Anarchist Dreams Deferred

“Held like water in your shaking hands,” goes the opening
of
the Weakerthans’ explosive “Confessions of a Futon
Revolutionist,”
“are all the small defeats the day demands.” It’s the third song on the
Weakerthans’ debut album, but it’s the first one I can remember
hearing. Lyrically, it’s an archetypal Weakerthans song—densely
worded, smart, funny, and heartfelt as hell, artfully depicting the
terrible tear between youthful idealism and jaded weariness, freezing
the moment, with its desperate, defeated pleas to plant bombs, sing
protest songs, and “make believe we’re strong.”

At the time, it all seemed perfect: I had just moved from one
ramshackle punk house to a shitty apartment after a summer spent
backpacking; my bookshelf was half stocked with old college texts, half
stocked with zines and borrowed AK Press titles; my bed was a futon on
the floor; I literally hung my diploma up on the bathroom wall to seal
the deal.

A little history: The Weakerthans were formed in 1997 by John K.
Samson, formerly of the politically charged Canadian pop-punk band
Propagandhi, who never really clicked with me, probably unfairly due to
them having a dumb name. The Weakerthans retained some of Propagandhi’s
punk tempos while allowing Samson to explore the slower, more acoustic
sounds of country and folk. Lyrically, too, the Weakerthans saw Samson
tempering Propagandhi’s pranksterish anarchist politics with more
mature feelings, romantic sentiments, and themes of compromise,
uncertainty, failure, and regret.

Life goes on. Maybe you get a slightly nicer apartment. You miss
some old friends. You start to think the protests aren’t changing
anything, or that they’re just recreation for an increasingly
privileged subculture of activist punks, and so you stop going to them.
You get bitter about people and the real-world possibility of utopian
social structures. You find yourself more inclined to sing about your
cat or last call at your local bar than about the revolution.

As presumably their fans have aged and mellowed—or sold out or
given up or whatever you want to call it if you’re into throwing
stones—so have the Weakerthans.

Take the song “Pamphleteer,” from their sublime sophomore album
Left and Leaving. The narrator is a street-corner propagandist,
pushing pamphlets (I imagine socialist newspapers, but your
affiliations may vary) on an unreceptive rush-hour audience. It’s not
the sexy anarchism of Against Me! bricks breaking Starbucks windows;
it’s real, grueling labor—that politics isn’t bomb-throwing is
one letdown, that nobody even wants your pamphlet is another.

Fast-forward one album to Reconstruction Site, with its
triptychs of hospital death and its bitter civic indictments of
Winnipeg, and Samson has become “Our Retired Explorer,” spurning not
only the foot-soldier front lines of political activism, but even human
affection and another round, for his hermitage: “Thank you for the
flowers and the books by Derrida/but I must be getting back to dear
Antarctica.” Still, it’s as kinetic and romantic a song as the band
have ever written, right up there with the New
Order–interpolating “Wellington’s Wednesdays.”

The Weakerthans’ latest, Reunion Tour, threatens to tip the
scales too far from regret to rehash—another song about Samson’s
cat named Virtute, another paean to last calls—but the sentiment
of its more winning songs, such as the desolate “Sun in an Empty Room”
or the still hopeful, tentatively thawing “Civil Twilight” just about
save it.

Not that all of Samson’s songs are—or need to be—about
political theory and praxis. Some of the band’s most touching numbers
are straight-up love songs or more broadly existential laments.
“Everything Must Go” takes stock of the ephemerality of relationships
and life by cataloging the personal effects up for grabs at a garage
sale. “My Favourite Chords” starts with gentrification and corruption,
sure, but it ends up being a mash-note invitation to a too-cute DIY
date.

It’s all an awful long way from, say, Propagandhi’s “…And We
Thought Nation States Were a Bad Idea” (which is, by the way, the
motherfucking jam). But there are always plenty of bands and albums
that are perfect for when you’re young and still know everything that’s
wrong with the world and how to solve it (at this very festival:
Flobots, Anti-Flag). There are far fewer bands that speak to that
particular disillusionment of idealism dashed or defrayed. The
Weakerthans are one such rare band.