There’d be no Rock and Roll without shtick. Shtick is a hallmark of the form, from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ coffins, to The Beatles’ mop tops to Bowie’s glitter, Elton’s costumes, Alice’s guillotines, KISS’s pyrotechnics and The Sex Pistols’ nihilism. The shtick list is as long as it is varied. But, regardless of form or function, it’s always been just that — shtick. Jalacy J. Hawkins was not really a witch doctor nor was David Jones really an alien. But, that suspension of disbelief — the buying of the shtick — is central to the magic of Rock and Roll.

Sometime around 1970, however, Jonathan Richman threatened the whole shticky construct. He was anti-shtick. He stripped away all of the high-minded pretense from his heroes, The Velvet Underground, and replaced them with wide-eyed exuberance and hip-shaking fun. Jonathan and his band, The Modern Lovers, had an arresting quality which dared us to wonder, “Is it really that simple? Is that song really just about driving on the highway with the radio on?”

Eventually, as a solo act, Richman went even further. Those bumblebees really were just bumblebees. That summer feeling was so obvious as to be beyond metaphor — it was the platonic ideal. His low volume, nursery rhyme-adjacent brand of Rock and Roll threatened the semiotics of the form. They suggested that signifier and signified were obviously one and the same. That he really meant what he said. And that music could still be enchanting — maybe even more so — without all the shtick.

Sweet, wonderful, amazing Jonathan, who once famously said that he didn’t write songs so much as he “makes things up.” If only it were that simple — because, given his relationship to The Velvet Underground and (semi-intentionally) to Punk Rock, his anti-shtick was received as high shtick. For many years, his post-Modern Lovers’ work was described alternately as “arrested development” or “performance art.”

It turned out to be neither of those things but rather something closer to Jonathan’s optimism than to our cynicism. Fifty plus years, a few Farrelly brothers’ movies and thousands of concerts later, he is still anti-shtick. He avoids cell phones and emails. When not making music, he works as a stone mason. The way he sings in those songs — nasal and naive (in the wisest way possible)? That’s apparently how he really is. So, as much as his anti-shtick still resembled pretense, it might actually be the opposite of pretension. It’s not an affect of high art. It’s simply who the man is.

Other than Jonathan Richman, there is no artist I know whose shtick is so pronounced, yet for whom the space between person and persona is so thin. Jonathan is the point of the circle where all shtick and no shtick meet. His closest comparable (“close” being a very relative term here) arrived many years after The Modern Lovers formed, some four hundred and forty miles from Boston, down route 90S and then 91S and 95S for a long stretch, before turning onto 295S and, then, finally, route 50W towards Washington D.C. It’s there, in our nation’s capital, sometime around 1990, that many of us first put eyes on Ian Svenonius, who, like Jonathan, has made a career collapsing the space between mask and face.

If Jonathan Richman is a guy who makes up songs, Ian is one who propagates ideas. While both are obsessed with ideals, the former sticks to familiar metaphors while the latter seeks to subvert (or at least deconstruct) meaning altogether. Both are careerist, but Richman leans towards good ole fashioned hard work while Svenonius towards the dismantling of capitalism. And like Richman, who arrived fully formed with the (original) Modern Lovers, Svenonius has, for the most part, been the same socialist, agitator, writer, performer, hipster howler since his first band of note, Nation of Ulysses.

In 1990, around the time Nation of Ulysses’ debut album was released, Ian Svenonius was — I believe — twenty-two years young. I hedge simply because Wikipedia and Ian himself seem to disagree on the facts, and both parties contradict what public voting records indicate. Regardless of his actual age, when “13-Point Program to Destroy America” came out, its lead singer was already quite the physical presence — impossibly thick swath of black hair, dark, sensitive eyes, square cheekbones and long, sinewy limbs. His je ne sais quoi was the sum set of rigorous theses, thrift store suits, frenetic stage shows and an insurgent pompadour. Amid a ferocious hardcore scene. D.C., full of punks and academics, there was only one Ian Svenonius. And from the get go, he had big ideas which he was ready to fight for — or at least stridently defend.

Over the course of the next several decades, Ian’s music would spasm, shift, explode and reconstitute. But the basic chassis was there from the start. Nation of Ulysses was Hardcore Punk, deconstructed. N.O.U. were less a band and more a gang or a movement. They were the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” if you exchanged White Pantherism for French Post-Structuralism. N.O.U. had theories and treatises more than they had songs or albums. And whereas Hardcore’s in the Eighties marched towards cretinism, N.O.U. (not to mention their label mates, Fugazi) redirected their scene towards egalitarian ideals. Though they only survived a handful of years, their impact was sufficient to leave a very deep mark on a very select (if influential) few.  

After N.O.U., Svenonius’ identity coalesced. For his next (and perhaps his most famous) act, the hair got bigger. The suits more tailored. The ideas headier. And the music tighter. By the time The Make-Up arrived in 1995, his mask and costume seemed to fit so tightly that it was impossible to discern whether they were mask and costume at all. 

Though I owned one of their seven inches and a copy of their propaganda zine, I never actually saw Nation of Ulysses perform live. I did, however, get to see The Make-Up perform on several occasions, mostly in small clubs and — holy shit — were they something. If you discount their ideas (which is not hard to do), and their music (harder to do), you are still left with their impeccable physical appeal. I am too young to have ever seen The Supremes or Marvin Gaye or Led Zeppelin or Television in any of their primes, but I simply cannot imagine any band as stunningly good looking as The Make-up in 1996. Ian Svenonius, Steve Gamboa, James Canty and Michelle Mae. All decked out in matching silk shirts and ties. Steve and James wearing their hair short and tight. Ian and Michelle sporting dueling bouffants. Whereas N.O.U. employed force, The Make-Up used style and sermons.

As for what they sounded like, Svenonius insisted that The Make-Up were the inventors of a new genre called “Gospel Yeh Yeh.” “Gospel Yeh Yeh” comprised elements of the JB’s hard Funk, Prince’s pansexual falsetto, D.C. Hardcore, Baptist preachers, Jean Luc Godard and Karl Marx. Svenonius imagined their performances as conversations, ostensibly because he could extract affirming “yeahs” from the crowd. But, in reality, we were all just churchgoers. He had the microphone and the pulpit and the gang and the ideas. We were just there to look and listen and sweat in awe. And even though most of us had no idea what he was really talking about or what religion we were joining, we wanted in. 

Until The Delta 72 tried to copy their act, there was no one in Indie Rock remotely similar to The Make-Up. They had some things in common with The Birthday Party and The Gun Club and Pussy Galore, years before them. But, during the late Nineties, they were on the other side of the world from Pavement and Guided by Voices. And though nobody has been able to duplicate the Make-Up’s triple crown — most stylish, most ideological, most exciting — without them there would be no Liars, Les Savy Fav or Q and Not U.

Like Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up proved to be more legendary than popular. And so, as he had with his former outfit, Svenonius dissolved the band five years after they first appeared. During the early Aughts, he and Michelle Mae teamed up with Neil Hagerty (Royal Trux) to form Weird War, who made a series of less ideological, less incendiary, but still kind of interesting, deconstructed Garage Rock albums. But, from the outside, Weird War had the feel of an experiment more than of a gang. Svenonius spent most of that decade moonlighting as a subject slash contributor for Index Magazine and the many other publications who wanted to get his ideas and his hair into their pages. As a result, by 2009, the could-be-legend was more an essayist, a great interview, a great photoshoot, and a hipster cad than a rock and roller. He was to Vice what I suppose Fran Lebowitz was to Vanity Fair. 

But then — either because he had too many ideas or because he’d run out of them — Ian Svenonius started another new band. Chain and the Gang began as a lower stakes, rotating cast of friends and acolytes, sponsored by Calvin Johnson and the Dub Narcotic corporation. In time, though, they proved to be Svenonius’ most prolific and enduring outfit, releasing six studio albums in eight years. 

If ideology was the source of Nation of Ulysses’ ferality, and if it was fodder for sermons in The Make-Up, in Chain and The Gang, ideology is simply assumed. Twenty years into his career, fans (and critics) were familiar with Svenonius’ Post-Structuralist, Marxist provocateur shtick. As a result, Chain and the Gang is a band generally disinterested in agitprop. They are speaking to the converted. The ideology is baked in — it’s a given. The albums are not manifestos. The songs are not calls to arms. Instead, everything has the feel of a one sentence provocation — a series of three minute deconstructions of capitalism’s bedrocks. And while that might sound intolerably high minded, Chain and The Gang’s is actually the most winking, most endearing of Svenonius’ many acts.

It’s also the closest he gets to his anti-shtick predecessor, Jonathan Richman. Like Jonathan, Ian’s “singing” voice was always nasal, halting and limited in its range. Like Jonathan, Ian’s songs rely heavily on repetition. With Chain and the Gang, familiar subjects are repeated to the point of banality. And both The Gang and The Modern Lovers emit a cold musical tone that betrays a warmth of spirit — a trick that you can only pull off when people stop thinking of your shtick as shtick. Or when, as Owen Hatherly described for The Tribune, “the mask eats the face.” 

Obviously, the Jonathan / Ian comparison only stretches so far. Unlike Richman, who chases relatability into the realm of revelation, Svenonius is hunting for subversion. Ultimately, their ends are wildly different, but — at least for a handful of albums — their means are strikingly similar. And perhaps never more so than on “In Cool Blood,” Chain and The Gang’s third LP, released in 2012, and recorded with Calvin Johnson for K Records.

Whereas the band’s first two albums included Svenonius on the cover confined by either handcuffs or bars, by the looks of their third release, the singer is is finally free. And he’s multiplying. It was 2012. Obama was President. The U.S. economy was healthy. And Ian Svenonius was having fun again. To be clear, Svenonius’ version of fun is not the same hip shaking, car racing, summer party by the beach fun that Jonathan Richman sings about. No. Ian’s version is always in the head and occasionally in the loins but never, ever in the heart (or the ass or feet). And, to the extent that it's pleasurable or charming, “In Cool Blood” is so in correlation to the arrival of singer Katie Alice Greer (formerly of Priests). Greer plays Holly Golightly to Svenonius’ Billy Childish. Or the Nancy Sinatra to his Lee Hazlewood. The sweetness and lightness of her voice betrays the shtick of his instrument. In fact, it almost makes you forget that it’s shtick at all.

Compared to Nation of Ulysses or The Make-Up, “In Cool Blood” is a startlingly low key affair. The unfussiness of Calvin Johnson’s recording and the Shaggs-iness of the delivery pushes Svenonius and his band to the brink of giggles. The album is full of one liners and gags, rather than the essays or sermons we’d come to expect from Svenonius’ previous bands. And while the album is full of ideas — every song is basically a thesis statement, introduced in its title, repeated, inverted, turned sideways, deconstructed and repeated some more — they are wrapped up in he said/she said/they said hipster cuteness.

While The Modern Lovers and Billy Childish/Holly Golightly are major ingredients, they’re not the whole recipe. There are heaping tablespoons of The New York Dolls throughout “In Cool Blood.” If David Johnasen was more serious, and if Johnny Thunders liked Funk more than the Blues, and also if he was a she, and if they were less The Stones and more “Pablo Picasso,” they would have sounded almost exactly like Chain and The Gang in 2012. Or, I guess, the inverse of what I just said.

Some of it Svenonius’ lisp, which resembles Johansen’s. But, I think the similarities are more intentional than subtle speech patterns. “Hunting for Love,” the opening track from “In Cool Blood” — with its jungle sounds and with Katie playing Sixties girl group — is a less fun, less funny (but still kind of fun and funny) niece to The Dolls’ “Stranded in the Jungle.” And while “Nuff Said” owes more than a little to Billy/Holly and Lee/Nancy, its sass is pure Dolls.

Though Svenonius’ songs are typically more meta-text than text, there are notable exceptions. “Certain Kinds of Trash” (speaking of The New York Dolls) is a commentary on both the wastefulness of product-obsessed capitalism and the power of nostalgia. It’s a garage rocker that barely rocks, but which allows Ian and Katie to count out their favorite discarded products — from old Bic lighters, to typewriter ribbons and TV dinner pans.

And as soon as the singers finalize their anachronistic trash list, Katie takes lead on “Free Will,” the record’s one great, unambiguously Marxist / Post-Structuralist moment. On top of some loose Rockabilly, she reminds us that freedom is an illusion — that there is no free will, no free love, no free press. With Ian cheering her on, she confirms that there is, in fact, a cost to everything, including (especially) freedom. It’s the album’s high point, a series of jokes that are good because they are true, delivered with candy-coated vocals and a hip-shaking bottom. Notably, it’s also the song that features Svenonius the least.

Because the gags on “In Cool Blood” are all variations of the same two themes — (1) what we think we own actually owns us and (2) subtext is the text — the album’s charm fades before its thirteenth track. But, even at its least charming — the plodding “I’m Not Interested” (which is actually two songs) and the flat, thud of closer (which doubles as a fake advertisement for the record itself) — “In Cool Blood” has a certain magnetism. A good chunk of the appeal might simply be the delight of Katie Alice Greer singing on top of K Records’ version of a proto-Punk band. But also, to his credit, Svenonius — who was frequently better in theory and in concert than on record — is able to pull out the humor that we always suspected was there, stuck somewhere in the costume.

As to whether the more waggish, more consumable version could last, the answer was — yes, for a little while. Chain and The Gang went on to release three more studio albums, while its lead singer moonlit as the host of “Soft Focus,” an interview show for Vice that split the difference between “The Dick Cavett Show” and “Between Two Ferns.” But, as the jokes dried up and Obama left office and the trips to Olympia got complicated, Svenonius turned inward. He began to release minimalist Art Rock under the name Escapism. And then, in 2020, in a display of unexpected candor and unsatisfying apology, Svenonius blogged (and then deleted) that he had been “completely inappropriate to women.” That he had been a narcissist and a “creep” (his words in quotes). The revelation was both a surprise (“You mean, the Marxist feminist and inspiration to Kathleen Hanna and Jenny Toomey was really just an overeducated, superstyled cad?”) but also not a surprise (“We knew it was an act!”). 

Now on the other side of fifty, Svenonius is in the unenviable position of having spent a career fully committing to a part that he never acknowledged was a part until it became both obvious and kind of less interesting. For what it’s worth, I believe that his ideas still have tremendous merit. His catalog and contributions to the form — narrow as they might be — are irrefutable. And it’s not as though he’s going to make a heel turn, revealing himself to be a closeted capitalist or secret fascist. In his own way, Ian Svenonius is still a vital artist. And yet, the market for his shtick is as small as it’s ever been. So, what’s a guy to do? Paul McCartney didn't keep the mop top. Bowie left Mars for Berlin. Wild and crazy Elton became Sir Elton. They all left their shtick behind. As for Jonathan Richman, we were wrong. His anti-shtick was not shtick at all.

It's much harder to say what Ian Svenonius might do with the mask he’s been wearing. He still has a (shockingly) thick, fully black mane. His suits fit better than ever. And he has retained the capacity to disarm, if not arm. However, those of us who care are now too aware of the artifice on his surface and how it betrays the relationship between signifier and signified. We can’t hear the text or subtext or meta-text because all we can see is shtick. But, I suppose, the thing with the best shtick is that it can still stick.

by Matty Wishnow