Petey
Warsaw
Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Nov. 10, 2023
“I read the Bible sometimes/ Please don’t make fun of me!” sang Petey’s front man, who I assumed goes by Pete.
I knew nothing of this music before the opening of the show Friday night. Best I’ve been informed is that Petey is TikTok famous. A deeper, but relatively quick, dive reveals not only that Petey’s front man is indeed the ensemble’s eponymous Petey, but also that the band was active long before TikTok and that Peter Martin, AKA Petey of Petey, is a member of Young Jesus, a Midwest Emo band formed in Chicago circa 2009 and based out of LA since 2014.
This context is plenty to make sense of the music.
Genre creation works differently in the age of algorithms and social media: No longer is a band’s sound a display of a particular person’s influences. Instead, it is a representation of the influences on a culture at large, The algorithm’s initial function is that of excavator — it brings to the surface fragments of things (songs, genres, artists), all small enough to sift through quickly. For a musician making music on the internet, for the internet, the immediate outcome of this is a wide, technicolor pallet of influence — everything now post-everything-else, but connected to the past in a way that is nearly mycelial, fully integrated with the fabric of its surface aesthetic. Deep aesthetic, regionalism, socio-historical conditions, and reverent homage toward previous masters has been tossed out the window. The final outcome is entropic in nature. Everything that moved is now staid,;similarities between disparate approaches are amplified and all difference elided. It is the outlier that dies in this environment. Axolotls only live wild in a single body of water…
That was fun, but let’s talk Petey: The soul of this music in is the lyrics:
I need the freedom to feel good/
If happiness is a choice then I’d choose it every second if I could
I wanna be a real man, I wanna be a father/
I’m so tired of thinkin’ ’bout me, man, I think I need to worry about a daughter/
And I’ll talk to God through her eyes, please don’t make fun of me.
It’s the sort of thing I remember screaming through the windshield as I drove around late at night in my teens. Semi-literary, highly contradictory hollerings of feelings too big for inside voices:
Hey, motherfucker, wanna take it outside?/
I bet you never fucking ever seen a grown man cry!
Petey’s angsty yell is bloody-throated and popcorn lunged — humble, if not almost antisocial, in its softer moments, and with an aim toward ecstasy at its loudest.
At Petey’s best, they embody the spirit of mid-career Springsteen: Having a great time about serious things, always gunning for the crescendo.
However, the subject matter is fundamentally different: suburban, middle-class, and a nostalgia for the promises of American life pre-2008 financial collapse.
The comparison to the Boss is apt. This tour Petey is promoting his newest record, USA. Bruce was, of course, Born-In-The United States of America, lived through late-mid-century turmoil and saw the death of the labor left coincide with his own rise to epic fame. Petey however, wasn’t born in it. He’s from Detroit, sure, but the myth had died by ’91. Petey’s USA is just as entropic as the environment from which his music springs, its aggregate initial energy only apparent in the vastness of its current inertia.
After the show, my partner, who before the show was far more aware of Petey than I, made an interesting remark that I believe sums up the whole experience: “Weird to see everyone dancing to such sad music…”
The complexity here is, I believe, the appeal of artists like Petey. There’s no polemic in Petey’s lyrics or in their musical approach; there’s only a display. The contradictions are the content: I want the freedom to fuck off, and I want the meaningful responsibilities of parenthood. I want a retirement plan and a lawn and to never have a bedtime. I want to stomp my feet, be taken seriously, but also be cared for and allowed my precious irony.
This is the point.
This is where we’ve come to.
Might as well dance until it starts making sense. If it ever does.
