David Berman Treated Ennui Seriously Enough to Make It Into a Joke

The Silver Jews frontman died Wednesday.

Edd Westmacott / Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

David Berman, who died Wednesday at the age of 52, was most famous as the frontman of the band Silver Jews. He wrote with a cheeky melancholia that brought him a certain kind of fame throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

Some of his lyrics were infused with an offbeat surrealism that was popular in literature of that time. Berman’s characters included men with “mustaches caked with airplane glue” and “Jesus in a runaway shelter” and “a vocal martyr in the vegan press.” He asked in one song, “Can you summon honey from a telephone?” The lines could fit easily into the “hysterical realism” that critic James Wood saw floating through the fiction from that era of Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace. He could be weird and funny about loneliness.

His new band Purple Mountains released a self-titled album last month—they were set to begin a tour this Saturday—that was full of this cockeyed sense of desolation. Whereas Pavement channeled the slacker vibes of the era, Berman’s projects took burnout culture to a haunting place, both strange and sad. (Berman attended the University of Virginia with Stephen Malkmus, Pavement’s singer.) Berman treated ennui seriously. Which is to say that he made it into a joke. “In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” he sang, somehow conveying the line with both a wink and an air of genuine doom. He has a song titled, “Honk If You’re Lonely Tonight.” On the new album Purple Mountains, the track “Margaritas at the Mall” shifts from the death of God to an image of getting blasted on, yes, margaritas in the same offhand manner that we might wander from a Cinnabon to a JCPenney.

How long can a world go on under such a subtle God?

How long can a world go on with no word from God?

See the plod of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God

Trodding the sod of the visible with no new word from God

 

We’re just drinking margaritas at the mall

This happy hour’s got us by the balls

Magenta, orange, acid green Peacock blue and mercury

Drinking margaritas at the mall

In later years, Berman appeared in photos with a paunch and tinted glasses, his hair receding on top and flowing down to his shoulders in wispy brown bands. He seemed to look for contradictions in modern life. Perhaps that’s because, as we’ve written before, he had a “grave secret”: his father was the lobbyist Rick Berman, a self-proclaimed “Dr. Evil” whom the younger Berman hated. (“A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch,” is how Berman described his dad, whose work consisted of trying to “ensure the minimum wage did not move a penny from 1997-2007!”) In a recent interview with the Ringer, Berman rhapsodized about a Johnny Paycheck song as “silly and moving at the same time.” That was his own music, too—a laugh while looking into the abyss.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate