On Repeat: Robber by The Weather Station Is A Remarkable Illustration Of What We Would Rather Not See
Tristan Young @talltristan
Over the summer, during the heights of the protests inspired by systemic racism and police brutality, there were a lot of hot takes. Some were bad, many were awful. One of the most prodigious offenders was Joe Rogan waxing hypothetical about what advocates for system-shock level reforms and institutional change would demand should their, apparently unworkable, demands that the killers who murdered George Floyd and Breonna Taylor be arrested and face justice. To paraphrase, he condescendingly mused that many of the millions of protesters were just bellwether attention seekers and band wagoners, with no real understanding of their own agenda, and would consign themselves to simply wagging their fingers at invisible and intangible tormentors in the aftermath of actually seeing their initial demands addressed. The mixture of obnoxious audacity and stunningly myopic ignorance on Rogan’s part is beyond galling. Yes- the subject of their derision and opprobrium is intangible. It is abstract and invisible. Of course that’s what it is. To engage in bad faith arm chair punditry in the tail in of 2020 and still not understand what this year was about is a pretty big abdication of whatever intellectual rigor anyone on either side of the ideological spectrum would lay claim to. The problem is not a person you can arrest or put in jail. It’s not something you can observe in a tangible sense. Its pernicious influence is agnostic to our discreet understanding of its functions and appendices. It exists beyond many of our capacity to perceive it.
This brings us to Robber by The Weather Station. Articulating such sentiments in a measured and cogent fashion to would be detractors has proven difficult and exhausting. More often than not our moralistic outrage and egocentric oration short circuits whatever limited capacity we have to argue the case coherently and convincingly; but it can be done. The notion that it is also possible to do this in an alluring poetic manner, one shaped through soothing and graceful articulation, never entered consideration. Tamara Lindeman, vocalist for the aforementioned folk rock outfit has done just that. With Robber, she soberly and thoroughly prosecutes the case against predatory economics, class manipulation, and systemic corruption. Casting the spectral incarnate of greed as something more colloquial, in this case a classical robber, she goes on to explain how little our understanding of the situation- indeed our explicitly wilful ignorance- factors into it’s machinations. “I never believed in the robber/ I never saw no body climb over my fence/ no black bag, no”, Lindeman breezily begins. Calm and authoritative piano keys, trying to keep the intrigue of critical thinking in check, temper the mischievous assortment of percussion. But the erratically buzzing brass lurking in the background is not so easily constrained. The melody acts like an activation, an epiphany, forcing- encouraging even- a reckoning that is long over due for many of us. As the synth burns brighter even the piano line gets more agitated and intransigent, no longer content to tow the line.
Lindeman continues with some of the most illustrative writing of the year; “You never believed in the robber/ you thought a robber must hate you to wanna take from”. She lays out the fundamentally brutal realties of a system we have all one way or another bought into. If we ignored the true designs of market capitalism at our own peril, then it becomes even more ominous to understand the extent to which it is designed to ignore us, to not acknowledge, us; to believe we aren’t really here. “The robber never believed in you/ he never saw you/ he only saw what he would be allowed to do”. What he would be allowed to do. He was allowed by laws, allowed by banks, allowed by white table clothe dinners- in other words, by all of us. Admitting this is no easier for Lindeman to do than it is for us to hear. Her pace quickens and destabilizes, giving in briefly to breathless abandon. The strings quiver and fume with riotous unease as the piano hits harder and more urgently. The manic horns assert themselves more and more confidently, as if to advocate the unfettered joy of systemic breakdown.
Lindeman exposes these hard truths with near punishing efficiency and inertia yet as each pill grows harder to swallow than the last her vocals become more nurturing and enveloping. Rather than cast you out into a cold and unforgiving frontier of painful awareness, she is a compassionate source of solidarity with her heartfelt delivery. Hiding her own throaty and simmering frustration behind her responsibility to care for others she tenderly guides you through what would otherwise be a frankly shitty experience. That balance makes Robber so agitating and therapeutic at the same time. It’s a balance we seem unable to achieve on a macro scale within our national ecosystems. Lindeman understands better than most the connection between the system working as envisioned and the consequences that it cares nothing for. “Nobody taught me nothing was mine/ if nothing was mine, taking was all there was/ looting at dawn, looting at dusk” We live in a system designed by the rich to take what little we have and give it to themselves. That is its function. Lindeman implores you to remember this anytime anyone has the nerve to complain about a Target getting looted in the wake of person being murdered by an institution that is ostensibly there to serve and protect them. Robber is the protest song we needed; an articulate and logical portrait of a system that functions best when it is unknowable. It is a system that feeds off our innate contradictions, which makes it all the more appropriate that Robber is beautiful and grotesque all at once.