As Goes Akron

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What the hell happened to the Black Keys? That’s an honest question I ask myself a lot when nobody’s around and I’m not evaluating my thoughts based on how publishable they are. Today I want to give that question an honest answer, so let me back up. Let me back up because it’s a question most people can answer in five seconds. And yet it bothers me. It shouldn’t bother me.

I’ve been writing about music since high school, when Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer were alive and staging comebacks. Since then I’ve written for a lot of recognizable music magazines and I’ve wasted a billion hours on music forums. So I’m aware when writing about certain acts is embarrassing or cringe; I know when certain topics can cost me gigs down the line. 

I’d never write about The Black Keys at a serious publication. Everybody who wants to read work by me specifically would sigh or roll their eyes or quietly understand my motivation was four hundred dollars. Writing criticism about a band like that is best left to real critics, who can write about a wide range of music with the disciplined precision of a doctor. I can’t. I’m too emotional. I say “oh my Lord, this rules” or “fuck this” too easily. Leave me in my comfortable bubble of obsessing about albums featuring Benmont Tench.

But the Black Keys were huge for me growing up. I have three brothers and a cousin who are all serious guitarists with cowboy complexes. They all like cigarettes and whiskey and Eastbound & Down. They all practiced Black Keys songs constantly and I was always in the room listening. They wouldn’t call themselves fans and I never did either but the Black Keys were a solid representative of their musical outlook. 

Mine too. I worship R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough. I revere hill country blues and I should just send Fat Possum a check for $100 every month on general principle. Dirtbag blues. Party blues. Punk rock blues. It excites me today as much as it did when I first heard it. And that’s the exact world the Black Keys come from. They’re foundationally a hill country tribute band, and now that all the old guys are long dead, they’re the only band with any commercial viability still advocating for that sound and history. I think that’s worthwhile and important. Even if the music winds up in car commercials. Maybe especially if it winds up in car commercials. I hope Junior Kimbrough’s family gets some cash out of it.

The Black Keys have now done several albums of straight-up blues covers. They are the only white blues cover albums that I would even consider listening to. They get the sound, groove and grit right, with just enough modernization to get non-hobbyist interest. All the trappings of authenticity. They did their homework. They get As regardless of whether you like them.

And they have some songs that, just as some dude, I consider bangers. Dead & Gone, Gotta Get Away, Lonely Boy, and Everlasting Light even though it’s just T. Rex. Knowing them primarily for their proximity to R.L. Burnside, it’s mind-blowing that they were once a huge band with songs in Super Bowl commercials and didn’t seriously change their sound to pull it off. 

And Dan Auerbach has done some phenomenal work as a producer. He produced Dr. John’s final serious album and it’s a monster. Yola’s debut is also unstoppable. His work with Nikki Lane is great too. He produces the people I would produce if I was in Nashville and had the knowhow and the means. If I’m at the El Rey and see an opener who’s going places, Dan Auerbach probably has their cell phone number.

Here’s where I try to grow up and trust and examine my intuition a little bit more. When I listen to them, I basically like every individual part of the song. They do what I would do with the material at hand. They’re the kind of band I wanted to be in. I hate blues-rock and that entire scene, Joe Bonamassa makes me want to pull a Leonard Cohen and become a monk, but playing R.L. Burnside songs for an audience of inexplicably young and normal fans was my teenage fantasy. But something about the Black Keys is just off. Every time I listen to them for more than two minutes, every time I think about them too much, something is wrong.

I started to notice with John Anderson’s last album, Years, produced by Auerbach. I know there are Anderson fans out there. I get it. He’s fine. Swingin’ is great. But I found that record viscerally repulsive. On an animal level. It was a somber late-life Johnny Cash talking to God type thing, sure. It’s all fine in theory. But that song Years is one of my most hated songs ever, at least in its studio presentation. Maybe the childish rhyme scheme, or the redneck rock guitar solo, or the drone-shot music video, I dunno. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s almost biological, kinda like how some poor bastards think cilantro tastes like soap, and it's not something I'd say as a music critic.

And that’s increasingly how I feel about every note of music the Black Keys have ever recorded. They’re whip smart and very good at their jobs, they collaborate with the exact right people, but there’s an X factor. Something is driving the specific feeling that I urgently need to take a shower. When I listen to their stuff, I feel bad, feel hungover, and it lingers. I love music for scumbags so that’s not it. I love doing bad things with bad people. I never had the courage to do crimes but they sound great. There’s something more specific with the Black Keys.

The bad feeling they give me is a lot like the feeling you get when you’re complicit in something morally wrong. But that’s not even it. R.L. Burnside killed a guy for maybe no reason and he’s great. My favorite live album ever is by Jerry Lee Lewis. The best Warren Zevon album is the one he made when he was on enough cocaine to kill Warren Zevon. I count all these men as musical heroes. So this isn’t me being churchy.

Today I think I cracked it. I’d been bothered about it for a long time, but today I might have cracked it. The problem isn’t that they make scumbag music. Of course not. I’ve paid hard earned money for albums just because they had pornographic cover art. It’s the sense that they’re conmen. That they’re lying to me, and can’t be trusted. That they’re cold and cynical, maybe even nihilistic. You can be a conman and have good taste, they’re not incompatible. (And never mind the sordid stories I’ve heard and you’ve maybe heard too about cocaine and ex-wives and smoky motel rooms. I wasn’t there, I’m not investigating anyone, that’s their business.)

Awhile back, they booked an arena tour and swiftly canceled it. Shortly after, they put out a statement to the effect of “I love the Clash and I am punk rock.” I didn’t believe it. We all know what happened. It didn’t sell. I believe somebody fucked them over but I also think they were arrogant enough to think the gambit would work. I suspect they had insane sales expectations for their last album and generally think they’re more legit than anybody else and more famous than all these, you know, fucking bullshit pop kiddies who need to leave music to the grown-ups.

Here's what did it for me. I heard they played a private show for a vape company. And now I've learned their next gig is at a festival that sounds spiritually repulsive at a minimum, just baseline. It's called “America Loves Crypto,” and it has all the Musk-adjacent foul-smelling baggage that entails. It was the final aha moment you’d think I didn’t need. There’s a line between being a scumbag and openly admitting you believe in nothing, and you know it when you see it. 

That’s the problem. That’s what was gnawing at me. They don’t believe in anything. That’s the ugliness, and what turns a good musician into a bad one. The bridge you cross that turns you into Mike Love and makes you way too aware of the meanest lawyers in town. That’s what curdled everything.

Don’t get me wrong, I was never going to recreationally listen to the Black Keys, but I could have had fond memories of them from when I was 16. Instead I’m just sickened that their music has taken so much space in my brain. I wish I could kick it out for good, and maybe writing this is what it takes.