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Conor Oberst: Wuss-Rock No More

People were cruel to the Bright Eyes frontman early on, but over many years and dozens of albums, he's proven his status as a legacy artist.

Like most undersexed losers who have wasted many perfectly good Saturday afternoons in record stores, I have a fairly substantial record collection taking up space in my living room. Even from the millimeters-thick spines lined up on the shelves (arranged alphabetically, then chronologically, of course), you can tell it skews in a certain direction—scary sounding band names scrawled in intense fonts. Lots of “Death,” lots of “Murder,” so much “Blood.” There’s one that sticks out, though, and I know this because everyone who’s taken a passing look at my collection seems to notice and say the same thing: “You own a fucking Bright Eyes box set?”

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Yes, I do. I own a fucking Bright Eyes box set. Five releases across seven LPs from Omaha’s folk prodigy Conor Oberst. Around its release in 2003, there was a certleain stigma attached to being a fan of Oberst, and not just among the sorts of people who would collect every colored variant of Death Murder Blood LPs, but in the musical world at large. Oberst was the personification of the early 00s indie rock hubris—a handsome, brooding singer-songwriter in a track jacket, crooning about feelings and junk? That’s a prime target for a joke dump right there. Also not helping his case as a cliché-free artist was that his catalog of sad bastard break-up songs and strands of stringy black hair in his eyes got him lumped into the emo crowd as well. (Let us never forget his role as a playable character in version 1.0 of the Emo Game, among Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba and Cursive’s Tim Kasher, a surefire sign you’d “made it” as an emo star.) Oberst was a shaky voiced, acoustic-strumming go-to punchline, where the setup was always “lol you listen to wuss-rock,” or likely something more homophobic depending on the caliber of your friends back then.

But now, as Oberst settles into his mid-30s, a widely respected artist with dozens of diverse records under his belt, having been making music since his arm was literally not long enough to reach over the top of his guitar to strum it, you have to wonder: Did the music snobs who were quick to write Oberst off as another lame emo kid come off a bit hasty in their assessment?

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Critics were cruel to Oberst early on. In 2000, Pitchfork, the de facto decider of indie cool at the time, tore the third Bright Eyes album, Fevers and Mirrors, to absolute shreds, slapping a 5.4 on it. They tar and feathered the thing, calling it the “sophomoric musical meanderings of a young songwriter who seems to take himself far too seriously” and a “maddeningly self-indulgent mass of pseudo-depth.” The review even took aim at Oberst personally for punching above his artistic weight as a 19-year-old: “In this sickening chunk of narcissism, Oberst makes a laughable attempt to prove to his listeners that he is of a penetratingly deep intelligence by spouting strings of stale aphorisms that pass for rich understanding amongst those reluctant to have original thought.” Dang, Pitchfork. That’s some ice cold shit coming from the publication that spent the majority of that year giving Radiohead’s Kid A a public bukkake.

Pitchfork did at least grant Oberst one kindness though. The review wrapped up with this meek praise: “Oberst is in the early stages of developing a talent that will likely take some years to fully mature.” It would take him over a decade, but Oberst would force prescience into this line.

“I long ago stopped trying to figure out what people think of me,” he told me earlier this year while speaking about his full-band punk project, Desaparecidos, whose debut, Read Music/Speak Spanish, fared even worse with Pitchfork back in 2002, receiving a 4.6. “I think any time you enter the public sphere, especially with doing art and trying to put forth some kind of communication that is not watered down in any way, people are gonna love it and people are gonna hate it. I’ve heard that description of my music a lot—as being divisive or whatever, and I’d much rather be divisive than be something that’s just… mediocre.”

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Video for "Easy/Lucky/Free" from 2005's Digital Ash in a Digital Urn

Even when he received positive criticism, it seemed to sink him deeper into this indie pigeonhole. In 2005, Sasha Frere-Jones devoted 1,400 words in The New Yorker to Oberst, calling him “indie rock’s reigning poet prince.” The entire third paragraph of the piece was spent comparing and contrasting Oberst with Bob Dylan. Granted, that was likely done in part to contextualize Oberst for the slices of Wonder Bread who read The New Yorker, but a comparison like that, albeit well-meaning, can be a death kiss for artists because, of course, Oberst is not Bob Dylan. Only Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan and to put them in the same sentence unwittingly drags an Oberst into his big shoes and enrages readers for the sacrilege.

“That was a tough one,” Oberst said of the Dylan comparison on an episode of WTF with Marc Maron this year. “I think that in music journalist shorthand, that’s code for ‘they have a lot of words in their songs.’ There’s worse things to be called, I suppose. But when people read something like that about you in a magazine, they take the step to think that you’re saying it about yourself. No, I never said that. Someone else wrote that and then a thousand other people asked me about it.”

But again, positive or negative, Oberst seems to have always dodged criticism by ignoring it altogether and staying the course. He even once immortalized this sentiment in his song “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and to Be Loved)”: “I do not read the reviews / No, I am not singing for you.” A bad review would try to take his album down and he’d respond by releasing two more albums, once even on the same day. He’d have character assassins trying to cast him off with other bedheaded flashes in the indie rock pan and he’d turn around and start a new folk band project.

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Oberst’s ability to diversify his output has been what’s kept him continually relevant, and distanced himself from his musical peers who’ve fallen by the wayside or are still desperately clinging to hit singles from a decade ago. While Oberst kept Bright Eyes active and relatively prolific all the way up until 2011, he’s also performed as a solo artist, as well as with backing players in Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, not to mention Monsters of Folk, and Desaparecidos, through which he released arguably the best record of his career this year with Payola. And there have been some guest appearances sprinkled in with Cursive, Jenny Lewis, Tilly and the Wall, First Aid Kit, alt-J, Arab Strap, and a long list of others. He’d sing protest songs on an acoustic guitar dressed as an ironic cowboy on The Tonight Show and he’d play punk songs in small DIY venues. All slightly different shades of the same guy’s personality.

Leno was supposedly not thrilled with this performance.

Oberst could’ve easily made a career out of touring and playing the hits from his much-beloved 2002 record Lifted and most fans would’ve been happy. Hell, most artists would be happy to have that career stability. But Oberst is a risk-taker, a perpetually evolving artist. And now, two decades into his career, whether people will give him the credit or not, he’s influential, he's provocative, and he's approaching legacy artist status.

Not to perpetuate the Dylan analogy that’s clung to Oberst for years, but at some point, you have to ask yourself: At what point did Bob Dylan become Bob Dylan? How far along in his career did people start regarding him as an important artist of his generation? Did people recognize his brilliance early enough, or were they too caught up in comparing him to his predecessors as well? I’m reminded of a lyric by Jeffrey Lewis: “I’m sure the thing is probably Dylan himself too stayed up some nights wishing he was as good as Ginsberg or Camus / And he was like, dude, I’m such a faker, I’m just a clown who entertains, and these fools who pay for my crap, they just have pathetic puny brains / And Camus probably wished he was Milton too or whatever, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Conor Oberst with Desaparecidos in 2015, photo by Derek Scancarelli

Oberst’s constant reinvention, his deflection of criticism, and his workmanlike endurance seem to finally be shifting the tides. Fevers and Mirrors—remember, that little record that Pitchfork shat on upon its release? Well, it was reissued in 2012. Pitchfork’s review? A 9.0. Best New Reissue. Their 2,300-word praise-heap read like one long “our bad, yo” for their 2000 take on it. They’ve even come around on Desaparecidos, granting Payola a handsome 7.6.

Fevers and Mirrors, Payola, these are all small parts of a bigger picture—a catalog of albums that have aged well and have been justified by the test of time, albums you’d be proud to put on your shelf.

This is the first day of Dan Ozzi's life. Follow him on Twitter - @danozzi