The coincidence was certainly not planned, but it’s hard not to feel like the stars have aligned when noticing that the latest single by Opus Kink, ‘I’m a Pretty Showboy’, has come out almost at the same time as Taylor Swift’s ‘Life of a Showgirl’.
Needless to say, the two are very different beasts, if only because one is the product of a pop juggernaut, where the other is the latest, increasingly ambitious expression of a band that’s best described as a collective of gleefully filthy punk artists. Yet in spite of this – or perhaps because of this – it is hard to resist the temptation of looking at the song as a rebuttal of sorts to the album, involuntary as it is. Both declare in their very titles, it could be argued, an intention to dissect what it is to be the kind of person who makes a show of themselves for a living. In this light, the involuntary rebuttal element becomes hard to ignore when considering that, where Swift’s album has been broadly criticised for being bland and blunt-edged, Opus Kink’s song is sharp, relentless, and very deliberately uncomfortable.
The contrast is stark: between a millionaire superstar lamenting her role as a cog in the machine, and a band of against-the-grain underdogs boldly and aggressively reclaiming their right to, and their glee in putting on a show in the (uncompromising, unsettling) way they see fit. “It’s about wanting your milk, wanting your honey, even though you’re scum and don’t deserve a taste”, states – among other things – the caption accompanying the unveiling of the track on social media. If you want to read into it both a proud reclaiming of space from someone who might feel the pressure of that space being denied to them, and a scathing criticism of a showbiz ecosystem that runs on a very specific assumption of who’s allowed to be an artist and who is not, you may not be entirely off the mark.
With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that the song finds its backbone in some truly strong lyrics. This is not new for a band whose lyrics have always been beautiful and haunting, often feeling more like poetry put to music, but there are some snippets in there that feel like grainy snapshots taken backstage at a gig, capturing the dust and the sweat and the grime so neatly that you can almost touch them. Certainly, they do not shy away from the uglier bits, but rather than lamenting them, they embrace them, relish them even: “Each time I cry it feel better than the last”, frontman Angus Rogers intones at one point, and you can almost hear a grin in his voice as he does. If this makes you uncomfortable, it’s almost certainly meant to. This is no black-and-white representation of the life of the artist: it’s a nuanced portrait of its contradiction, painted mostly in murky colour. “I’m a pretty showboy, I don’t want to be free”, the song concludes in the end, as a broad choral section devolves into a snarl. It could be condemnation, it could be liberation: it’s most likely a bit of both and something else altogether.
What the track certainly is, both musically and emotionally, is punk, arguably more than the band’s other, most recent offerings. If indeed it is the first peek at what might be an upcoming album, which has been hinted, but not confirmed, then perhaps we can expect a change of pace, if not a change of voice. The band’s voice, which has been strong and distinctive from the very beginning, indeed remains unchanged, with its clever use of brass, its textured, emotional vocals, and its shifting rhythms that are cleverly chained together to create an atmosphere rather than just string up a tune. The pace, however, has shifted, and with it, to an extent, so has the tone: both feel quicker, sharper, more ragged – more punk. Where earlier singles had the thick, unsettling melancholia of some blues-and-folk-adjacent Americana (think The Handsome Family, but also some of the later Tom Waits), this is more stripped down and more raw, the dominant emotions being anger and defiance, and the kind of wild, slightly deranged glee that’s found on the other end of them. The galloping, faster-paced sections, especially with the way the brass instruments are used here, feel both like a cheeky callback to the band’s beginnings (there’s a similar handling of rhythm in ‘Wild Bill’, for instance) and like they are directly related to Gogol Bordello and their gypsy-punk scions. The initial hook could have come out of a Fat White Family song circa ‘Songs For Our Mothers’, although it rapidly derails into something completely different. The song as a whole feels like Opus Kink distilled: all fat trimmed, all sharp edges exposed, perhaps the best representation of the electric intensity of their live shows thus far.
Whether Opus Kink’s sound is truly punk or not is a debate to be had, probably without a conclusive answer in a time where the word ‘punk’ has come to mean everything and nothing. What’s certain, however, is that this track is undoubtedly punk in spirit, in all possible meanings of the term. It’s an energy we very much need in an art scene that far too often feels sanitised and much too safe.
Chiara Strazzulla
Image: ‘I’m A Pretty Showboy’ Official Single Cover
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