Watch the G8 concerts and you will see what were called in Rock School 'rock positions': a system of codes which would express the rock performance, codes which have long voided their content and now repeat themselves not even as farce (the spectacle of, say, Whitesnake in the early 80s) but as the worst kind of postmodern cynicism - every style is up for grabs; even U2 can play punk. Listen to Will Oldham, watch him speak or perform and at every stage there is a refusal of position. Not by chance will he write over and again of an unspecified 'it' - peculiar object, peculiar, impersonal agent which acts upon those of whom he sings. No consolation for him of the great cynicism. Reborn is a new a commitment - not for what was called rock and not even for punk (though punk is a different word to rock, is its refusal). Songs of part-objects and fragmentary things (always the word things in Will Oldham's songs). Songs of couples in rooms. And passing through the words, flowing with them, sometimes, but also against them, forcing the singer's voice to rise and break, there is a music which allows there to be sung something like the heart of being, the lining of the world.
These are beginning songs, but what begins are receptivities and new alliances, new relations. There are no stars above Will Oldham. Old verities have disappeared. Begin again; you can rely on nothing. The old forms have been hollowed out and the new a form of form must open. Not by chance does Will Oldham speak of the importance of Big Black and the Minutemen to him, and of the new collectivities which gathered around these groups. Punk repeated itself in them, as it did, later, in Slint and then in Will Oldham (his first album sees him accompanied by several members of Slint), which is only possible if the punk is repeated as a revolution, and not as a repetition of empty forms. When Will Oldham writes of God, this is not the God of monotheism. Not is a postmodern and cynical God, meaning everything and nothing. God now names a kind of relation: the one who asks for a wager. Will Oldham's music is then exemplified by Abraham's journey to the mountain in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. The knife is held over Isaac, which is to say, over himself as singer, over what he has taken himself to be (and what is taken as being). But God intervenes and a new Will Oldham is born.
Who is Will Oldham? Not the actor who hides himself under pseudonyms, but the one who knows that there are no names but false names, and each of us is the monster who cannot be named. A monster? Rather a horde of monsters, a whirling multitude. Who is Will Oldham? Interviewee who responds differently to the questions he is asked each time he is asked them again. Singer who begins anew with each album, working with new people, working differently each time. Who is he? One who watches over punk as it names the being of becoming.