No Glory in the West: Orville Peck and the Album of 2020
It’s only a ten-minute drive to physical therapy, but with the windows down and stereo turned up, after eight weeks on crutches, it doesn’t take much to feel like a rider. May isn’t exactly summertime in Minnesota, but the sunshine takes the bite out of a cold wind that carries my voice away as I sing along to the cinematic single off of Show Pony. My hair is whipping in my eyes, and the wheels grip the road with enough grit that I can feel each bump in its trotting rhythm. I haven’t been alone and free like this in months, able to imagine West Circle Drive could extend beyond city limits, into a different time and place entirely. God, how much I’d love that, to be nowhere near now.
It is easy to say in 2020 that the United States seems on the brink. This is not new — the threats of capitalism and white supremacy are embedded in U.S. history, covered thinly by the myths of freedom and equity we’ve been telling ourselves for centuries. So now, the pandemic, continued police killings of Black people, and the current administration’s gratuitous displays of cruelty have stripped the lipstick from the pig.
Enter Orville Peck, the masked singer whose two projects, Pony and Show Pony are steeped in one of Americana’s most iconic aesthetics; the cowboy. Few people know the true identity and likeness of the fringed-mask-wearing crooner, who reframes the common tropes of country music in undeniably queer and anti-capitalist terms. Little is known about his personal life, but Orville Peck came onto the musical stage with his debut, Pony in 2019. Based in Canada, he says that the secrecy allows his character to exist more honestly within his music. The distance he holds from the United States seems to allow a mirrored honesty with the complex tropes he deals in.
The American cowboy, directly descended from Mexican vaqueros, emerged at another fraying point of U.S. history — the pre-Civil War years — and gained its status as a cultural icon during the industrialization of the late 1800s. In the decades since, the image of the cowboy has been romanticized as it has been whitewashed, excluding Black cowboys and skirting the very real dangers and pitfalls of the rugged life. Equally overlooked is the part the cowboy played in enforcing “manifest destiny,” fighting tribal members who sought to protect their lands. The icon that serves is flat, cropped to fit in a frame.
The cowboy as we know it can best be summed up as a rider: a lone and fierce figure with his saddle, hat, and spurs. To this day, ranchers in the pacific Northwest pride themselves on their independence and skill in handling cattle from horseback. These ranchers, and the people who live immersed in the country sensibility (truckers, farmers, small town dwellers) exist in opposition to the modern conventions of urbanized, capitalist society. It is no coincidence that these “quintessential” image of the American West are often dismissed and denigrated in classist assaults on everything from trailer parks to bolo ties. The cowboy continues to push against the accepted and known America towards some idealized there, beyond the lines and laws that at once keep us comfortable and confined.
As the country western aesthetic is relegated to that of campy retro, the association with camp is appropriate for Orville Peck. The lush queerness of Show Pony, from the music video for “Summertime,” with its flowery visuals overcoming the singer, to the gender-fucked cover of “Fancy,” drip with aestheticized sentiment. In her piece Notes on Camp, Susan Sontag writes about Camp as “a love of artifice” and “attractions that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason.” This refusal of governance and stylized performance of self places the cowboy squarely within the bounds of Camp. Dolly Parton solidified this placement when she described her sense of style:
“I make jokes about it, but it’s the truth that I kind of patterned my look after the town tramp. I didn’t know what she was, just this woman who was blond and piled her hair up, wore high heels and tight skirts, and, boy, she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Momma used to say, “Aw, she’s just trash,” and I thought, That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.”
Orville Peck has talked about his allegiance to Dolly, and lives out the Camp of country music in its queerest iteration.
Each song hits with a devastating specificity during the COVID pandemic. “Drive Me Crazy” tugs at the heartstrings of anyone currently separated from beloveds by social distancing requirements, reckoning with the memories and moments that cannot be recovered. Each verse drips with a soulful pessimism, most evident in “Kids.” Our narrator is continually shocked to find “neither one of us has died.” And it is this tiny sliver of tenderness that opens the door to revolt, or as Peck puts it “getting low on luck it’s time to fight.” This energy powers us through the final two songs, “Legends Never Die” and “Fancy.” The project wraps up with self-mythologies as a form of resistance to societal shaming. The West was always billed as a place of self-determination, and with the campy co-optation of the cowboy aesthetic, we are given new routes to self-determination in a culture largely written to exclude us.
The centerpiece of this femme anti-capitalist drag sensibility is the second track, “No Glory in the West.” While blogs are calling New York City “dead,” the vicious consumption of capitalism is on full display in COVID-themed ads for restaurants that refuse to give their servers time off for illness or even testing. The echoes of American imperialism, or Manifest Destiny, are ongoing though white (rich) flight to vacation towns at the height of the pandemic, and of course, the declaration of an entire city’s death because the bars are closed and people are rising against inequity in the streets. Let us remember the cowboy was often at odds with the law.
In this song, the wild west façade falls like a ghost town in heavy wind. The lyrics speak to exhaustion — “nowhere left to go going’s all we know,” “and there’s still no rest,” “Tired of begging them just to compete.” The visuals of the music video mirror this, as a black-clad Peck rides and walks through a bitter winter, seeming to break at moments while bathing in ice or wildly gesturing in front of a fire. He is heading home as the song nears its end. We are warned “don’t place your bets on a word that they say,” as he enters the house, to find it empty, like so many homes are as evictions resume across the country.
The American cowboy is roughed-up, world-weary and fierce. Orville Peck marries that history with femme extravagance, with gentleness. And gentleness is the opposite of capitalism. Listening to this album now, every song speaks to the collective need for escape and tenderness like a salve.
I’m driving home now, wishing incoherently for the city to survive, for the system to burn, for the light to stay green and leave this wind in my ear for a moment longer. Last week the planet Mars came closer to the Earth than it will for decades. In suburban Rochester, looking up, I could imagine the next time the planet of war will be visible. I pictured the sky brushing its black leather mask to the side and opening its throat, to sing.