“Watch me fly like a rainbow in the sky”
From “Siberian Butterfly” by Bob Mould
The last concert I saw before the world locked down was Bob Mould. It was at the South Orange Performing Arts Center (SOPAC) – packed into a small theater with my Jersey brethren. I was a couple of rows from the stage, so Bob was right in front of me as one man playing one electric guitar – an incendiary vision of noise, sweat, and spit – playing song after song with virtually no break until he finally relented for some water and a chat with the audience. It was a blast. The music was fantastic. This was no surprise as Bob Mould has been making stellar music for 40 years from his days in Hüsker Dü to his new album Blue Hearts. Check out the 24 CD box set Distortion: 1989-2019 that documents his 30-year post Hüsker Dü career if you missed anything along the way.
And yet what was most striking about the show was the visual and sonic vibe that rang through the theatre. Yes, he is a confident and accomplished performer. Yes, he has an enviable back catalog from which to draw material. But what came through was his struggle. He was very much alone up there. No band members to drown things out if he wasn’t on top of his game, to jam with if something went wrong or to banter with in case the audience was unresponsive.
And from where I was sitting, it was his aloneness in the struggle that resonated and paradoxically seemed to draw the crowd in. He was defiantly sharing what he had been through in his life. His aloneness was our aloneness. His rage against the dying of the light was our rage. His ambition to change the world was our ambition. And his fear that he may not succeed was our fear. And what was both frustrating and satisfying was that Mould’s performance was neither one of conclusion nor resolution. I did not get the sense that he has solved anything. Rather he was inviting us into his process – his ongoing struggle of who he is as a person and artist, which to me was validating and inspiring. It was a compelling performance – truly worthy of his legend.
So, when I spoke with him for The Hardcore Humanism Podcast, I wanted to understand his struggle. Many of us are struggling now and looking for answers. We are facing a worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, sociopolitical turmoil, and a world in which performing artists are severely limited in plying their trade and expressing their creativity. And Mould has been through something similar in his life. He lived through a turbulent time in the 1980s in which he faced discrimination for being gay, a deadly HIV/AIDS crisis and a mainstream culture that did not accept his underground art. And he survived and thrived only to find himself faced with a world that feels like it has gone backwards rather than forwards, not learning the lessons of the past. And in talking with Mould, what I came to realize is that his music and performance was in fact creating a world that was better than the one in which he was born into — a world in which we can struggle, suffer, and have people who are willing to watch, listen and be with us as we experience our life.
Mould’s struggle started early. As a young man growing up in the 70’s, he was aware of the fact that he was gay. And yet, while he was certain of his sexuality, he did not feel sure of how being gay would express itself in his life. “I grew up in a small farm town in northern New York State called Malone right on the Canadian border,” Mould told me. “And it was maybe a town of 5,000 people and, you know, a very homogenous town … Not many people of color, not many LGBTQ folk, of which I knew I was one at a pretty young age. I was able to identify my sexuality, but not my sexual identity.”
Exploring his sexual identity was limited not only because Mould was not exposed to LGBTQ representation, but also because he encountered people who stigmatized gay people. He explained how the Moral Majority movement that supported Ronald Reagan’s candidacy in 1980 reacted to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “I think about the Evangelicals and how much support they put behind this television actor named Ronald Reagan,” Mould recalled. “They got him in power … There were a lot of people very scared about HIV … partly natural … but also, being informed by this Moral Majority view that AIDS was God’s punishment for homosexuality. So, imagine a 22-year-old in that environment. Not a lot of fun.”
How does one manage in this type of environment? For many people, including Mould, the answer was to hide their sexual identity and not be openly gay. “You learn a set of coping skills, you learn how to pass as what we used to call it, you can pass as straight. You can be gay, but you can pass straight, you can play football, you can be butch,” he said. “That was life for me in the late 70s and early 80s.”
This approach may have spared him from immediate scrutiny and harm but it was the beginning of an insidious process by which Mould felt he had to question rather than explore and discover his identity. “Your government is telling you, well, you know, we took a poll, and half the people in America think that the gay people should be rounded up and quarantined, and a third of Americans think anybody with AIDS should be tattooed,” Mould explained. “It was very unsettling because I’m like, being told, I’m sort of subhuman … For me, what was happening was feeling like I was denying the exploration of my sexual identity … I was constantly just vigilant about how gay can I be … Who am I? Where do I fit in the community?”
This concept of community also gnawed at Mould. Because he was not open about his sexuality, he was not in as strong a position to advocate on behalf of the LGBTQ community. He cites people such as Boy George and K.D. Lang as examples of people who were strong advocates, and wonders if he chose correctly by not being more open and engaged in activism in the 80s. “I feel like, maybe I didn’t do enough, because I wasn’t until, out as an out gay man until 1994. I mean, most people suspected, but that was officially when I came out in the professional light,” Mould described. “There were things that I did, you know, and that Hüsker Dü did to create awareness and to give to the community … Then when I started to see what Act Up was doing in 1989, then it started shaking me a little harder, that maybe I wasn’t as vocal as I should have been. And because I wasn’t out … but so it was that battle. And I still have that battle to this day.”
Part of Mould’s battle has been not only how to understand himself personally, but also as a public figure. Mould has moved into a more overt political stance as evidenced by Blue Hearts and he is comfortable with his current activism. And yet he has learned from his own experience and is careful not to judge others who may not be so overtly taking on current sociopolitical tensions. “If you’re a public figure, or a person of note … it’s always that tough line to walk. And even now, in 2020 I’ve written this very, you know, this sort of pointed, political protest record,” he explained. “And I look around and I wonder why more of my peers are not doing the same. I mean, some of them are. And, you know, in that situation, I say to myself, who am I to call out my colleagues? Because they have families to support and maybe they can’t afford to alienate half of their fan base by taking a hard stance.”
As Mould has come out publicly and has more overtly integrated activism into his music, he feels that he no longer is disconnected from different parts of his life. “My lives or desires or motivations, work versus love, and I don’t need to compartmentalize them anymore, which is nice…” he said. “I feel more whole, as in a whole being. So, yeah, that’s progress.”
Photo credit: Blake Little
