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December 2003

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The Weaker-thans Grow Strong

By Jeff Shaw
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December 2003
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While a member of the influential political punk group Propagandhi, John K. Samson played bass on progressive thrash tunes about veganism, U.S. militarism, and homophobia. Just because his new band, the Weakerthans, turns down the decibels doesn’t mean Samson has turned down his social conscience. 

The band’s music still tackles issues of consequence. “We come from the punk rock community and that essential ethic will always be with us,” Samson says. But the four-piece group from Winnipeg, Manitoba draws as much from contemporary poets as they do from radical political theoristst. This combination of influences shows in the clear-eyed portrayals of life’s neglected corners that have drawn the Weakerthans’ a dedicated and growing fan base. 

“I’m interested by the margins, in all senses of that word,” says Samson, whose lyrically literate and musically textured songs offer a distinct voice. “Part of our mandate is to talk about people who do not get talked about in mainstream culture.” 

They’ve been doing that since 1998’s Fallow, where Samson distinguished his new trio from Propagandhi, with quiet, idiosyncratic tunes about forgotten lives— from minimalist spoken word meditations on modern life to bleak countrified narratives about mechanic school dropouts. The Weakerthans’ just-released third CD, Reconstruction Site, is their most complete and mature to date. It tackles themes of community, redemption, and how to be an active participant in the world without offering easy or pat answers. Propagandhi songs were and are about certainty, Weakerthans songs are about uncertainty. “To me, that’s an important political trait— to be uncertain,” says Samson. 

The band’s politics have always been explicit on some tracks, such as “My Favorite Chords” from Fallow (where Samson sings “They’re tearing up streets again/They’re building a new hotel/The mayor’s out killing kids/to keep taxes down”). On others, universal human themes are given an activist bent. “Pamphleteer,” still one of the strongest Weakerthans songs, chronicles the internal life of a socialist leaflet distributor. 

It’s not just the words that draw in listeners, but also the Weaker- thans’ eclectic sound, which ranges from power-pop to gentle folk, stopping at all stations in between. For their follow-up, Left and Leaving, the band added guitarist Stephen Carroll to fill out the sound while continuing to talk about human struggle through the lens of fictional lives. All three of the group’s full-length discs share that common element: they are filled with compelling portraits of characters no one ever thinks about. 

It’s that kind of politics, a politics of compassion for the ignored, that the band offers. This is true whether Samson is writing songs about socialism or spirituality, as he does on Reconstruction Site. 

“You kind of slide toward that [spiritual] vernacular when you’re talking about redemption and reconstruction. I’m a secular person, but I think the religious impulse is built into people,” says Samson. “For the last record, I used the language of Marxism: on this one, I used the language of religion. They’re two different ways of getting at similar ideas.” 

Concern over the state of the world aside, Samson isn’t afraid to write quirky songs that somehow turn touching. One track on Reconstruction Site is sung from a cat’s point of view; another, “Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call,” delves into the mysterious world of the omnipresent men’s club. These songs transcend goofy premises to send messages about common human (and feline) experience. 

“I was trying to get inside the voices of people I, on the surface, have nothing in common with,” he says. “The Elks are kind of like the punk rock community, in that you kind of walk in and feel like you belong. There’s a great allure and comfort and beauty in that, and there’s also a great danger—that you have an isolated, fraternal thing.” 

Then there is the catchiest effort on the new disc, “Our Retired Explorer (Dines With Michel Foucault in Paris, 1961).” An imagined encounter between an emblem of modernism and the famous French philosopher, Samson’s wordplay (“Thank you for the flowers and the book by Derrida/But I must be getting back to dear Antarctica”) interacts with bouncy guitar hooks to create what may be a unique commodity—a song about post- structuralism that gets stuck in your head. 

Despite his defense of uncertainty, Samson’s politics and music are uncompromisingly and classically progressive. If pressed, he’ll tell you that this makes him more like the retired explorer than Foucault.

“I’m a bit of a modernist—I think the Enlightenment was a great thing,” Samson says. “I have a totalizing worldview, as Foucault would say, and I’m pretty happy with that.” 

Like the group’s previous two releases, Reconstruction Site challenges Weakerthans fans to grow with the band. It also shows how someone goes from playing chord-crunching, lyric-screaming punk music to writing increasingly complex and subtle songs—without compromising the convictions that made you want to scream in the first place. 

Jeff Shaw is a freelance writer. His work has also appeared in In These Times, the Nation and the Progressive. 
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