John Early’s solo special is a beautifully dumb, exquisitely articulated cover of the millennial mood.
. The songs are original in those specials. They’re often written to evoke or play on familiar artists, but they are always doing heavy joke lifting within the lyrics and the musical concepts., a special all about empty ideological signaling and performative smarm, discards that entirely. The fact that it’s all covers is the crux of the joke.build towers of righteous, mournful grievance on top of pebble-size complaints. Early is a delighted, furious close reader.
Early’s stand-up is a good fit within the world of the grandiose concert documentary he’s created, especially its cycle from a pretense of self-awareness to embodying self-obsessed characters and back again. Still, he has a tendency, shared by his frequent collaborator, to eventually drive jokes off the cliff of meaning and down into pure clownery. The phone-location-services joke, for instance, eventually ends with Early dangling off the high-wire bit of his repetition of specific sounds.
Music is also a cheat. Or, if not a cheat in this case, a remnant level of emotional engagement that even Early’s spiraling, pervasive cynicism can’t quite wash away. If the cover band is good enough, even the most ironic, eye-rolling performance of “After the Gold Rush” still activates some of that original Neil Young earnestness. It mars’s too-cool affect a little bit, but it’s also a relief. It’s a brief rest inside harmony for a moment before Early gets back to skewering banalities.
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