Interpretations:House Of Mayors (Song)

A magnificently haunted brain

Just leave John Linnell alone and let him think. After a time something morbid, funny, and unique will emanate from that mind - something like this song, the grand summation of the collection of other funny, dank things the EP contains.

Linnell loves arcane nooks of technology (like his private obsession with old cameras & his stubbornly obtuse desire to develop film in a darkroom), wrong-headed historical trends, and 19th century Americana. The song James K. Polk always struck me as someone marveling at the strangeness of obsolete passions, phrases, and nomenclature - perfectly complemented by the use of a singing saw.

The State Songs project, too, seems like a reified dream of decrepit knick-knacks - hammy Sousaphone-heavy jingles, wheezing and clunking band organs, carrousels with lead paint peeling off the wooden horses, stale-smelling high school gymnasiums with thick-lacquered floors, town squares - along with the stale ideas and stale culture of backwater empty nowhere America.

The House of Mayors project may be even more deeply stained with such haunted thoughts. Fernando Wood is James Polk with mad cow disease. The music for DeWitt Clinton might be inspired by Charles Ives. Will You Love Me in December has the "faintly musty smell" of a preserved drawing room.

In the title track, Linnell one-ups Disney's collection of herky-jerky presidents by imagining the same effort absurdly spent on the more forgettable "hundred odd" men who were NY mayors.

A plainly ridiculous part of the fantasy is that anyone would care. No one is going to even remember the historical deeds, speeches, or legislations from these old nobodies, much less pay to come in and watch them reenancted by clanky actuated mannequins. Still, Linnell makes us believe it: we're walking in the tour group, we point at specific mayors we've just learned about (by reading their little plaques), we're startled by their unsettling liveliness, and we applaud as they are introduced & celebrated.

Linnell demonstrates a Steven King style gift for surfacing universal horrors, in this case artificial human figures. It's scary enough to watch them move and talk and such. He also makes us see how bizarrely they are "stacked in columns and rows" and remain in place waiting for animation the next day. Linnell emphasizes their erect, eyes-open readiness even after everyone has left & the lights go out.

There's a kind of social commentary in his observation of their old wigs, suits, mustaches, and eyewear - a feeling that the people of the past were stuck in their time, without the awareness that they were frozen in fashions (in thoughts as well as clothes) that were to become outmoded, ridiculed, historicized... and a dread suspicion that we are in the same position.

There is a bit more direct social comment in the next-to-last verse - the fact that (nearly) all of these mayors were white men, "anemic" in their paleness, their sameness barely disguised by differences in facial hair. A woman would be "out of place" here - she would be from another time, our time or later - one of the future occupants of those chairs on the next floor.

In the end, Linnell warns the critics who feel "cheated or mad" by the white patriarchy on display that the future will come with its own, as yet unknown disappointments once those chairs are filled... because even in 1996 he was already convinced of the gloomy credo he would write in 2021: there will be sad. Nehushtan (talk) 05:50, 10 September 2024 (EDT)