what had yet to be released.

Take Microcastle, a record rarely associated with the queerness so apparently blatant in a record like Halcyon Digest. I remember visiting a Newbury Comics on winter break from college and finding a CD copy, upon which rested a sticker with a quote from SPIN magazine. The quote read: “A disturbing plea for erotic asphyxiation.”

That quote refers to a description to “Agoraphobia,” a frequent mainstay on Spotify “indie” playlists. While Kranky may have picked the quote out of context for its shock appeal, SPIN had a point, albeit one made in a tossed-off fashion. The juxtaposition of death and sex is at the heart of Deerhunter’s macabre schtick; Cox’s obsession with Dennis Cooper’s work, combined with his experiences in children’s hospitals and the lurking shadow of the AIDS crisis, all have a hand in it. In the song though, death takes the place of sex, as Cox entertains the notion of being sealed away for good, with nothing left to say. It could realistically be a response to the backlash his early blogging days received, but the double entredres of its repeated opening imply something additional, its “four walls made of concrete” resembling a closet as much as a grave.

It edges further, but only just. “Calvary Scars” crosses gruesome Catholic iconography with a perverted voyeurism, its reprise on Weird Era Cont. filling in the notion with “finest wood and ropes so thick.” Otherwise, the record contends with the fallout from suppression, in the winter that settles in the heart on “Never Stops” to the coping mechanisms on “Saved by Old Times” to the melodramatic kiss of monoxide on “Twilight at Carbon Lake.”

Reading these lyrics for the first time, I felt a giddiness at the prospect of finally relating to songs in ways that weren’t just ideologically or aesthetically congruous to my interests. Depending on who you identify as (and what you identify with) it can be hard to find your story told in music. My interest in pop music naturally waned as a child as my interests grew darker. I couldn’t get into pop-punk into my teens because the people that bullied me in middle school listened to it. The nü-metal that should have appealed to me later didn’t, because the guys that bullied me in high school listened to it.

There’s something more to it, though. As part of my Catholic upbringing, I endeavored to forcibly eradicate my sexual urges entirely. As a result of that process, I’m almost unable to process music in a sexual context, and any apparent sexuality in performance I instinctually remove from the picture (this is a nagging problem that plagues me today). It did a number on my ability and my willingness to relate to art that could have really helped me growing up.

I discovered Deerhunter’s music right as I crossed the threshold into self-acceptance, and it felt incredible not only to find a band of similarly-cast weirdos, but fronted by a weirdo who had lived through circumstances that, minus the medical crises, rang extremely true to my own. His weirdness was my weirdness, but his heroicness came from his refusal to hide any of it, despite the negative attention he and his band collected from passersby. Some would say that makes Cox a problematic character, especially when you consider the behavior he exhibited on that Cryptograms tour and the occasional grossness of his blog’s content. I would agree, but only to the extent that Cox might approximate a role model among his more impressionable fans. If anything, I could respect the artist for what I could never do: not giving a shit for the sake of transparency, or as if there were really no other choice.

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There were limits, of course. Cox’s eagerness to indulge in his darkest, messiest instincts caused a great deal of trouble for the band early on, including a ton of tabloid-like coverage from music blogs and the consequent momentary departure of a bandmate. I can imagine the backlash affecting his willingness to communicate openly through his music. I can also imagine Cox being a nightmare to work with: mercurial, cagey, prickly, and far too particular of an aesthete, it makes sense that each of the band’s seminal records were challenging to produce even notwithstanding label and tour pressures.

Monomania has always felt like a response to that limiting effect to me. It’s the band’s noisest record, but not necessarily their loudest. Instead, it’s the moment when Cox saw an opening and leapt at it, aiming once and for all to make a name for himself as a queer rock icon. It was a good time for it; tons of cultural factors (globalization and growing secularism most apparent, but not the least of which included the rollout for Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange) had caused a majority of the American general public to gradually start accepting the LGBT identity as a natural occurrence rather than a social aberration.

Whether he understood that or not, the timing was kismet. Monomania’s release coincided with his film debut as Jared Leto’s lover in the critically-adored Dallas Buyers Club. Before then, he had attempted to reinvent himself again in the warped singer-songwriter tunes of 2011’s Parallax. Its cover displayed a shadowy yet clean-cut Cox playing the role of the sexually-charged club crooner, and a significant number of its songs detailed – for the first time in his oeuvre – the inner workings of romance. After years of relegating his queerness to the cerebral margins of his records, Cox was ready to exploit it for the sake of art and profit.

In April of 2013 I stayed up late to watch the episode of Jimmy Fallon where Deerhunter performed “Monomania” for the first time live. In the space between that fateful trip to the coffee shop and then, I had become the “Earthquake” boy: falling asleep drunk, waking up on dirty couches, indulging in all the substances and experiences I dutifully avoided as a teen. My first love was a man from Western Massachusetts who was a few years my senior; we had a really good time for a handful of months, and then as if in divine karmic retribution he broke my heart exactly a year to the day of my revelation, on Valentine’s Day 2013. It was a messy closure, and by the spring I was still recovering.

I’ll never forget the band’s performance, though I wonder if Cox has, or ever wanted to. Dragged up in a leopard-print button-down and a nasty black wig, two fingers on his left hand sloppily bandaged as if they were amputated, Cox delivers a performance that rivals his best as the band plays behind him. The song is about a life of unrequited love and the damage it does to your psyche, and Cox sings it with a conviction that feels drawn from personal circumstances. He spits every line out as if releasing pressure from a valve, the words bubbling through teeth stained from fake blood.

Though the song ends with a bout of pre-planned theatricality that’s far less effective in retrospect (the FCC’s grip on live TV remains evergreen) the power of the show rearranged me. It wasn’t just the possibility that Deerhunter were the kind of band to jump into different styles like professionals; it was that a band I had associated with my own personal growth were acting out my own struggles in real time, which was something I had never experienced before. It was a rare moment where I felt like I was a part of the world at large, where my experiences could be part of life’s great tapestry instead of just fringe on its exterior. To this day it reminds me of the life-affirming power of being represented in the culture you take part in.

Monomania functioned similarly, boasting song after song about craving same-sex connection so badly that you’d be willing to push yourself past your healthy limits for it. “Leather Jacket II” takes the Cooperesque fantasy of Cryptograms’ “Lake Somerset” and reframes it as garage punk in the shape of a tetanus-infested junkyard, its pathetic speaker begging for the familiarity of being turned inside out (“Maybe I’d scream…I was a goldmine”). “Pensacola” sees the band soundtracking an older man’s romantic frustrations as he sips cheap beer in a deafening dive bar. “Dream Captain” is gay sex in media res, its refrain referencing both Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and writer Jean Genet’s homoerotic Querelle. And “Back to the Middle” is the resulting fallout, a track that bears just enough specificity to be a honest-to-god gay breakup rock song (“Take me to your cabin/Like you promised so many times”).

In between lay moments of sobriety where Cox seems to assess the darker implications of the record’s debauchery. There’s the enigmatic “T.H.M” and the tale it tells of a suicide victim who “came out a little late.” “Sleepwalking” is similarly cautionary but less allegorical, as if Cox were warning his past self of the dangers of seeking love in the wrong places. “Nitebike,” the confessional climax of the record, sees Cox edging toward an epiphany but unable to achieve it, helpless to the sight of his problems swirling around him like ghosts on a starlit highway. The imagery is just as suggestive as what came before (“On the cusp of a breakthrough/when they took it out and stuck it in/It went so deep, man”) but there’s no noise other than the slapback delay coating Cox’s voice, as if his motorcycle were silently gliding on air.

There’s a running motif through all of Deerhunter’s records about reclaiming the past through amalgamative fantasy. I don’t think that’s by design; it’s simply a facet of how Cox’s own life turned out, and by extension the way a lot of young queer individuals find their lives progressing. On Monomania, that process is spelled out in its opening track, where Cox explains a raison d’etre of sorts (“Neon rust is coloring the blood/Calling on the words to speak”). In its brittle garage-based noise, Cox could live out his aspirational punk fantasy, painting a world where all the guitars are fittingly phallic and the boldness of living out and proud mixes perilously with the vulnerability of an exposed bone.

Monomania is not my favorite Deerhunter record, but it’s the one that I find best captures why I love the band. At the height of their career, Cox and his compatriots chose to zig where they should have zagged, meaningfully leaning into messy garage rock when any savvy label executive could have cajoled them into writing “Desire Lines” and “Helicopter” over and over again. It’s a deeply, visibly queer record that for once chooses not to embed that queerness so cerebrally.

More importantly, it marked the last time I remember falling head over heels for their work. Though Cox would argue otherwise, I found Fading Frontier to be a massive disappointment because it felt like the band had capitulated to the formless, toothless “indie” that had quickly lost steam in the wake of hip-hop’s newly-reacquired zeitgeist and R&B’s creative, inclusive renaissance. The record is pleasant but safe, and that may have to do with how it’s produced like a typical hi-fi indie record, but the songs themselves don’t contradict that feeling. “Breaker’s” shimmering reverb and California sunlight, “Take Care’s” soft swing (and its titular similarity to a song by another acclaimed “indie” artist), “Ad Astra’s” palpable adjacency with Washed Out’s brand of chillwave, the sheer commercial accessibility of “Living My Life”: bands can do what they want, and Cox has never written anything from a place he wasn’t currently experiencing, but I felt the lack of danger made the music far less compelling.

It’s possible that Monomania proved an exorcism of sorts, allowing Cox to play-act his inner torment in both freeing and mortifying ways, kind of like how a night of heavy drinking leaves a sickening hangover in the morning. It’s also possible that he and the band simply grew too old to want to engage in that type of energy. Age kills ambition for nearly every living artist, and Fading Frontier could very well have been the product of a band softening their edges out of that necessity.

I have a nagging feeling, however, that the problem lay more with me.

In the summer of 2015, I was a year out of college and had spent that time tumultuously, living in a musty basement and caught up in old unrequited feelings for a friend I was sharing the place with. Later I had found a man (or in more truthful words, he found me) and after getting acclimated to his particular brand of emotional coercion, he and I decided to move to Washington state. I tried making music and failed miserably. In our single-bedroom apartment in south King County I was suffering. I think I needed a band like Deerhunter, fronted by someone who had understood my pain before, to be there for me. I found no such solace in a domestically-complacent record like Fading Frontier.

I’m not naïve. I understand these people owe nothing to me. If anything, it made me realize even more lucidly how much that music had meant to my personal development. As my tastes changed, I would turn to Perfume Genius and Frank Ocean and Janelle Monae and, at last, all of the iconic pop artists I told myself I would never appreciate. Their collective power eventually helped me flesh out a stronger, more confident version of my adult self.

But I won’t ever forget the role that Deerhunter’s music played in my life. As a musical act, they widened my boundaries for what could be expressed aesthetically. But in Bradford Cox’s self-conscious unconscious, I also found a kindred spirit who helped me identify what was rotting inside me. He couldn’t honestly tell me it would get better, but he made me comfortable to the idea that it would be okay if it got worse.