As he told Rees, “I’ve been right to the top and there ain’t nothing up there worth having.” This sort of honesty-unconcerned with commercial striving a pure repudiation of the filtered and staged-is rare. “I come across alone and silent / I come across dirty and mean,” he admits on “I Am a Man That Worries.” He delivers each line with the steadfast confidence of a guy who has witnessed a lot of ugliness and won’t pretend otherwise. These days, Mellencamp doesn’t care about appearing likable, grateful, or good-natured.
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Age seems to have given Mellencamp license to gripe he is a poet of ennui, which makes him an apt mouthpiece for a moment when it is sometimes difficult to feel optimistic. (Vocally, he has landed somewhere between late-career Bob Dylan and early-career Tom Waits.) He is frequently accompanied by acoustic guitar. Mellencamp’s voice, once booming and raucous, is now softer, but never gentle. On “Jack & Diane,” another single from 1982, he sang, “Oh yeah, they say life goes on / Long after the thrill of living is gone.” “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack” is lumbering, bleak, and engrossing. Mellencamp sounds like he’s working through a season of mortal reckoning, though, to be fair, he has been lamenting impermanence since his youth. Mellencamp’s voice is shredded from decades of cigarettes-it remains an illicit delight to watch him smoke hungrily throughout an entire 2015 appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman”-and his face has turned long and craggy under his trademark pompadour.
“And who among us could ever see clear? / The end is coming, it’s almost here,” Springsteen adds. “How can a man watch his life go down the drain? / How many moments has he lost today?” Mellencamp rasps. “Wasted Days,” the first single, a duet with Bruce Springsteen, is about the despair of aging. Mellencamp turned seventy in October, and this month he is releasing “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack,” his twenty-fifth album. “Sometimes love don’t feel like it should,” Mellencamp sang on the single “Hurts So Good,” from 1982. “All great and precious things are lonely,” Steinbeck wrote in “East of Eden,” from 1952. Let’s get all those motherfuckers out of here.”īesides sharing Steinbeck’s political radicalism, Mellencamp also possesses his instinctive knowledge of just how desolate even the sweetest life can feel. I am for the total overthrow of the capitalist system. And you’re looking at the most liberal motherfucker you know. “Let’s address the ‘voice of the heartland’ thing,” he told Paul Rees, whose satisfying biography, “Mellencamp,” came out last year. The image of such “real,” non-coastal Americans has become a useful cudgel for conservatives looking to depict their opponents as élitist buffoons Mellencamp finds this grotesque.
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Yet Mellencamp has also bristled at this characterization, which is largely rooted in fantasy: men gazing wistfully out the windows of vintage pickup trucks, watching dust blow by, listening to some parched and distant radio station. The musician, who comes from Indiana and began releasing records in the late nineteen-seventies, is known as a populist soothsayer, an irascible and unpretentious spokesman for hardworking, rural-born folks. In 2012, the singer and songwriter John Mellencamp was given the John Steinbeck Award, presented annually to an artist, thinker, activist, or writer whose work exemplifies, among other virtues, Steinbeck’s “belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes.” The grace of the marginalized is a long-standing theme of Mellencamp’s writing.
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