Culture

The Beardcore Manifesto

Clayton Trutor

This decade in music will be remembered for the further splintering of popular music into discreet subcultures. More music is being recorded than ever before, but, in many ways, fewer people are hearing any specific artist than at any time since the origins of radio. A number of technological and cultural shifts, as well as the further extension of niche marketing by Corporate America, have rendered popular musicians not nearly as popular as they were even twenty years ago. Lady GaGa, the Black Eyed Peas, and Katy Perry combined are not nearly as culturally significant as, say, Whitney Houston was in 1992. Individuals have an unprecedented ability to tailor their cultural interests and avoid genres of music, film, and television that do not interest them.

At the same time, virtually everyone claims to have eclectic tastes, particularly when it comes to music. It’s the knee-jerk cosmopolitan thing to say. It makes you sound like a world citizen. I know that when I claim to like “everything,” it is total bullshit. I try to reserve that answer for polite company, but it makes for such a convenient response to the question of what kind of music I like. I know for a fact that my musical tastes are becoming increasingly narrow, so I’ve decided to embrace “Beardcore” as my knee-jerk genre response to that open-ended question.

“Beardcore” is nothing new in my vocabulary. I started using the term a few years back to describe any folk or country-tinged artist with substantial facial hair and an album on an independent record label. This made no sense at all. My original definition of Beardcore enveloped musicians in at least half a dozen subgenres. I meant something more specific than that musically, but I could never describe it. Back in 2005, I tried defining Beardcore on Urban Dictionary, but all I came up with was the connection between facial hair and hillbilly music, which, I believe, the Oak Ridge Boys came up when I was a mere twinkle in my father’s eye. Evidently, Beardcore, as I defined it, has not entered the lexicon. A t-shirt vendor who purchased the domain name “Beardcore.com” in 2006 seems to have had more success popularizing his use of the term. “Beardcore.com” has tried to recreate the “Fear the Mullet” fad of the early 2000s, substituting facial hair for hockey hair.

The time has come for me to put the principles of Beardcore to paper, or “to screen,” I guess. We are living in the Beardcore Moment, as well as a thousand other narrowly defined contemporary musical moments. This essay aims to cement Beardcore’s place in the sonic lexicon as both a noun and an adjective to describe a particular set of aesthetic choices common to artists such as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Fleet Foxes, The Pernice Brothers, Blitzen Trapper, Woods, Iron & Wine, and Bon Iver. Moreover, I believe Beardcore can serve as shorthand for describing the frequently overlapping fan bases of these acts. Musicians, like most artists, dislike it when other people put a label on their work, often reasonably so. I contend that for all of these artists, being lumped together with like-minded peers will benefit them in the present and in the future. The emergence of Beardcore as a descriptor for the aforementioned acts will provide listeners with a common starting point for discussing their work. Since the purveyors of Beardcore have constructed their sound so thoughtfully from the chronicles of American music, I believe that fans who self-consciously identify with Beardcore will follow suit and delve more deeply into the canons of American music. If not, then at least they will have a label for describing the bands they like.

To describe Beardcore, I must begin with the beards. To be considered part of the Beardcore club, a prominent band member, typically the lead singer, must sport substantial, unstylized facial hair. Cassadaga’s got plenty of twang, but Conor Oberst’s beardlessness takes him out of the running for Beardcore. (Update: Mr. Oberst has been sporting a beard in his appearances with the “Monsters of Folk.” Perhaps, his membership application merits reconsideration.)

Beardcore, like most subgenres of independent music, aims to make a counter cultural impression, both in its sound and its fashion sensibilities. Nothing contrasts more with the hair “product” and chest-waxing masculinity of the 2000s than allowing a mound of hair to amass on one’s face. To be clear, the Beardcore ethos favors manageable facial hair, not the conspicuously unruly variety of beard and locks favored by the jam band crowd. Beardcorists are realists. They realize that employment is an unpleasant, though necessary part of life. Unless your employer is a university or a member of the String Cheese Incident, few bosses will put up with ZZ Top beards and three foot dreads.

Up to this point, most Beardcore artists are male, so the facial hair requirement might need to change if more female artists join the fold. I tend to think that Beardcore, like many rock subcultures, will remain primarily the domain of the lads.

Beardcore is more than just good fashion sense. Musically, it constitutes a distinct contemporary reformulation of American folk and country traditions. Beardcore shares similarities with several pre-existing subgenres, but it is not Alt-Country and it is not Freak Folk, to name a couple of cousins. Beardcore, I reckon, doesn’t have enough dirt under its nails to qualify as Alt-Country. To understand the sonic differences between the genres, ask Beardcore and Alt-Country about their favorite members of the Byrds. While Alt-Country views itself as an extension of Gram Parsons’ “Cosmic American Music,” Beardcore prefers the twangy tunesmithing of Gene Clark, who liked his county music baroque, but without the syrupy sentimentality which characterized the “Countrypolitan” Nashville Sound.

Alt-Country has an overarching concern with the authenticity and rootsiness of its sound. Beardcore also harkens back to a great deal of traditional American music, but shows a greater willingness to embrace popular sounds. In the Beardcore ethos, a good hook takes precedence over the preservationist concerns central to Alt-Country. 1960s pop luminaries Brian Wilson and Ray Davies bear as strong an influence on Beardcore as Dock Boggs and the Carter Family. Beardcore’s pop sensibilities tend towards the Baroque, distancing it from the folksy lo-fi sounds of acts like Smog, whose late 90s work anticipates Beardcore’s appropriation of American roots music for alternate purposes.

Beardcore godfather Bonnie Prince Billy’s I See a Darkness (1999) serves as a transitional work in this regard, trading in 90s lo-fi for a new focus on melody. The Appalachian hymnody on Bonnie Prince Billy’s Palace records was decidedly low fidelity. Those sensibilities are still in place on I See a Darkness on tracks like “Death to Everyone.” But Billy (or should I say Will Oldham) turns his Appalachian influences on their head on the album’s minimally majestic title track, as well as “Madeleine-Mary” and the lovely “A Minor Place.” Billy blazes a trail toward accessible, sing-along mountain music on I See a Darkness. Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes appear to have taken good notes on the album.

If Alt-Country is a shade more traditional than Beardcore, then Beardcore is a shade more traditional than the lo-fi mad hatters of Freak Folk. Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart are both a bit too Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters for Beardcore. The Freak Folk kids tend to be a bit younger and more into Lord of the Rings and Kate Bush. Beardcore is fine with whimsy in its music. It just doesn’t want its shows to feel like a combination Renaissance Fair/Open Mike Night. Freak Folk also seems like a quintessentially urban phenomenon, one that feeds off the craziness of, specifically, New York City and transforms it into an idiosyncratic sound. Beardcore, by contrast, romanticizes the rural and displays an anti-urban anxiety, even if most of its creators spend the majority of their time in cities. Beardcore talks about country living as much in its lyrics as genre icons Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams. It is no coincidence that the most mythologized album in the Beardcore fold is Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, an album recorded in a deer camp over a northern Wisconsin winter.

The purveyors of Beardcore are for the most part flannel clad Carter-era babies. Most of them are Yankees too: Pacific Northwest, Upper Midwest, and New England. Elder statesman Will Oldham is the only one to emanate from south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Arguably, Louisville-based My Morning Jacket constitutes a second Dixie Beardcore band. Jim James has got the beard and they’ve got a catalog full of twangy, hook-laden numbers, but too many of the jam band people like them for MMJ to earn full membership in the Beardcore fraternity. That doesn’t mean that Beardcore doesn’t love his copies of Z and At Dawn, but Beardcore is a little weirded out by the number of redheads with dreadlocks he saw at his first and only My Morning Jacket show. The jam band kids must dig MMJ’s more meandering work. (Update: Jim James has joined forces with Conor Oberst in the “Monsters of Folk.” Perhaps they are working together to woo the fickle goddess of Beardcore).

Temperamentally, Beardcore is wistful and earnest, or perhaps tongue in cheek. It’s tough to tell. Beardcore takes Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and George Jones’ I Am What I Am and puts them between two mayonnaise drenched pieces of white toast. It is tough to know where one emotion starts and another begins in the dreamy layers of sound on a Beardcore record. Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” sure sounds earnest, but “Ragged Wood,” the next track on their debut album, comes off like an inside joke. Bon Iver works some Gene Clark snide on “Skinny Love,” but he sounds like he’s having a George Harrison style bad day on “For Emma.” Beardcore is poignant and ambiguous, but not in an Ethan Hawke Reality Bites kind of way.

If you’re interested in dropping the world citizen charade when it comes to your musical tastes, Beardcore awaits your patronage. I suggest you jump on the Beardcore bandwagon while there’s still plenty of room. The 90s are on the verge of a big comeback in the fashion world as the low-rise 2000s come to a merciful end. Beardcore is way ahead of the curve on this. 1993 never really ended in the northern tier Beardcore hotbeds. It gets pretty goddamn cold in Wisconsin. A fella needs a few flannel shirts in his closet. Musically, the Beardcore sensibility is catching on too. Ol’ Bright Eyes isn’t the only one going all Nashville Skyline. Ben Kweller’s excellent new album Changing Horses sounds pretty Beardcore to me, even if it’s doubtful that he can grow a beard. The album’s title suggests that he’s transforming himself as an artist, so it’s likely he’s joining forces with us. Finally, Alt-Country icon Rhett Miller, both in his solo work and on the last two Old 97s albums, has embraced the latent pop melodicism underpinning his earlier work. It also doesn’t hurt that Miller has grown a beard.

Time will tell if the Beardcore moniker catches on. I assume it will, but I don’t expect any royalties for it. I assume the “Beardcore.com” guys have a handle on that end of things.