P O L I C Y T A L K S @ T H E F O R D S C H O O L

MICHAEL BREEN

President and CEO
Human Rights First

JOSH ROSENTHAL EDUCATION F UND LECTU RE
Human rights on the brink

Free and open to the public.
Reception to follow.

Information: 734-615-7545 or
fspp-events@umich.edu

@fordschool #policytalks

Thursday, November 14, 2019
4:00 - 5:20 pm

Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Annenberg Auditorium, 1120 Weill Hall
735 S. State Street

In a world of hip-thrusting Luke Bryans and
muscular Tim McGraws, Luke Combs stands
out. Baby-faced and beer-bellied, he looks
like someone you’d expect to see in the crowd
of a country music concert, not on the stage.
But in a genre that claims to represent “real
people,” that image is a good thing. Following
a massively successful first album This One’s
For You, Combs continues to deliver catchy,
’90s-country-sounding tunes on his sophomore
effort, What You See Is What You Get. He proves
himself to be just what today’s Nashville needs
— a reality check.
A stomping anthemic love letter to “long
neck ice-cold beer,” the album opener might
give listeners the wrong first impression. But
even
“Beer
Never
Broke
My
Heart”
breaks
the
“bro-country”
mold for its lack
of scantily-clad
women and use
of real drums as
opposed to snap
tracks. Further
dodging
the
frat-party
subgenre
of
country, Combs
quickly
pivots
to
chronicling
life’s smaller, sweeter moments.
“Refrigerator Door” is an ode to the
kitchen appliance as a kind of time capsule.
Combs lovingly details the “Couple magnets,
recipes and Polaroids” against a simple chord
progression. In “Even Though I’m Leavin’,”
Combs follows a father and son from monster-
in-my-closet worries to the father’s deathbed.
“Even though I’m leavin’ / I ain’t goin’
nowhere,” the pair consistently reassure one
another.
A Brooks & Dunn assist on “1, 2 Many” starts
the party up again. An uptempo song about
drinking “5-4-3-2-1, too many” in the style
they perfected in the ’90s, Combs sounds like
the perfect addition to make the legendary
duo a trio. “C’mon that’s a country song right
there,” Combs concludes in the outro, sounding

like the harbinger for the next wave of neo-
traditionalism in the genre.
In “New Every Day,” “Reasons” and “Every
Little Bit Helps” Combs keeps finding new ways
to rationalize a break-up. However, on a 17-track
album, a listener doesn’t have time for a three-
song lull stuck in the same thematic problem. All
lyrically clever and instrumentally sound, they
make sense on their own, but grouped together
they can’t help but bleed into one another.
On the title track, “What You See Is What You
Get,” Combs finally hits his stride. “With me ain’t
no tricks up these sleeves / An acquired taste
/ a constant work in progress” Combs admits.
At this point in the album, it’s easy to get what
he means. Consistently backed by an electric
guitar and steady drums, Combs doesn’t make
room for any surprises. All of his songs exist
in the same sonic landscape — a modern take
on ’90s country. But if appreciating that takes
an
“acquired
taste,”
it’s
safe
to
say
contemporary
country
fans
are hungry for
it.
“All
Over
Again” is the
only track that
veers into the
snap-track trap
of his country
radio
peers.
Still, the chorus
can’t help but
explode
into
real drums as Combs laments “falling over
again” for the relationship to be “all over
again” just as quickly as it started. Ultimately
Combs can’t give in to pop-country, even when
he tries.
What You See Is What You Get confirms
that Combs knows his lane in country music
and plans on sticking to it. By not taking any
genre-bending risks, he takes the greatest risk
of all — trusting country music to stand on its
own. And it works. “So say I’m a middle of the
road / not much to show / underachieving,
average Joe,” Combs shrugs in “Does to Me.”
He recognizes the value in being an everyman.
That’s why listeners are lucky to be getting
what they see when it comes to Luke Combs.
A real person.what they see when it comes to
Luke Combs. A real person.

There’s room for more
than one Luke in country

KATIE BEEKMAN
Daily Arts Writer

In a 2017 essay about Zadie Smith’s recent work,
the critic Mara Smith posits that the common thread
running through her first five novels is her use of “an
omniscient narrator able to hold multiple voices in
suspension.” For Mara Smith, these novels are mostly
concerned with balancing disparate voices, cultures
and sensibilities — a thematic concern that works
well with the lengthy, digressive form Zadie Smith’s
novels tend to take.
Anyone familiar with her wonderful and
often more tightly constructed essays (collected
in “Changing My Mind” and “Feel Free”) knows
that Smith is capable of another style, which is less
omniscient and more everywhere-at-once. Her
reviews and criticism have a playful, airy exuberance
that feels like the counterpart
to the narrative drive of her
novels, while retaining her
characteristic
stylishness.
Every
name-drop
lands
exactly in the right place,
every turn of phrase is both
utterly correct and wryly
illuminating. She has a way
of gradually sketching out
the field, detail by detail, and
then effecting a resolution or
a twist at the exact point when
it is needed. Other times, one
reaches the end of an essay
frictionlessly only to realize
that they’ve ended up in a
completely different place than
they started.
I mention her essays because
it’s worth keeping them in mind
when reading Smith’s first
collection of short stories, “Grand Union.” The stories
sometime seem like they’re outgrowths of the more
experimental essays in “Feel Free” — they are airy,
exuberant constructions unmoored from the essay’s
fidelity to literal reality. Absent the usual structures
she works with, Smith is free to try new approaches,
to experiment with pastiche, to sketch with a soft,
loose pencil. The result is as uneven as it is thrilling
— it feels like documentation of experimentation
rather than a polished, tightly-woven collection of
the kind that writers like Jhumpa Lahiri or Deborah
Eisenberg create. In other words, this book has
much the same roundabout, baggy energy of her
novels. The essay form
also seems like something
of a touchpoint for some
of the stories here, in that
Smith frequently eschews
conflict, plot and even
character
development
in favor of scene, texture
and voice. Her game is
not to tell a story but to
describe a situation via the
accumulation of details, and, in the process, to tease
out tensions and contradictions.
One story that works like this is the fourth in the
collection, “Words And Music.” The story begins
with a moving portrait of two sisters separated by
the circumstances of their lives, as one returns to
other’s Manhattan townhouse after she has died,
having inherited it from her. “She sits in Candice’s
accidental gold mine and rips up the little postcards
as they arrive, a few each week, the ones that explain
how much the house is worth and how easy it would
be to sell. She doesn’t doubt it.” This thread only lasts
a couple pages, though — the second half of the story
pivots to an unnamed first-person narrator who goes
on to describe a disabled man who has become “a
piece of city choreography,” a man who walks around
dressed as Abraham Lincoln, a “cipher” under
the Washington Square arch that she describes as
“inauthentic, like me.”

This little quip is never explained, but it’s clear what
it means. Many of the narrators in Smith’s stories
work like apparitions of the third-person omniscient
voice, and it helps that many of them live lives similar
to Smith’s. Many of the narrators of the Manhattan
stories are middle-aged creative professionals, often
biracial, entertaining variously conflicted feelings
about personal identity. Another story that resembles
a personal essay, “Downtown,” documents a visit
from two Jamaican aunts during the Kavanaugh
hearings, which are only one element of the narrator’s
elusive “funk.” She goes to a Black church and prays
for a long list of Black people killed by police in
recent years. The narrator feels weird about this —
“You don’t say to a witch: The reason they’re dunking
you is because you’re a witch. You say: The reason
they’re dunking you is these motherfuckers believe
in witchcraft!” This tiny semantic point is not taken
well by the other churchgoers. Elsewhere in the
story, the narrator meets a
taciturn
Austrian
painter
who lives in a Hungarian
forest and represents a kind of
absurd pole of purity that she
simultaneously
desires
and
feels guilty for desiring. The
story doesn’t try to connect
these disparate incidents. In
many cases their meaning is
self-evident, it’s more that their
juxtaposition creates elusive
flashes of meaning. This is a
kind of fiction that is less about
situations as it is about affects
— the lack of plot development
hardly makes the stories less
rich, in the same way that deep
water is never still no matter
what the wind is doing.
The
more
character-
driven stories tend toward
portraiture, which is sometimes wonderful, as in the
first section of “Words And Music,” and sometimes
tiresome, as in the maudlin “Big Week,” a portrait of
a Boston ex-cop, a fount of guilt and wishful thinking,
who is trying to reconnect with this family after
recovering from a problem with opiates. Other stories
in the collection show Smith engaging, with mixed
success, with science fiction, parable, folk tale,
metafiction. Most of these stories experiment with
fragmentation or disjunction to varying degrees.
Smith’s style has gotten more terse with each book
she has written, and in “Grand Union” her prose is
honed down to a fine edge. Even the few stories that
confer more traditional
narrative pleasures, like
“Sentimental Education,”
often open with bursts of
disjunct energy:
“Back
then,
she
unnerved
men.
But
couldn’t
understand
why, and sought answers
from
unreliable
sources.
Women’s
magazines
—
women themselves. Later, in midlife, she came to
other conclusions. Lay on the grassy pavilion above
the Serpentine café, admiring a toddler, her own son,
as he waded in and out of the wading pool. Suddenly
her daughter appeared at her shoulder: ‘You look at
him like you’re in love with him. Like you want to paint
him.’”
In a paragraph like this, the length of the
sentences is almost as important as what is being
conveyed. The prose has a blocky, forceful character
that undercuts the literal things that happen within
it. Smith’s prose is like a flashlight that shines on
her subject — revealing only what is immediately
relevant or salient in what feels like a much deeper
structure. It’s this — Smith’s consistent, masterly
wryness, her control over every detail — that
makes this story collection such a joy to read. Even
though there are occasional misfires in the book, it’s
wonderful to follow her wherever she might go.

Smith’s story debut glows

EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer

YOUTUBE

MUSIC REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW

HAMISH HAMILTON

Grand Union

Zadie Smith

Penguin Press

Oct. 8, 2019

COURTESY OF EMMA CHANG

What You See Is What
You Get

Luke Combs

Columbia Nashville

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts

Tuesday, November 12, 2019 — 5