It’s a poets-vs.-pundits battle for the truth.
Political pundits don’t say what we’re going through spiritually; they’re caught up in partisan games of gotcha. But poets do, and it’s poetry that makes X — founded in the late 1970s by the singer-songwriter duo John Doe (John Duchac) and Exene (Christine) Cervenka, drummer D. J. Bonebrake, and guitarist Billy Zoom (Ty Kindell) — America’s greatest punk-rock band.
The new album, Smoke & Fiction, is their latest exploration of American values. Never an explicitly political group, X found its inspiration in the post–World War II Beat movement’s nonconformity and spontaneous creativity, expressed through raucous, rock ’n’ roll–based punk. As new-generation bohemians, Doe and Cervenka, respectively Illinois and Florida natives, also embraced country/folk bluegrass to convey the essence of their complex cultural identity.
Using the metaphors of smoke and fiction, X ingeniously counteracts the current dis-/mis-information crisis. Their ninth album foils the establishment media’s corruption and dishonesty, as did the Beats and the best original punk and post-punk bands (the Sex Pistols, New Order, the Au Pairs, Scritti Politti, Wire, the Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Buzzcocks).
Going beyond zeitgeist trends, X thinks through the gaslighting and depravity of this period to arrive at their own personal and social needs. Boxing promoter Don King recently explained that it’s important that the nation “realize, recognize, identify” threats to liberty. X’s new album sounds the same alarm.
On Smoke & Fiction, the band searches their own consciences. “The Way It Is” describes their difference from contemporary pop musicians by remembering: “We were never just kids / we were pretty young / We did what we did / just to have some fun.” The “just kids” phrase refers to Patti Smith’s 2010 punk memoir, Just Kids, appropriated unthinkingly by Taylor Swift’s recent name-dropping ploy.
But X distances themselves from the usual punk-era shibboleths: “We did what we did / to set each other free / That’s just the way it is / the way it’s gonna be.” It’s a stirring riposte to those artists or politicians who cite country-before-party sanctimony. On “Flipside,” the band grasps political differences without making them personal, whereas the opening track “Ruby Church” makes them profoundly personal.
If you expect punk nonconformists to mindlessly parrot progressivism, listen to the rebellion of “Big Black X,” in which a nostalgic litany recalls lost values, rapped with draggy melancholy: “Stay awake and / Don’t get taken.” It’s reminiscent of “I’m Lost,” X’s 1987 punk riff on the signature notes of Beethoven’s Fate Symphony.
Bonebrake bashes away at his drum kit on the title track, while Doe and Exene pine:
I still talk a little bit,
but there’s no words for this.
I still hurt a little bit,
But there’s no cure for this.
I still wish a little bit,
But there’s no star for this.
I still pray a little bit,
But there’s no saint for this.
Like John Lydon of the Sex Pistols, the members of X are Catholic manqué artists tethered to their Judeo-Christian roots. (That’s what their name represents.) Smoke & Fiction’s title song laments how secular politics may disguise spiritual values but fail to replace them. (On 2020’s “Water and Wine,” X sang “There’s a divine that defines us / An evil that divides us.”) This combination of punk guitars, pulsing drums, and lyrical poetry that goes from country simplicity to Beat surrealism creates an expressive language that is no longer subcultural but part of the way a divided culture can express itself. (“The struggle is so real / the struggle is surreal,” goes “The Struggle.”)
That all-American expression is best felt on “Winding Up the Time,” swirling with wonder, passion, regret, and faith. As always, when John’s and Exene’s discordant harmonies soar, you hear the romance of soul mates (George Jones and Tammy Wynette were not better). The off-key harmonies on “Baby & All,” an unexpected lullaby, intone lyrics as simple as nursery rhymes that, however, defy fear. It’s complex, adult, and born of experience.
X’s previous album was titled “Alphabetland,” not for LGBTQ virtue-signaling but to spell out “U.S.A.” in 2020, the year of chaos. These two comeback albums don’t have the sonic clarity of the band’s ’80s classics (Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under the Big Black Sun, each produced for dramatic effect by Ray Manzarek of the Doors), and yet, somehow, this Millennial fuzz is rather proper given the era’s confusion.
Surely X, playing through obfuscation and still making meaningful punk art, knows this. We don’t need to know the band’s political affiliations; these songs tell us more. (And the album is blessedly terse, clocking in at less than half an hour.) X couldn’t possibly vote against the complexity and feeling they articulate and convey in each track of Smoke & Fiction. X’s punk poetry realizes, recognizes, and identifies the ground shifting under our feet.