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