Judgment Day

Happy Birthday, Mr. President.

Cameron Winter just made the case for listening to him. Not in the artistic sense, for his deep, warbling baritone, and not for his burgeoning cultural iconicity, his sartorial status among Gen Z, but to listen to the goddamn words that are coming out of his goddamn mouth, goddamn it.

Who is he? A drill sergeant moving his troops toward the front lines? A disembodied voice booming over the loud speaker of a prison yard in which you are the only inmate? The writer of a ransom note or a bomb threat or the holder of hostages? Saint Peter denying entrance at the gates of heaven? His is the voice of justice, justly and unjustly arbitrated. There is no escaping the sear of his flatly delivered, “Good morning.”

My first introduction to protest music was a seventh grade English assignment in which we talked about the power of song to make change. “What’s Going On,” “Where is the Love?” “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” We probably listened to some Dylan, too, but I don’t remember. As homework , we were told to write a song or poem that spoke to contemporary issues, and “Warning”’s lyrics sound like a product of that assignment. I’m imagining Cameron Winter, hunched and smelly in the back of the class, standing up to read his work aloud, only after the sheepish and popular thirteen year olds who half-assed the assignment go first. A switch flips in him. The teacher and the rest of the class look up as he reads his scathing sermon detailing how justice will be delivered, why, and to whom. He is not the same after finishing the reading. He looks around and sees the mouths of his teacher and classmates hanging half-detached from their jaws, wide open. The kids don’t tease him anymore. They shut up when he raises his hand. Or maybe the respect only lasts for a couple of weeks, until the episode fades from adolescent memory. The teacher makes a phone call home after the class period ends, and he notices his parents stop whispering when he walks into the kitchen at home later that evening. Something is off, and the adults are trying to play it cool. They won’t bring it up, for fear of sounding crazy or applying undue pressure. They’ll just hope that life works itself out the way life tends to, and that this will therefore mean something someday, after all.

To compare his lyrics to a seventh grader’s after-school work product sounds like a backhanded compliment sans compliment. What I mean to incite is the feeling of awe experienced when you are bested or impressed by someone for whom you had different expectations. The closest Winter had previously gotten to the style of “Warning,” which, if I may dare, lands squarely in the tradition of protest music (unfortunately, Springsteen’s recent attempt with “Streets of Minneapolis” is too half-baked and sentimental to arouse anything close to protest on its own), has been “Trinidad” from Geese’s Getting Killed. I’m particularly thinking of their live performance on SNL in January, which music critic and Geese evangelist Steven Hyden compared to “the national anthem” on Twitter. If the shouted refrain “there’s a bomb in my car,” wasn’t explicit enough, then the painfully drawn out, frenetic, and lyrically-distorted version with which they introduced themselves to the U.S. late-night audience hammered home that they are watching.

Geese appear to be dedicated to the maxim that Nina Simone stated for herself and artists generally: to reflect their times. In addition to Help (2), whose proceeds support the rights of children in war torn regions, Winter (and Geese) have performed at Artists for Aid, an LA benefit concert for relief in Sudan and Palestine, and at TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens, (under the alias Chet Chomsky) to support families in Gaza. Geese’s drummer, Max Bassin, was recently muted by the BRIT Awards when he accepted the Best International Group award on their behalf saying, “Free Palestine, fuck ICE, RIP Manny, let’s go Geese!” These are not young people who seeking to maximize their success by skirting around the issue. This is to say that this is an artist who does not seem to simply admire Leonard Cohen, Nina Simone, and Bob Dylan from a purely aesthetic point of view, but sees the power of their artistry and personas as wound up with their politics. Winter gave us a protest song just as we began to wonder where it had gone in the songwriter’s toolkit.

Within Winter’s (limited) discography, there’s little to which this sonically compares. It’s backed entirely by strings, bowed and plucked, which act like a firm memory foam pillow cradling his voice. He arrives loud and clear and isn’t beating around the bush. “Good morning/ this is your warning.” The strings are more or less constant, but they grow in intensity as we move from the first to the second, the second to the third verses. It’s a true supportive backbone to his most direct lyrics to date. He tells the listener of their fate so plainly, a child could understand. “You’re gonna appear before a stranger/ I don’t know if you’ll be in any danger.” Here is the proverbial seventh grader: The elementary rhyme and connotations therewith (think “Stranger Danger!”) moves the listener into a scene where you’re on trial with a jury of one. I’m reminded of the style of justice promised by the great critical American cinema of the Vietnam War—Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—dramatically ironic, Hell is very hot. The world created by his addressee is, in fact, apocalyptic. People are abducted, “pulled into moving cars,” mercilessly humiliated, “dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears,” and “you” are the perpetrator. Nevertheless, “some get away with it.” But you won’t. If you don’t heed his warning, you will be one of the punished.

The spectre of eternal damnation intensifies during the second verse. For all of your accomplishments, Winter flatteringly addresses “you” as “winner.” You have done exactly what you had sought out to do. But then, the vocal part doubles, and who you believed to be one judge becomes two. Another character is about to enter the shot. “Is this the work of your life?” he asks, before spitting, “this is the work of a beginner.” It’s a line delivered with the spite of the evergreen playground taunt of “do it, you won’t.” Winter is no longer interested in the work his audience does removing the unsightly from view and now wants to reveal how exposed these dirty jobs are to the rest of us. “Look out there it’s the last prisoner,” he implores. You think he’s done until he punctuates the line with the word “swaying.” Swaying, not deliriously, or out of bodily pleasure, but hanging. He’s guides you to the moment of realization. You did this. You have hanged your last prisoner. There is nowhere left for you to turn in your path of carnage and destruction. Winter then reframes our gaze and challenges the tried to be a little less myopic. Winter’s God (of “God is real!” fame) has arrived, and Winter is unafraid of describing the image he keeps of Him. God is “a tall far-off thing with eyes/ … Looking at everybody all the time.” Strange, but I’ll take it. This figure haunts whatever isolated landscape in which this song takes place, ogling the scene like a silent and cruel adjudicator. Aren’t you in for a treat when this thing gets near? Winter trusts that the day will come when its presence makes you turn inward. He says that you will one day “find / It’s not been looking at me in the same strange way that it’s been looking at you.” I listen back to this and wonder whether Winter effectively absolves himself from divine justice, but I don’t think he can avoid the “tall far-off thing’s” eyes, either. He just balks at the ego necessary to act so wrongly when someone’s keeping a tally. And then, the best part, which solidifies this song-story’s place in the pantheon of music consisting of horrific, unsettling images: the three dissonant staccato notes straight out of Hitchcock’s Psycho, which alone render a verdict regarding the audience’s fate.

Winter finally wrests control from the divine in the third, and most visceral, verse. “Now there is work to be done on the sides of your body.” Chills. We’ve moved again, and now I’m picturing being tied up in a chair in a strange basement, a slew of weapons and torturous materials tacked methodically to a wall. The justice he describes is congruent and extremely literal, reminiscent of that of the ancient Greeks’ or the wrathful Old Testament God. I want to analyze this final verse, but it’s where Winter is most explicit about his own desires and rage. The strings swell, and the vocals layer and are delayed like in “Nina + Field Of Cops” from his debut album, Heavy Metal. It’s where his ability as a narrative songwriter comes through most forcefully on this song, so I’ll leave it to him.

And there are hot things that are unusually long and they burn very badly

There are things I hope one day to hook around the corners of your mouth

A brief interjection: We’re back to seventh grade. He’s not being specific enough. He sings about torturing like someone just insulted him and he’s trying to clap back without sounding stupid and getting doubly ridiculed. The instruments of torture are mere “things,” but he dodges sounding pathetically inarticulate with help from the increasingly dense string section. Somehow, saying “things” is freakier than saying “pliers” or “clamps.” His affectation transforms into that of an increasingly rapturous pastor preaching about the righteousness of Judgement Day.

There are plans that I have in this house, written down

And there are plenty of people I could very easily call who can come over here within an hour

And do the work that must be done on your heart

Another digression: he gets really concerned about the state of his perpetrator’s heart. So concerned, in fact, that this is where the song get's beautiful. It’s the vocal embodiment of not being angry, but disappointed. We all know that’s worse than pure anger.

There is so much work to be done on your heart

And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house

My friend this is your warning

Good morning

And then the alarm bells ring.

Apologies for the overused Euphoria meme in an otherwise serious post. I couldn’t help myself, sorry.

To whom does Winter speak? At first, I got scared, because I thought it was me. I think it may be about us. But my second reaction, influenced by my perennial place as a student of Bob Dylan, was that this could be his “Masters of War,” if he wants it to be. “Masters of War” is so specific (though timeless) that it loses a more general application. So then, it could be his “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” I’m not sure, and quite frankly, I don’t like dealing in Dylan comparisons. They serve no one (and especially not the writer). But the fear I felt when I first heard “Warning” was enough to make me never want to listen to the song again, but I’ve now listened many times. It’s the same feeling I felt after seeing The Zone of Interest or Killers of the Flower Moon: disgusted by inaction in the face of a clearly articulated problem that deserves a justifiably intense solution. This is a scary song. Hell is very hot. It’s good to be reminded by something other than the twenty-four hour news cycle that something is wrong, and it’s important to have someone express the bent-up ways you’ve been feeling about it. Heed the Warning in the middle of Help.