Written by All respect to LaTour, but people are not still having sex. Recent surveys suggest that Americans are getting it on with less and less frequency, married couples in particular. According to a Talker Research poll, 1 in 4 adults reported having sex barely once a month, and most said it lasted not even 20 minutes. No generation is practicing abstinence more devotedly than Gen Z, half of whom have never had even one sexual partner. Most of them, it seems, would rather just get a good night’s sleep. For the artist formerly known as Sturgill Simpson, this downward trend is inextricably linked to toxic politics, and he’s gone and made a whole album about fucking as a means to turn the tide and change the world.
Combining country-rock with funk, hard disco, and Golden Age of Porn soundtracks, Mutiny After Midnight marches onto the streets and into the sheets. “I wanna make America fuck again,” the artist currently known as Johnny Blue Skies sings on the sinewy opening track, which is actually called “Make America Fuk Again.” “I wanna start a revolution and watch it begin.” At least on this record, sex is an ideal vehicle for change, a salve for a violently divided America where everyone is on edge. He quotes George Floyd on “Excited Delirium” and calls out ICE for their strongarm tactics and aggressive anonymity: “How the hell you gonna protect the peace, running around looking like you’re going to war?” By album’s end he’s excoriating the Sex Pest in Chief in a wordy soapbox anthem that helps the cause not one bit by rhyming “bad cartoon” with “grabbing women by the poon.” Musically and lyrically, Mutiny plays like he’s expanded 2016’s “Call to Arms” to album length.
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This central idea—that our salvation is rooted in the physical as well as the spiritual—is not new to Mr. Blue Skies. One of his most popular songs is about using drugs and love (brotherly, not romantic) to kick down the doors of perception; “Turtles All the Way Down,” while certainly not carnal in nature, was definitely alert to the ways in which metaphysical quests are both guided and constrained by the meatsacks we drive through this reality. Whether he’s singing about the hardships of touring, the aches in his aging joints, or the pain of stepping on your kid’s Legos, he’s always a body in search of stimuli that might ease or expand the soul. But what if you didn’t have to suffer for your art? What if you didn’t have to struggle to overcome? What if we could fuck our way to a better world?
Country and funk have always offered a clear view of that world, whether it’s Sylvester fronting a rock band and covering Neil Young before ascending to disco supremacy, or the Drive-By Truckers billing themselves as the Dance Band of the Resistance. And current pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Sam Smith have released hits that are implicitly political because they are explicitly sexual. In other words, Mutiny comes at just the right time, even if the dance element has been somewhat overstated; several of these songs, such as “Excited Delirium” and “Ain’t That a Bitch,” have more in common with Light in the Attic’s Country Funk compilations than with anything you’d hear at an actual disco. They’re swampy, Stonesy, and steamy, with some real fuck-the-pigs energy, but they don’t sound quite as daring as the songs that groove hard and a little sleazy. That’s when the album’s audacities—its sexual philosophy, its political radicalism—become unique and exciting.
The best songs here are lean and sinewy showcases for his backing band, the Dark Clouds. For most of his career, Blue Skies has defiantly rejected the typical verse-chorus-verse approach to songwriting in favor of more intuitive and often more concise structures, and he assembled a band that can navigate even the trickiest straits with grace and flair. The grooves on Mutiny demand a good drummer, and the Dark Clouds boast one of the best out there. Miles Miller does more with a hi-hat than most drummers do with a whole kit, and he lends “Situation” in particular an energy to match—even exceed—his bandleader’s horny lyrics. He leads the band into lengthy tangents, following those grooves to their natural climaxes and creating a space away from the vocals for listeners to get their own grooves on. Even “Venus,” too bookbound in Roman mythology to get down and dirty, at least sounds good, as the band pushes the song into psychedelic territory.
There’s nothing especially kinky about the sex in these songs, but in the orgasm desert that is America in the 2020s, anything other than missionary counts as freaky. Like all things pertaining to sex and politics, Mutiny After Midnight is more than a little ridiculous, especially when Blue Skies claims to have “that Hunter Biden energy”—surely the weirdest flex of this weird decade. On closer “Ain’t That a Bitch” he describes torture in visceral terms: “Put a towel on my face and let the water start flowing… Pull out my toenails but that’s OK, they’re in-growing.” Maybe it has some thematic heft—the infliction of physical suffering vs. the creation of physical pleasure—but those lines and the song itself sound too cynical, especially as a final statement on an otherwise joyful and outrageous album. Blue Skies does manage to sell some of his more awkward or undercooked dirty talk, like these lines from “Situation”: “Climb up on top and don’t ever stop/Let it build up, then let it drop.” Or this one from that same song: “Ever since the day that we met, wanna get you wet, wanna make you sweat.” He just has that much natural charisma to make it work. More crucially, all of those cringe lyrics are about what he can do for and to his partner/fellow citizen rather than what she can do to him.
To their credit, Blue Skies and all of the Dark Clouds are alive to that inherent ridiculousness, which makes Mutiny actually sexy rather than just about sex. Listen to the coda of “Situation,” which they play at twice the tempo. It’s a little seedy and so brazen that it could have been a punchline. Instead, it sounds galvanizing: a sharp band moving in psychedelic unison. Even the acoustic guitars on “Viridescent”—perhaps the one track that might slot most easily onto one of his previous albums—sounds velvety and weird in this context, especially when the saxophone enters like fingers along a shoulder blade. The Dark Clouds swing big, and they connect more often than they whiff.
About half of these songs traffic in personal desires, but Mutiny gets very public in its quest for salvation via sex. It’s ultimately an album about community. Being alert and attentive to the pleasures of others is radical, and here’s where Mutiny gets gloriously kinky: “No place in the universe for individuality, truth is knowing that it’s all connected,” he declares on “Everyone Is Welcome,” sounding not a little like the guy who described “reptile aliens made of light” 12 years ago. But then the song gets down to bizness: “Two is enough, but three’s a whole lotta fun/Four’s a fucking party and everybody cums.” Bracketed by a song about ICE disappearing US citizens and another song with a visceral description of torture, this erotic vision of national unity is more than simply titillating. Blue Skies knows that America is sick. We really should be in bed.
