“I don’t like you, you’re a fool.” This is the first thing that Juan Wauters talk-sings to me on his album N.A.P. North American Poetry—a jarring shift, considering he had been just beforehand serenading me into calm content for half a minute with some talented and graceful guitar fingerpicking. Despite my better rationale, I feel a certain smart upon the ego. “Excuse me?” I reply to Juan with psychic indignation. “Is that a nice way to talk to your audience?” But that is the point.
Of course, Wauters is not talking directly to me—at least this is what I tell myself to calm down. Just like most songs written in second person, the addressee is some unknown body that inhabits the songwriter’s world, not ours. I try to imagine who this fool is, who walks “too low” and soils the very air that Juan breathes—some dour, slouching man in a pale gray suit, perhaps. Or maybe it is an indefinite group of people, the personification of a general social malaise rife with apathy and/or cynicism. But there is something so intimate and forward about Wauters’ singing, as if he is insisting that I am not excluded from his sentiments. And then I am back to wondering if this song is about me after all—if I am this kind of person and have just never realized it. And then I am wondering what kind of person I am in the first place.
But again, that is the point.
The music on N.A.P. reminds me of the Zen koan—a small anecdote that is meant to edify or enlighten the reader, but often, paradoxically, ends with no clear message. A surprising number of koans also include a moment in which the Zen master engages in some mindless act of trivial violence, for instance, hitting his student on the head for no reason and then walking away—a physical parallel to Wauters’ opening line. What is the point of this crap, you (and the Zen student) may ask? The answer: a state of confusion that jumbles the mind to a point where the ultimate epiphany must occur on a level beyond the plane of the intellectual. Hmm, a realization that transcends the intellectual… now that I write that out, it sounds a bit like… the experience of listening to music.
After all, there is no doubt that Wauters’ music is engaging in a sort of metaphysical didacticism. Right after his initial insult comes the next line, “let me hip you to something.” And then the somethings come as the tracks continue. Questions of the mind and existence haunt Wauters’ lyrics—sometimes, like in “Lost in Soup,” he is teaching the lesson to you (“the world’s rollin’ pushin’ you,”), sometimes, he is also a student himself, as on “Water” or “Sanity or Not,” when he has doubts about his belonging in a certain “niche” or his mental well-being, among other uncertainties. On “Continue to Be You,” an angst-calming meditation on death and reincarnation, Wauters repeats an earlier mantra from his opening track to sum up this whole mess of living: “Get a headache yeah, take medicine yeah, get better yeah, to another headache, oh yeah.”
And this is the thing that is attractive about Wauters: he gives us some serious philosophy to ponder through a not-so-serious medium. His arrangements are reminiscent of 60s teen-candy (but good candy, not too sweet), and he frequently descends into moments of total irreverence, babbling nonsense with a flapping tongue or basking in arrhythmic orgiastic moments, as on the closing track “Ay Ay Ay.” The message that Wauters offers is so much cooler and calmer than it has been when delivered in the past, through some oversolemn crunchy beardman looking past your eyes promising that he will “open your mind.” Wauters’ tone is much more casual, and one that does not intimidate, but merely invites (that is, after getting your attention with a preliminary barb): “Hey, let me hip you to something.”
N.A.P. North American Poetry is out now via Captured Tracks—you can purchase it on iTunes.
