An alt-pop underdog fronts a new batch of guitar-averse guitar legends.
SAMUEL HYLAND
A block or so away from Marathon Music Works, a factory-esque Metro-Nashville concert venue, sits Jo Johnston Street, a sparse alleyway that bookends a suspicious parking lot. It could be the site of a murder. Right now, at about 11:30 PM on a Friday night, it’s the site of my phone. I don’t know this. I’m sitting in the back of a Dodge Grand Caravan, rumbling towards my dorm building, telling an Uber driver about Mk.gee. “He’s one of the guitar gods of the day,” I say, fumbling in my pockets. “He played this one song a dozen times. I used to love it. I kind of hate it now.” This is a lie: I cherish “DNM,” maybe even more than I did when I first heard it. Two Star & the Dream Police, Mk.gee’s breakthrough album, sounds like the original motion picture soundtrack of a sci-fi tearjerker: a lovelorn boy, awkward and shaggy-haired, trapped on Mars with a choir of extraterrestrials who have guitar cables for vocal cords. Or something like that. In any case, the cry-in-the-closet vibe sort of combusts by the fifth time in a row he plays “DNM,” a Broadway-ready ballad about things that go unsaid. When this happened tonight, the frat-types in the front started bouncing, and everyone full-heartedly joined in. I wasn’t dressed—nor mentally prepared—to mosh, so each of my hands were tucked into a corduroy pants pocket, clutching a wallet, a phone, a pair of tangled earbuds, and a portable charger for dear life. Hours later, in the back of the Dodge Grand Caravan, these mosh-modification efforts are all I can think about. My phone might be lost. Key word might. But I wasn’t going all out, right? It definitely isn’t on the ballroom floor.
“I kind of hate guitar. You can’t deny that it sucks, because it just represents a thing.”
Objects are constantly being swallowed by larger objects. The critic Garielle Lutz once spoke of books as “acquisitive thing(s), absorbing, accepting, taking into (themselves) whatever was dropped into (them).” When she said this, she was talking about teeny ephemera, stuff like crumbs and hairs and bits of broken-off lip skin. But ballroom floors are hungry too, and on nights like this, they have quite the appetite for personal belongings. About midway through the opening set—a brawny DJ called SEES00000, who heard cheers every time he picked up his wine bottle—I felt a wet splotch trickle down the back of my pants. Come lights-on, I looked down to find a growing puddle of spilled beer, complete with a litany of smoking guns: a mangled plastic cup, a lime, a sheepish look on the first face I made eye contact with. Later on, between what I estimate to have been the sixth and seventh encores of “DNM,” a gaggle of collegiate-looking fans shone their phone flashlights on a pubescent arm, which happened to be hoisting someone’s keys. “KEYS,” the chorus of voices shouted, Mk.gee tuning his guitar. He peered down from onstage and offered a shy “You guys good?” The revelers, who were indeed good, replied: “DNM! DNM! DNM!” To my knowledge, the keys were never claimed.
Marathon Music Works is a sizable venue that looks like someone gutted a Home Depot and fitted it with a restaurant-slash-bar. It smells like hot dogs, frat-boy perspiration, perfume, candy-flavored vapes, stray breath, and a wide variety of beers. Which is to say, it packs a lot of people. I’ve learned to take “DOORS AT 6:30 SHOW AT 8” with a grain of salt—most times, it means standing alone in the front row, wasting precious battery on Twitter while friend groups gradually encroach on my personal space. I like going to things early. I’m also wary of overdoing the earliness. It isn’t school: no one’s taking attendance. What it is, is Mk.gee: pop music’s newest ax-wielding prophet, sought for his sorcery by Justin Bieber, Frank Ocean, Kendall Jenner, and a smattering of sold-out crowds like tonight’s. Or maybe he’d cringe at “ax-wielding prophet.” “I kind of hate guitar,” he told the New York Times earlier this month. “You can’t deny that it sucks, because it just represents a thing.” Guitar-wizard or plain-wizard, my decision to nap until 6:20 then Uber over for 6:45 was a bad one. Goodbye, pedalboard photos and Instagram-ready stage shots: much to my dismay, I staggered inside to find myself stuck somewhere in the middle-back, where all I could see were three headstocks towering over a sea of shaggy heads.
“Mike is a once-in-a-lifetime guitar player. But I think that if you listen to [Two Star] just for his amazing guitar playing, you completely missed the whole thing, which is that he might be the most fascinating producer on the planet right now.”
Going to a show alone means you get to make awkward eye contact with people who are talking to their friends. A few staring contests in, I started getting flashbacks to Guitar Hero Live, a 2015 video game that sought to rejuvenate the Guitar Hero franchise with real-life, interactive crowd recordings. To middle-school me, a Red Hot Chili Peppers fan who couldn’t play guitar, this was a godsend—the road to fame wasn’t paved with practice, anymore; it was paved with $70 and a bus ride to GameStop. It was disappointing, of course, to learn that I was no better at fictional guitar than I was at real guitar. But whenever I needed an ego boost, I’d switch to easy mode and watch the fans fawn over me, fluttering their eyes like my lazy button-mashing was so sexy. For decades, the Guitar Hero series—and its titular concept—invoked invincible heartthrobs whose lone interesting qualities were (1) their looks, and (2) their looks while playing their phallic instruments. When Mk.gee says that the guitar “just represents a thing,” I sense he recognizes that this cultural character has eroded. And he’s right. Born Michael Gordon, he’s an awkward figurehead for a litany of guitar-averse guitar heroes, less infatuated with strings than their place in larger, more interesting systems. “Mike is a once-in-a-lifetime guitar player,” Dijon, a frequent collaborator of his, told the Times. “But I think that if you listen to [Two Star] just for his amazing guitar playing, you completely missed the whole thing, which is that he might be the most fascinating producer on the planet right now.”
Heavenly as the songs on Two Star may be, Gordon’s guitars squelch from somewhere on Earth, exempted from neither gravity nor tactility. It’s a democratic counterpoint to Guitar Hero’s despotism, and one he seems to relish in: guitar as vagabond, scouring a soundscape the way a nomad might scour a landscape. “Escapist” is an easy catch-all term for things that sound like the future—airy, pensive, synth-driven without being synth-pop—but it feels vaguely wrong for a record like this, which understands objects in relation to other objects. Escapist music bends rules to make some objects stand out. Two Star doesn’t do this. And considering Gordon’s guitar-god reputation, it’s disarming that in its rigid pecking-order of things, guitars don’t solely exist at the top: they’re humming beneath the vocals, grunting along with the bass, flirting with the toplines. On a track like “You got it,” which runs lush riffage through a gauntlet of non-guitar effects, the strings play servant to something larger, a baroque collage that comes strikingly close to gospel. Without the album cover, which portrays an intimate moment between Gordon and a Jazzmaster, it’s hard to tell that the thing he’s holding is responsible for the sounds you’re hearing. Playing guitar, or being a “guitar hero,” as he’s been called, isn’t the point—the real genius is in constructing a wheel, and being savvy enough to reduce a tyrannical instrument to a spoke.
“Today, I don’t care to climb… I just wanna take my time.”
Though among the most revered, Gordon is far from the only new “guitar hero” to see things in a similar light. Texturally speaking, Two Star shares an aesthetic palette with Suntub (2023), a shimmery ambient-rock album by the Danish composer ML Buch. Both projects visually self-identify, somewhat, as six-string epics—show those vinyl sleeves to an out-of-touch record store owner, and watch him mindlessly toss them into the “rock” bin—but don’t foreground guitars so much as recontextualize them, the same way you might re-position a layer in PhotoShop. One of the most memorable tracks on Buch’s record is “Flames shards goo,” an inquisitive ode to jagged lines and temporary bodies. “Today, I don’t care to climb… I just wanna take my time,” she admits early on, sounding prostrate. Her fingerstyle phrasings, all echoey arpeggios, are cyclical and nomadic, tip-toeing through shards of glass. None of which, of course, is to say that the new class of guitar heroes is always heartbroken or subdued. Five months after Two Star & the Dream Police, the London avant-garde musician Klein released marked, a crunchy collection of menacing feedback squalls. Malicious as it may sound, it’s far more interested in reckoning with the world than dominating it. Listen to it on an express 6 Train at half-volume, and you’ll be shocked to learn how much sense it can make.
In 2017, the New Yorker published a tongue-in-cheek horror story about guitar-playing boyfriends. “Legend states that boys noodling on guitars cannot be destroyed,” the tale, written by Rekha Shankar, quips. “There is no stake, no silver bullet, no suggestion of a more fun activity that can deter them. For, once a boy is possessed by the desire to noodle, he transforms into a heinous creature—a Frontman who jams and, on the worst of nights, records it all on his iPhone.” In a previous era, this might have been fate for Mk.gee or MJ Lenderman, polite wunderkinds who own Jazzmasters and tinker with them to get their money’s worth. But it’s 2024, a comeback year for the shy neighborhood virtuoso, which means that they get to do it on-stage—still noodling, except now, all iPhone-recording duties are handled by a mob of cultured undergrads, flashlights on.
Mk.gee is a noodler. He doesn’t play to arrive; he plays to meander. And he’s far more interested in the thrill of moving than the finality of getting anywhere. It’s why at Marathon Music Works, where I definitely didn’t lose my phone, he kept wanting to play “DNM” again. Then another time. Then about ten other times. By the fourth “DNM”—right around where the mosh-pits commenced—I was beginning to feel old. Here I was, hands clenched in my pockets, surrounded by sweaty college friend-groups who were about to do damage to my body. (For what it’s worth, my body was quite unprepared: Before I Ubered over, I had eaten my only meal of the day, which was approximately five forkfuls of leftover Indian food.) But in that liminal space between encores number four and five, I saw some of the faces I’d made eye contact with before showtime. I imagined them with wrinkles, mustaches, thick frames, and long, gray beards. After this concert, we were all going to grow up. Tonight was the only night we’d be together. If only this moment could last forever is a tired, obsolete wish. It sounds a lot better when Mk.gee plays it.
🎸🎸🎸
“Making it as a rock-star means abandoning the dream of becoming an athlete. Michael Gordon, the lanky recipient of tonight’s loudest roar, was living both dreams at once.”
There are times when indie rock feels intermingled with the National Basketball Association. A little over a decade ago, the overachieving Miami Heat soundtracked their reign of terror with “Seven Nation Army,” an iconic battle cry by the White Stripes. This was before YouTube TV and FanDuel ads, which meant that player introductions were a grand, televised spectacle: Duh-waaaaayne WADE 💜, the PA voice would boom, and out would come Dwyane Wade, jogging courtward beneath a ball of literal fire. Ten years later, the suburban straight teenager’s two favorite pastimes are still colliding, except sort of in reverse. Which is to say, rock isn’t stoking budding basketball dynasties anymore; basketball is buoying budding rock-stars. A week before his new album came out, MJ Lenderman announced the release of an exclusive Manning Fireworks basketball, emblazoned with the record’s now-ubiquitous artwork. (Lenderman, who conveniently goes by “MJ,” also has a popular song about Michael Jordan’s “flu game,” which he contends was actually a “Hangover Game.”) And Michael Gordon, the 26-year-old alt-pop underdog, does quite an athletic, NBA-ready thing when he goes out on-stage.
Around 11 PM at Marathon Music Works, Gordon and his live band—Andrew Aged, who plays guitar, and Zack Sekoff, who handles samples and percussion—stopped for long enough to suggest that they were finished. The lights went out, and they made all the typical thank-you gestures: heart hands, index fingers pointed skyward, goodbye waves. There was a residual hum of sickly guitar feedback, but it didn’t seem to mean much, because it had more or less been the baseline sound of the past three or so hours. It could have been nothing. The audience was louder, anyway. Various individual hollers rose above the fray, some yelling for “Two Star,” others yelling (incorrectly) for “Michael Jordan.” Minutes passed before the shout-sludge solidified into a thunderous, unified, One more song. The house lights hadn’t come on yet, which sort of gave away that there was going to be an encore. But I’d never had to wait this long. It felt like being stranded in a body of freezing water, begging the ship you fell out of to hear you, to see you, to come back. Nothing makes you appreciate noise—or “DNM”—like silence. And, of course, Gordon and co. couldn’t stand the quiet, either. The stage lights turned back on, and Gordon skipped to his position with two pointer fingers raised, a little bit like Daniel Bryan. I remember laughing at how boyish it was. The arms-raised jog is a thing you practice in the hallway, when no one’s looking: a bookend to the imagined game-winning RBI, or 99-yard touchdown, or improbable NBA Finals victory. Making it as a rock-star means abandoning the dream of becoming an athlete. Michael Gordon, the lanky recipient of tonight’s loudest roar, was living both dreams at once.
When the Sun sets behind a mountain, a gigantic shadow protrudes from its peak and extends into infinity, bisecting the golden-hour sky. Mk.gee shows are known to utilize this science. The lights don’t come from the top; they come from behind, rendering each band member an outline from which long, linear shadows point never-ending fingers. The music is, very literally, touching you: a tough thing to divorce yourself from when the house lights come back on and the show ends, for real this time. Moments before curtains, Gordon’s “DNM”-spam had incited a crowd-surge, which ragdolled me from the middle of the floor to the banister. The walk to the exit was long. By the time I got outside, there were cars and smoking teenagers as far as I could see.
My Uber driver, a Dr. Phil lookalike with a high rating, gave me a call at about 11:20. He told me that traffic was backed up. I profusely apologized. I’m always profusely apologizing for things. “No worries,” he said, and told me to go to Jo Johnston Street, a sparse alleyway that bookends a suspicious parking lot. It could be the site of a murder. Right now, at about 11:30 PM on a Friday night, it’s the site of my phone. I don’t know this. I’m sitting in the back of a Dodge Grand Caravan, rumbling towards my dorm building, telling an Uber driver about Mk.gee. “He’s one of the guitar gods of the day,” I say, fumbling in my pockets. “He played this one song a dozen times. I used to love it. I kind of hate it now.” This is a lie: I cherish “DNM,” maybe even more than I did when I first heard it. Two Star & the Dream Police, Mk.gee’s breakthrough album, sounds like the original motion picture soundtrack of a sci-fi tearjerker: a lovelorn boy, awkward and shaggy-haired, trapped on Mars with a choir of extraterrestrials who have guitar cables for vocal cords. Or something like that. In any case, the cry-in-the-closet vibe sort of combusts by the fifth time in a row he plays “DNM,” a Broadway-ready ballad about things that go unsaid. When this happened tonight, the frat-types in the front started bouncing, and everyone full-heartedly joined in. I wasn’t dressed—nor mentally prepared—to mosh, so each of my hands were tucked into a corduroy pants pocket, clutching a wallet, a phone, a pair of tangled earbuds, and a portable charger for dear life. Hours later, in the back of the Dodge Grand Caravan, these mosh-modification efforts are all I can think about. My phone might be lost. Key word might. But I wasn’t going all out, right? It definitely isn’t on the ballroom floor.
“After this concert, we were all going to grow up. Tonight was the only night we’d be together.”
We get to my dorm building, and there are tears in my eyes. I can’t find my phone. I would have known if I dropped it. A phone is a blunt object. When it falls, it makes a loud noise. I’m trying my best to stay cool, but it’s hard to look zen when you’re on all fours, tearing up an innocent Uber driver’s floormats. We get out of the car, and he helps me search for the device in places where devices might be. Underneath the front passenger seat, between my seat and the door, in the trunk area. No phone. I borrow his phone to log into Google Maps, but it prompts a two-factor authentication check, which I need my phone for. He tells me he can drive me back to the pickup spot for $20, but I need my phone to Venmo him. Now is a great time to profusely apologize. He accepts this apology while rummaging for a card reader in his glove compartment. He extracts the reader and I give him my card. I trust that he only took $20, but whenever I do get my phone, I’m not going to check. I’ve made a few reckless purchases recently. I don’t want to look at my bank account. We’re off to Jo Johnston Street, rumbling through Metro Nashville in awkward silence.
Around midnight, the phone is sprawled on the pavement of Jo Johnston Street, corpse-like in the headlights of a Dodge Grand Caravan. I tell the driver that I’d like to hug him, which he laughs off. I get back to talking about Mk.gee. I’m about to say that he’s one of the guitar gods of the day. I stop myself and start profusely thanking him. After this Uber ride, we’re both going to grow up. Tonight is the only night we’ll be together.
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