When Iris DeMent sings, you hear goodness in her Arkansas twang and plaintive ache. It’s a voice you want to trust. But in her new album Workin’ on a World, that goodness is now deranged. The album’s title harkens to another backslider, Bruce Springsteen, whose former working-class empathy and folksy/Oakie affectations turned into elitist condescension.
DeMent’s case is a worse fall from grace. Her family roots in Christian devotion created a career-long struggle with folk-music worldliness. No one could deny her extraordinary singing, but secularists resisted its divine source, crediting DeMent’s agnosticism. “Her strongest concepts bear down on her parents and their faith, which she loves on their behalf and rejects on her own,” hailed Village Voice critic Robert Christgau.
On her own, DeMent’s gift always expressed spiritual yearning. Until now, when her sight is fixed on the chimera of social justice (against faith in heavenly justice).
Her new album’s title song begins, “I get up every morning / knowing I’m privileged.” This is not humility; she’s caught the white guilt that turned a segment of the population into preening, tortured, servile apologists, post Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd. Unlike the Christian gospel “I’m Working on a Building,” which describes a relationship with God (a song favored by artists from The Carter Family and Bill Monroe to B.B. King and Albertina Walker), DeMent readjusts her country heritage toward the radical socialism of Pete Seeger, whose “If I Had a Hammer” vowed to change America’s social order.
Seeger’s concept of labor renounced the religious idea of good works and Christlike discipleship; it was based in egotism and calls for revolution. DeMent’s last album, 2015’s The Trackless Woods, was a song cycle based on the poems of Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, a critic of Stalin, whereas Working on a World’s sentiments skew closer to Biden’s “Build Back Better” regime and The Daily Worker. DeMent falls to the temptation of earthly misery. The love trouble heard in the blues and bluegrass slowly emerged in her earlier songs, comparing romantic pain to existential crisis (as in the juxtaposition in “Out of the Fire” of “bed of desire” and “ashes of the pyre”). Now she avenges her hurt on political opponents, defining her agony in terms of feminist despair.
Her anti-gun screed “Going Down to Sing in Texas” thanks The Chicks without mentioning that singing group’s absurd name change — they deleted “Dixie” to erase their cultural background, as if admitting racist guilt. DeMent favorably compares Muslims with Evangelists (as if Islam doesn’t proselytize), even saluting “those brave women in ‘The Squad.’” What a stupid song, adding absurdity to DeMent’s deluded chagrin: “I know I’m just a pilgrim / only passing through” is full of vainglory. DeMent’s political narcissism outdoes Beyoncé’s self-absorption. At least Beyoncé’s surprisingly bodacious “Daddy Lessons,” from her 2016 Lemonade album, recalled the good sense of gun ownership and female self-protection. (Iris rejects patriarchy on her own “Walkin’ Daddy.”)
DeMent hits bottom on “Mahalia,” in which she reduces the legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to a feminist icon: “You were a woman, too.” (Did newly woke DeMent forget that liberals can no longer define “woman”?) She attempts to secularize Jackson, but while equating her to Bob Dylan puts her in the liberal secularist canon, it robs Jackson of her own terms: faith and power.
On the irreverent “Let Me Be Your Jesus,” DeMent isn’t even as appealing as Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” or Morrissey’s “I Have Forgiven Jesus.” Her fluttering “woahs” sound pathetic, whispering like Biden when he attempts to convince listeners of his stealth. DeMent’s attempts to expose Evangelists sinks to the same methods as a demagogue’s. (This album includes her misguided Martin Luther King desecration “How Long” that I tracked back in 2020.)
Disaffection is at the core of Workin’ on a World, and “Nothin’ for the Dead” is most telling: “There’s no separating the good stuff from the bad” evokes Springsteen’s unwillingness to balance America’s past with its potential. (Both Bruce and Iris have lost faith in “the true foundation” that Albertina Walker sang about.) DeMent’s hillbilly guilt emits some good, sorrowful moaning, though. Better than covering REM’s dulcet “Losing My Religion,” this grief sounds pained and real.
Finally, on “Waycross, Georgia,” purity and honesty comes through. Trust faces down distrust.
Along that road that leads toward home
Are the people who fеd your life
The peoplе who fed your life
Smile and thank each one of those people
Smile and thank each one of those people
And then say farewell, say farewell
At last, DeMent’s simplicity is as moving as ever, but her resignation — and that tremulous vocal shtick — tells us that another great artist has gotten lost.