All respect to LaTourbut 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.
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