The personal is always political for the reignited punkers of Desaparecidos
“When we got back together, we knew we couldn’t write songs about breaking up with your girlfriend or a meal we’ve enjoyed,” says Matt Baum of Desaparecidos. “People are going to expect us to scream and yell, and we still have things to scream and yell about, so let’s do it.”
The Omaha band of singer/guitarist Conor Oberst, lead guitarist Denver Dalley, singer/bassist Landon Hedges, keyboardist Ian McElroy and drummer Baum formed out of a shared love of blunt-force punk rock and loud political activism. The group’s first album, Read Music/Speak Spanish, arrived in February 2002, and it railed against America’s consumer culture and the Bush government’s sense of privilege. The band wasn’t around for long: Bright Eyes’ Lifted, Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground came out in August 2002, and Oberst returned to concentrating on that band full-time, later adding other projects such as Monsters Of Folk and the Mystic Valley Band to his prolific résumé.
But Desaparecidos reconvened for a benefit show in Omaha in 2010, went on a short tour in 2012, and started recording again sporadically, releasing several singles and now a second full-length, Payola, another set of pointed political accusations, propulsive punk-rock anthems and powerful, shouted vocals.
“We spend a great deal of time talking about things, saying, ‘Did you hear about this?’ or sending a link to something,” says Dalley. “A huge part of what makes this band this band is the dynamic of five guys who have grown up together and known each other for 20-plus years. It’s that dynamic both in the music and in the content. It’s stuff that we’re like-minded about and we’re fired up about. We bring it out in each other.”
“These songs came out really rough and loud and raw,” says Baum. “I love them. I don’t know that we could have done them any other way.”
On Payola, the band screams and yells about topical—and often polarizing—issues. “Anonymous” voices the views of the controversial hacker group; “Search The Searches” questions invasions of privacy in the name of national security; “Backsell” attacks the major-label music industry; “Slacktivist” rails against apathy and social media.
“To me, the first album is a concept album sung from the perspective of our backyard,” says Dalley. “This one is a little more further-reaching; it’s a little more specifically targeted track by track.”
While Oberst is the voice at the front of the songs and the writer behind the lyrics, the political vision is collective.
“It is democratic,” says Baum. “We definitely agree that we’re not going to do stuff that we don’t all agree about. We’ve had arguments about stuff. We sat down and really debated lyrics. Denver and I got really heated once.”
While they decline to specify (“Oh, that’s stuff you don’t get access to,” says Dalley), they said they did spend time parsing the lyrics of “MariKKKopa,” which satirizes the principles of Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant sheriff on Arizona’s Maricopa County. “These Spics, they’re brave and getting braver,” Oberst sings from the point of view of a racist Arpaio supporter.
“We thought it was an appropriate usage of that word in that context,” says Dalley. “It is an ugly word. But that’s the point of it. It’s supposed to be controversial. It’s supposed to be ugly and make you think. Lyrics used to be like that, before it was all just ‘baby’ and break up with your girlfriend and ‘call me maybe’ and bubblegum shit like that. Protest songs, they used to get stuck in your head, and then maybe you think about what they’re actually saying, and then you look up the lyrics, and you might even learn something and you might even get involved because of it. To me, that’s the ultimate goal, I think.”
Of course, as with much political satire, the audience has to be trusted to recognize the characters in a song like “MariKKKopa.”
“Yeah, but I think that no one in their right mind would look at a singer/songwriter like Conor Oberst and be like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t know he was a racist,’” says Baum. “It’s a safe assumption to make. He married a Mexican woman, so it’s unlikely he hates Mexican people.”
While Desaparecidos would love to believe their songs would raise consciousness and challenge their audience’s preconceptions, they recognize that many will already agree with their “the left is right” point of view.
“I think there’s going to be an element of preaching to the choir no matter what,” says Dalley. “At the end of the day, we’re all just hippies preaching peace and love in a different way. But what are we going to do? We’re not going to get played on Christian radio. Are they going to play us on AM Republican talk radio? No. It’s not going to happen. So, we’re just going to have scream a bit louder and maybe they’ll hear us somehow. Even if everyone is like-minded, everyone likes an anthem and likes to sing along to something they can believe in.”
—Steve Klinge
