Piece of shit

on mark kozelek and "separating the art from the artist"

I’m walking through the snow in feels-like-zero degrees, wondering what’s so compelling about the male genius who also knows he’s a piece of shit who also knows he’s a genius.

There’s a bootleg performance of Mark Kozelek at the Great American Music Hall in 2004 that I’ve been listening to regularly for the last few months. Nearly every day this winter has felt like I am pulling arrows out of my own chest, which is related to this, but also beside the point. Throughout the performance, the accompaniment is sparse — a small, delicate string section and Kozelek’s evocative guitar. The version of “Admiral Fell Promises” is particularly moving and perfect for weeping loudly during your candlelit shower.

Though when you’re out and towel-dried, you think about those lyrics: “Come out from the burning fire, butterfly / Let me lock you in my room and keep you for a while,” and remember that, in many of the accounts of sexual abuse, women recall being literally locked into a room with Mark Kozelek.

The thing about famous genius and an absolute, verified, abusive pervert Mark Kozelek is that no one was really surprised. Almost a decade before the allegations surfaced, he was writing songs called “The Moderately Talented Yet Attractive Young Woman vs. the Exceptionally Talented Yet Not So Attractive Middle Aged Man” and telling music journalist Laura Snapes that “I’m the best person you never met and one day, if you ever meet me, you’ll probably want to have my baby” in response to a professional interview request before, naturally, calling her a bitch on stage. The idea that this same man was also a sex pest was not beyond the pale.

But that’s all I really knew, at first — that he was a misogynist, that he was an asshole. It’s not flattering on my part, but I kind of thought, well, which men of his musical generation aren’t?¹ I didn’t look into it.

I had started where most recent MK fans do, with Ghosts of the Great Highway, the Sun Kil Moon album from 2003. Even if you’ve never heard of this man or that band (or the other band), you’ve probably heard “Carry Me Ohio.” It’s one of the best choruses we have. I hear it, and my heart bursts into thousands of tiny lighters, swaying in the wind. It could fill stadiums. Though, of course, it never did.

So it’s not loaded stadiums or ballparks
And we’re not kids on swingsets on the blacktop
And I thought at fifteen that I’d have it down by sixteen
And twenty-four keeps breathing in my face

— “24,” Red House Painters

“24” is the first track on the first record that Mark Kozelek ever put out under the name Red House Painters. It reminds me of the opening line of The Lover by Marguerite Duras: “Very early in my life it was too late.” Right from his debut, it seems Kozelek has always felt this way — too late, already doomed, bitter, and overlooked. What I’m trying to say also is that he sounds like a girl.

Read that passage again and tell me it couldn’t have been written by Fiona Apple or Avril Lavigne, or even Taylor Swift.² Or Kurt Cobain, but keep in mind it is my opinion that Kurt Cobain is a girl.

Aside from comparison, Kozelek’s perspective connects with me, though of course it comes to a point. In “Cruiser,” when he sings “Morning pours the ocean deep / Into the hollow of my sleep / But the ocean can't be mine,” I feel it; how one person can be the ocean, how you can float in being with them but never wrap your fingers all the way around. And in the same song, when he sings “You're my erotic brown-eyed toy
/ You're my exotic black-haired toy,” I start rolling my eyes.

And yet, his honesty compels me to a point where it almost begins to enhance the work. Of course she slips through your fingers, you think she’s a black-haired toy! One of my favorite SKM songs is “Ben’s My Friend” off of Benji — perhaps his most critically acclaimed record to date — and it’s all about how he’s an old guy who dates younger women and complains about parking at concerts.

Does it do anything for me that I truly believe Mark Kozelek knows that he’s a colossal piece of shit and hates himself for it? Well, not really. It’s what we’re all supposed to hope for, though, that the people who do bad in this world suffer for it. Those people can, and often do, avoid jail time, have lots of money, a great career, fans, lovers, children, and sometimes people think this means they are not suffering. But at the center, those people have a big gaping hole.

Mostly, at the Great American Music Hall show from 2004, Kozelek plays deep cuts from across his sweeping discography. There’s a particularly moving version of “Dragonflies” that transitions into “Void” so beautifully that I almost stopped walking in the street the first time I heard it. But he also, eventually, plays “Glenn Tipton,” a relatively well-known SKM song from their most commercially viable album. The recording is completely painful.

He loops the first few instrumental bars for several minutes, gratuitously. Finally, he sings the opening line in a lazy drawl, after which he speaks into the microphone to say “You guys aren’t as much fun as the crowd last night, they would go nuts every time I started singing.” It’s all downhill from there, with Kozelek making up bogus joke lines for most of the song, one of them being “I slept with my first victim when she was fourteen.” He plays it as a Freudian slip.

The greatest punishment I can think of for Mark Kozelek is exactly what he’s gotten. A room full of people, enraptured by an intimate performance of perhaps his greatest contribution to this planet, at whom he is furious. The total inability to connect with those who are trying to connect with him. The idea that everyone else but you is an idiot, which is the idea that no one could possibly understand you, which is the idea that you are entirely alone. He’d be better off in a padded room, where at least he might become a monk. Out here, he’s stuck with himself. And with all of us.

All of us who also feel like depraved losers cutting ourselves up on the sharp edge of nostalgia. All of us who need people badly, and are bad to people sometimes. All of us girls who he’d probably ask to come on stage to hold a sheet of lyrics for him so that he could produce the real art.

The conversation about separating the art from the artist has always felt like something to talk about at a dinner party. It doesn’t seem like a real question. Where is the separation supposed to occur? Can I attach Mark Kozelek to the work he produced before the assaults and discard him when listening to the later records? Assuming that he was horrible to women before these documented incidents, should I do away with him and his work altogether? When I put him away, where does he go? I cannot forget the information, but I cannot forget the songs either. Is my attachment to them a function of my attachment to the idea that everyone must be redeemable in their way, even if their way never involves personal rehabilitation? Is it an attachment to the feeling of riding shotgun in the car with my dad, both tearing up at the same song, knowing there’s miles of conversations we’ve never had? Is it an attachment to the final scene in Sentimental Value, when Renate Reinsve makes eye contact with Stellan Skarsgård and says nothing? Do I envy the men who seem to find it sufficient to say “well, yeah, I’m a piece of shit!” and just keep it moving?

Maybe I hope that their justice might be found elsewhere, away from the place where I come to connect with them. Maybe I hope that I might never have to be a part of that, that I can continue to interact with them through the more beautiful parts of their nastier, more complicated whole. Maybe I hope that the people I love are capable of doing the same with me. Maybe this makes me a coward. Maybe this makes me a piece of shit.

1. Jeff Tweedy, that’s who.. my king!

2. Currently Googling if I will need to hire private security as a consequence for this take