Riot grrrl legends Sleater-Kinney had garnered staggering levels of goodwill when, after a ten-year hiatus, they roared back to life in 2015 with No Cities to Love–the ultra-rare comeback album that was so good, old fans actually flocked to shows to hear the new stuff for a change!
That seemingly bottomless well of goodwill hit a major roadblock, however, when they finally followed up No Cities to Love with the much more polarizing The Center Won’t Hold in 2019. A radical departure from their tried-and-true Punk sound, Sleater-Kinney had tapped Grammy-winning Art-Rocker St. Vincent to produce the new album. Though the pairing of two such iconoclastic and feminist acts probably looked great on paper, in practice the songs and production never quite gelled together; their competing Pop and Punk sensibilities made for an awkward fit; and the record ultimately sounded like less than the sum of their parts.
Not helping things was the fact that long-time drummer Janet Weiss left Sleater-Kinney just before the album dropped, citing her increased marginalization from the band’s creative process. Remaining members Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker further squandered fan goodwill when they tried to downplay Weiss’s contributions to the band in ensuing interviews (for many fans, them pointing out they’d had other drummers before Weiss would be akin to saying Nirvana had other drummers before Dave Grohl–technically true, but side-stepping the fact that only one drummer had been crucial to their rise to Rock supremacy). Sleater-Kinney has released another album since The Center Won’t Hold, with another slated for next year, but neither has come anywhere close to generating the same buzz or anticipation that No Cities to Love did. The Center Won’t Hold killed their post-reunion momentum. Janet Weiss was essential after all. Fans only attend shows to hear the old stuff again.
I’m not here to re-evaluate or re-litigate the virtues of The Center Won’t Hold, now that the dust has settled four years later; I still consider it a frustratingly underwhelming record, and a real missed opportunity for these Riot Grrrl legends to make a statement album amidst the rank chauvinism, cruelty, and vulgarity of the Trump administration, right when we needed it most.
Except for the title track.
If ever there was legitimate promise in the pairing together of Sleater-Kinney and St. Vincent, if ever their competing sounds gelled together only once, it was on the opener “The Center Won’t Hold.” There is something positively mesmerizing about the song, and is the lone moment on the album that seems to just nail the zeitgeist without trying to force it.
Partly my affection for this track is because I’m always a sucker for a solid William Butler Yeats allusion. His 1922 poem “The Second Coming“–with its iconic lines “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”, as “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”–is one that has resonated richly ever since the 2016 election, and was well due a revisit in 2019. (And given how quickly things really did fall apart during the botched U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic less than a year later, the song title swiftly proved prophetic).
But it’s not Yeats who does the heavy-lifting on the title-track, but Sleater-Kinney. With barely restrained intensity, Corin Tucker seethes in the opening verse, “I need something pretty/To help me ease my pain/I need something ugly/To put me in my place/Oh, I need something holy/Give me a little taste/And I need something muddy/To cover up the stain.” Simultaneously pretty and ugly, holy and muddy–hers is the ethos of “There must needs be opposition in all things,” one that intuitively understands that the “abased…shall be exalted”, principles that we often pay lip service to as Latter-day Saints, but that we so rarely feel in our guts.
As we also do with the literal Second Coming, for that matter. We pride ourselves on being called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–especially since President Nelson hammered at the “true name of the Church” around this same era in 2018. But do we really feel that in our guts, either? The early settlers of Utah asked Brigham Young if it was even worth planting orchards if the Millennium was just around the corner, but church apologists today defend the right of the Q15 to be stingy with their $170 billion hedgefund in the interests of long-term savings and financial planning–as though we’ll just casually cash out our portfolios in a stable stock-market whenever the Creator of the World meanders over to claim what’s His.
Yet as we are reminded in the second half to “The Center Won’t Hold”–all wild and discordant, as Carrie Brownstein lets loose the absolute heaviest riff of her life in a career replete with them–there will be absolutely nothing calm and collected about the Second Coming. We call it the Great and Terrible Day of the Lord, because it will indeed be terrible–in fact, it already is, right now, just in the supposed lead-up. Even the righteous shall barely escape the wrath to come, and is overall nothing to look forward to. If we truly took the second coming seriously at all, we wouldn’t be so smugly self-satisfied about it, but be watchful and wary, for we know not the day nor the hour.
Yet it is also true that the second coming is nevertheless still something to look forward to; because our current political order–what Paul once called the “rulers of the darkness of this world” and “spiritual wickedness in high places”–does indeed deserve to be overthrown! The horror of its impending overthrow makes it no less necessary. As more than one reviewer noted in 2019, Corin Tucker’s repeated screaming of “The center won’t hold” in the song’s cathartic finale is as much a cry of solace as of terror–a reassurance that the present political center can’t possibly hold, and doesn’t deserve to, and won’t. As with so many things related to the second coming, the thought that this will all be over sooner than we realize is both our terror and our consolation.
And to those who find it an odd fit at best to connect a hard-left, feminist, LGBTQ band like Sleater-Kinney to the decidedly conservative, patriarchal LDS church, well, I would only remind us yet again, for the umpteenth time, that the resurrected Christ appeared to the women first; that in life he drank wine with the prostitutes and tax-collectors; showed compassion to the Samaritans and the adulteress; flipped over the tables of the money-changers and told the rich young man to sell all that he has and give it to the poor. That is, it is not the despised peoples of the earth who should most fear the second coming, but those who have done the despising. The first shall be last and the last shall be first; the center won’t hold.