celebrity gossip, academic style

Is Bon Iver a celebrity?

Well, let’s do the checklist.

Is he a popular figure, known across the nation and/or world?

Well, yes. He wasn’t a year ago, or maybe even six months ago, but the string of performances on late night television qualify him for public figurehood. He recorded albums with Kanye and got his name ON THE COVER sandwiches between Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj.

Is he known for doing something — acting, singing, doing crazy shit, being a celebrity — extremely well?

Obviously. Bon Iver is the best high voice deep woods singer in the universe.

Do we know things about his “extra-textual” (personal) life?

Oh, like the fact that he got mono and broke up with his girlfriend and his band and went to go live in his Dad’s cabin in Wisconsin and wrote all of For Emma, Forever Ago and watched a lot of Northern Exposure and that’s how he first heard “Bon Hiver” (which they say to each other as a greeting in that gem from the mid ’90s) and accidentally transcribed it as “Bon Iver”? Like that?

Is he the object of fandom?

You mean the way that I’ve been watching him sing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” on continuously loop and fantasizing about the stews I’d make for him in our Wisconsin cabin is called fandom?

WELL OKAY THEN. Bon Iver, celebrity. That means we can gossip about him.

What fascinates me, truly, apart from the fact that I really do conjure up recipes to make for us using only a cast-iron skillet, a wood stove, and my cunning, is how he embodies the appeal of the indie rocker — an appeal that he’s taken somewhat mainstream, reaching its apotheosis in the weeks leading up to/following the release of his second album with appearances on Colbert, Fallon, O’Brien and a highly coveted endorsement (9.5) from the infamously stingy Pitchfork.

The music seduced me two years ago. I seriously went through a phase where I needed to hear it the first thing when I got up and the last thing before I went to bed. There’s something intensely evocative and melancholy and tremendous about the album as a whole, particularly the progression from Song 1 (Skinny Love) through Song 4 (The Wolves Part 1 & 2).

I was first compelled to listen to Bon Iver by Sasha Frere-Jones, the contemporary music critic for The New Yorker, who wrote what can only be called a rave back in January 2009. He goes through the motions of Bon Iver’s creation story, explaining how

Vernon’s story is one of escape and renewal, a road movie that doesn’t spend very long on the road. Three years ago, he was living in Raleigh, North Carolina, playing with friends from Eau Claire in a band called DeYarmond Edison, and dating a woman who is not called Emma. (Emma is a proxy name for a woman he dated years earlier in Eau Claire.) DeYarmond Edison made slow, stately music that was rooted in American acoustic sound, and was vaguely related to old blues and to recent American indie rock. [Editor's note: "Justin Vernon" is Bon Iver's real-person name. I just call him Bon]

And elaborating on how he ended up in a cabin in the middle of the woods in Wisconsin:

Four months later, Vernon experienced a hat trick of bad times: DeYarmond Edison broke up, Vernon split with his girlfriend, and he contracted mononucleosis, which affected his liver. He subsequently spent a lot of time indoors, watching the TV series “Northern Exposure” on DVD. One episode featured the cast greeting a new snowfall in Alaska with the phrase “Bon hiver,” French for “Good winter.” Vernon liked the snow, which reminded him of home, and the phrase, which he first transcribed as “boniverre.” (He later removed the “h” from hiver because the French word reminded him of “liver.”)

And then he talks about the music:

The opening lyrics of “Flume” are both a declaration and a vague confession: “I am my mother’s only one, it’s enough. I wear my garment so it shows—now you know.” It is easy to believe that his lyrics are “sounds that eventually turned into words,” as Vernon once told an interviewer. In “Flume,” the language works best as sound—I listened to the album a dozen times before I looked up the words.

Yes, yes and yes. But I think what really got me was Frere-Jones’ description of seeing Bon Iver, in concert in Town Hall, as he

“….invited the crowd—as he does at every show—to sing along to the song that I find it hardest to get through unscathed, “The Wolves (Act I and II).” The audience was asked to sing five words—“what might have been lost”—which signal the song’s shift from a series of chords that ring without any clear time signature to a steady 3/4 stomp that uses those five words as a main motif. The recorded version doesn’t approach the ruckus that Bon Iver made that evening; as we all sang along, the band pounded harder and harder, blending in little eddies of feedback and clatter. Those words are what get me—joined with melody, they seem like a summary of the entire album, especially with that highly conditional “might.” Trying to keep track of everything lost? Or celebrating what wasn’t? When the band was done, and the crowd had filed out, I was still in my seat.”

I mean, okay, audience sing-along, kinda cheesy, BUT WAIT:

You guys, this was filmed in FRANCE. Even the French are willing to participate! The French are the opposite of cheesy! (Gerald Depardieu accepted). Or, oh my god, look at them singing “For Emma” a cappella in this hallway, I seriously can’t love him and his hoodie any more. LOOK AT ME, JUST PLAYING GUITAR ON THESE STEPS WITH THIS GIANT BEARD, I AM THE CUTEST.

Which is all to say that Sasha Frere-Jones, I too would still be in my seat, conjuring up ways to get backstage. Dear Bon Iver, I will be your Emma, and I will not be forever ago, and I will promise not to break your heart into a billion little indie pieces, just to mend your holy sweaters and make you stew. You suffer from “Skinny Love”? I’ll fatten it up. I make great cookies.

Several months after For Emma, Forever Ago, Vernon released a four-track EP of leftovers. These are all fairly awesome in their enduring Bon Iver way, but the last song on the EP — “In the Woods” — is a marvel to behold. You know how a lot of indie music sounds the same? And you’re like SHIT, is this Death Cab or The Decemberists or My Morning Jacket, I don’t even KNOW ANYMORE? Well this song sounds like nothing else ever, save maybe the soundtrack from some obscure Japanese sci-fi film. Here you go. Enjoy the sweet (and super literal) woods imagery of the fan video. But also enjoy how you after listening it you feel like you might have been hypnotized.

Apparently Kanye heard this track and, being Kanye, decided OH HEY INDIE DUDE, why don’t you fly to Hawaii and record on my new album? Me and Rick Ross and Nicki Minaj will be there smoking weed in the booth, come hang out.

One thing led to another, and suddenly there Bon Iver was, all white and pasty up on the stage with Kanye, John Legend, and the rest of the crew at the Bowery Ballroom, doing his auto-tune howly-thing, and one of my favorite songs from the Kanye album, “Lost in the World,” uses the chorus from “Up in the Woods” as its hook.

The Bon Iver album leaked last month, and he’s been appearing all over the place in the lead up to its release (this past Tuesday). He covered Bonnie Raitt, Colbert told him that the album made him cry a lot (and that his wife did hot yoga to it), Vanity Fair introduced him to a new demographic, and the New York Times ran a four-page profile of him in the Sunday magazine under the title “KANYE’S BOY IN EAU CLAIRE.” And, duh, the new album is great, in part because it’s not “For Girl Number 2, Less Forever Ago.” It does something different, and that something includes a concluding song sounds like he’s having ’80s soft rock’s keyboard love child. (By the way, he does an amazing cover of “I Don’t Want to Use Your Love Tonight,” by The Outfield, also known as the best arena anthem of 1987).

Photo via Vanityfair.com

But what’s the deal? Why is this guy everyone’s Backwoods Boyfriend? Why do I have to share? I mean, the guy is an INDIE CHICK MAGNET.

And I have a very straight forward theory as to why. It has two parts.

The first part involves the cabin.

As evidenced by my active fantasies articulated above, a guy alone in a cabin, wearing a lot of flannel, hanging out with his feelings and the wood stove — this is somehow really, really, really amazingly sexy. Sure, there’s the rescue fantasy — Dear Bon Iver, invite me to your cabin, we can share wool socks and I’ll make you less of a sadsack with my charms and melodious laughter — but it’s also about sensitivity. A guy who spends time alone — and produces something soulful and touching from that time alone — not only does it mean that the guy has veritable emotions (and is willing to warble about them), but that he’s devoted something other than his video games and Fantasy team. (I have nothing against either of those things, so long as they are complimented by some serious feelings-making and/or flannel). I am also from Idaho by means of Minnesota, which means that any guy with a cabin is a guy I would like on the top of my boyfriend list. Don’t lie: even if you’re from Texas and don’t know what a cabin or a “forest” is, you still like the idea. Like a lot.

The second part involves Bonnie Raitt.

Yes. Bonnie Raitt. If your mom owned a copy of any Bonnie Raitt album or CD and you listened to it at any point between ages 5 and 25, then you understand why this is important. I haven’t thought about this much until Bon Iver started covering Raitt on national television and telling the Times that she’s one of his major influences (and that he’d love nothing more than to produce an album for her). But his affection for Bonnie Raitt betrays the same unspeakable attractiveness as the disclosure that he minored in Women’s Studies in college. I mean, this guy LOVES WOMEN. Not loves women the way that say, Kanye loves women. Like the way that a guy who actually thinks of women as people loves women.

I mean, when he sings this medley of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and “Nick of Time,” I really think something inside me shatters. I basically cry every time. (Click that link; listen to it now). I don’t know if this entirely makes sense — if other people, male or female, have the same reaction to Bonnie Raitt and what her music, especially from the late ’80s and early ’90s, seems to stand for in the heart. It evades language, to some extent, but it has something to do with hearing a grown woman talk about love and sadness and desire, and doing so fearlessly. For Bon Iver to sing Bonnie Raitt — and to sing those songs in particular — is tantamount to unlocking my heart, however cheeseball that sounds. Only a real man can say he loves Bonnie Raitt; only a real man can major in women’s studies; only a real man can sing with a super high voice about broken hearts.

Only a real backwoods Bonnie Raitt-singing boyfriend can make thinning blonde hair and scraggly beard so. damn. hot.

So there we go. Am I right or am I right?