After warning music listeners about a dystopian high-tech future where a soulless new generation of consumers are entertained via virtual sex with celebrities, modern and secular mystic Father John Misty (contrarian and outspoken folk singer-songwriter Josh Tillman) presents a vision of life after global warming ‘overthrew the system’ in “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution”:
‘Industry and commerce toppled to their knees
The gears of progress halted
The underclass set free
The super-ego shatters with our ideologies
The obscene injunction to enjoy life
Disappears as in a dream
And as we return to our native state
To our primal scene
The temperature, it started dropping
The ice floes began to freeze’
Lyrics: Genius
The orchestral flourishes swell climactically and then died down, leaving Tillman to return to his deceptively easy-listening vocal melody. Despite the long-awaited Marxist revolution, the track continues to evoke a numbed acceptance of bleak pessimism. His intellectualized confessional lyricism reveals that life after capitalism engenders ‘some degree of resentment’ for ‘the sudden lack of convenience around here’. The cycle thus begins anew, as ‘some visionaries’ begin formulating products to make human survival on ‘this godless rock that refuses to die’ easier.
The track fits squarely into his the overarching narrative of his third album Pure Comedy (2017), which unapologetically packages provocative hyper-modern socio-political concerns in a highly accessible folk-rock sonic template. “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution” makes for a pleasing and intellectually stimulating listen (even if it presents familiar critiques of contemporary society), even if Tillman’s vision of humanity’s inevitably thwarted progress is bleaker – on a grander scale – than anything else you might hear today. For now, he claims no interest in music that tells you what to think, feel or do: “When I listen to music, I don’t think about correct, prescriptive, how-to-live shit” (Pitchfork). Instead, he presents a tacit acceptance and resignation to humanity’s flaws, inanities and collective insanity – how you react to this demystification is up to you.
