The Hold Steady: The wages of sin or Sin City?

The Hold Steady's Separation Sunday is one of the two or three best records of the year, and I urge all the cranks who read this site to either buy a copy or bother me about burning/sending via YSI a copy. Best described as a loquacious Bob Mould fronting members of Thin Lizzy and Boston, the Chicago band recorded a quasi-concept album in which a character voiced by singer/guitarist Craig Finn recollects his inglorious youth in a crap suburb, where he and his buddy meet a junk fiend named Holly who's the object of pity and amusement. Finn's songs are meta-narratives, informed by borrowed riffs from classic-rock, in which Holly's mordant rationalizations of her substance abuse eventually lead her into the arms of the Catholic faith with which she's always held a somewhat ambivalent relationship ("She climbed the cross and found she liked the view," Finn says in "Crucifixion Cruise").

In an intelligent dismissal of SS, Josh Love argues that SS belongs firmly in the tradition of a film like Sin City, in which women are madonnas and whores, indiscriminately, but still trapped in the amber of the male gaze:

The gender qualifier is critical here—both Rodriguez/Miller and Finn put girls in the middle of their sordid tales, but their experiences are markedly different from those of the men. Sin City undeniably flirts with misogyny in its perpetual cycle of (scantily clad, perennially battered) feminine helplessness and masculine rescue, and while Finn’s narratives aren’t nearly so narrow, the film’s male-female positioning does help us read Separation Sunday and understand why it comes off unfair and even a little chickenshit.

"Hate" is too tepid an adjective to adduce my reaction to Sin City; "detested" is closer: vacuous gymnastics written and directed by men still enthralled by an adolescence in which film noir tropes were the closest thing to wisdom they absorbed. Josh is too hung up on the dicta of rote feminism: Holly is offensive because she's created by a male imagination which conceives of women strictly in passive terms. While I will cede that Finn rarely implicates himself (his regret is more subtextual than you'd hope), and the anthemic "Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night" sounds rather gaunche out of context ("but I can take you to a place where you can save yourself/and if you don't get born again/then at least you'll be high as hell"), SS's adherence to the tone of demotic virtuosity concretized by fellow Chicagoan Saul Bellow (okay, Nelson Algren) steers the album past the stylized tableaux which denoted Sin City's identification with the forlorn anti-heroes keeping the cities safe from sin.

Moreover, Finn devotes the whole album to her point of view. Josh forgets that film noir provided actresses with the juiciest parts in old Hollywood. Like Gloria Grahame in Crossfire or In A Lonely Sleep, Holly is a fully-formed character: witty, fatalistic, possessing a welcome sense of self-parody, and loves music (she knows the words to "Running Up That Hill"!) In SS's centerpiece "Stevie Nix" she's perceptive enough to note the posturing that's part of the narrator's nerd appeal ("You remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young/you got passion, you think that you're sexy and all the punks think that you're dumb"). And, sure, you can argue that her musical tastes confirm the Otherness of Women more definitively than Simone de Beauvoir hoped; but you try to look tuff gnarls Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks in the eye and tell them they're beguiling male fantasies composed of equal parts poesy and mystification.

Separation Sunday's subtext is obvious: Craig Finn's life was saved by rock 'n' roll and Holly's wasn't. But it doesn't mean that Finn's the better person for it. In the bleak irony of coda "How Resurrection Really Feels" (itself an allusion to Neil Young's "Walk On," a wry dismissal of the expectations of Those Who Know Better), Finn admits, in a voice devoid of affect, that the sexy mess Holly "looked strung out but experienced/and we all got kind of curious." I mean, what the fuck -- village tricycle or gang-rape victim? Either way, chilling -- and far from the eschewing of responsibility for which Josh blames Finn.

What a treat to end a year in which Kate Bush's Aerial (a response from the abbey, so to speak) battles it out with this hunk of Born To Run-style parodic Mariolatry.

(Now I need to hear from Hold Steadiers, of whom there are plenty.)