Originally posted on Dec 17, 2020 9:25AM
Wacky Wacko – none
Men on the Verge of Nothing feels like Seth Bogart pulling several versions of himself into the same room and letting them argue. The record still carries the bratty garage-pop DNA of Hunx and His Punx, the queer camp and trash-pop humor that have followed him since Gravy Train!!!!, and the bright artificial surfaces of his 2016 solo album, but the emotional temperature is different. Released in 2020 through Bogart’s own Wacky Wacko Recording, the ten-song album is jangly, fuzzy and deliberately catchy, yet underneath that sweetness is a record preoccupied with power, masculinity, aging, grief, friendship and the exhaustion of watching people repeat the same social failures. It is funny constantly, but the humor no longer functions primarily as escape. The jokes have teeth because disappointment keeps sitting directly underneath them.
“Professionals” begins by targeting the polished language of cultural authority. Bogart has always been good at puncturing people who take their own positions too seriously, and here the subject is the professionalization of queerness itself, the way identity can be converted into credentials, expertise and social capital. The song is bright and deceptively casual, which makes the irritation more effective. Rather than delivering a lecture, Bogart turns suspicion into pop music. The larger album keeps doing this. Serious ideas arrive through guitar hooks, cheap-sounding keyboards, tambourine, fuzz and melodies that could survive even if the listener ignored every word.
“Dawn’s Lips” is one of the record’s sweetest pieces and also one of its most specific cultural gestures. Bogart wrote it in connection with Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz’s film about Dawn Wiener, and the title twists the Vaselines’ “Molly’s Lips” into a tribute to one of cinema’s great uncomfortable outsiders. Tobi Vail plays drums, Roxanne Clifford contributes vocals and Alana Amram adds guitar. The song’s jangling surface has a loose late-’80s and early-’90s indie-pop feeling, but the reference is not decorative nostalgia. Dawn Wiener fits perfectly inside Bogart’s universe because she is awkward, humiliated, stubborn and never transformed into a conventional fantasy of coolness. The song treats that lack of glamour as something worth loving.
The album’s lone cover, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” takes X-Ray Spex’s 1977 anthem and changes its emotional architecture. Poly Styrene’s original is a blast of accusation and liberation. Bogart slows the idea down, surrounding it with fuzz and reverb until the song feels less like a riot occurring in real time and more like somebody examining the damage afterward. Kathleen Hanna and Kate Nash appear on the track, connecting Bogart’s version directly to later generations of feminist punk, but the arrangement refuses easy triumph. The title still sounds confrontational, yet the music underneath it is bruised. It is an excellent example of how this album repeatedly takes familiar symbols of rebellion and asks what remains after the pose has stopped being enough.
“Boys Who Don’t Wanna Be Boys” moves directly into the album’s central problem: what gets done to people when masculinity becomes a disciplinary system. Bogart has explained that the song was inspired partly by a friend who had been subjected as a child to attempts to correct gender-nonconforming behavior. The track refuses to treat femininity in boys as a defect requiring repair. Instead, it turns the entire corrective apparatus into the grotesque object. The music is wonderfully buoyant, almost surfy and cartoonish, which makes the subject stranger rather than lighter. Bogart’s instinct has always been to put disturbing ideas inside bright colors. Here that method becomes political without losing its silliness.
The title track, one of the two files uploaded here, makes the album’s thesis unusually clear. “Men on the Verge of Nothing” runs about three and a half minutes and has a compact, energetic mix with a strong upper-mid presence and plenty of jangly guitar detail. The uploaded file is loud without being crushed into featureless density. Bass and drums remain clearly active beneath the guitars, while the vocal sits forward enough for the repeated phrase to become impossible to miss. Bogart keeps returning to men who believe they know everything, men who continue failing upward, men whose confidence exists in inverse proportion to their actual understanding. The chorus is catchy enough to sound almost celebratory until the words register. The joke is that certainty has become a kind of emptiness. Everybody is on the verge of something, but these men may be on the verge of absolutely nothing.
Roxanne Clifford, Tobi Vail and Alana Amram contribute to the title track, and their presence matters conceptually as well as musically. Much of Men on the Verge of Nothing is skeptical about models of masculinity, yet the record does not respond by retreating into isolated autobiography. Bogart repeatedly builds outward through women collaborators, friends, punk history and queer cultural memory. The album does not ask for a better lone male hero. It keeps looking for networks instead.
“Brainwashers,” the second uploaded file, pushes the satire toward the political left itself. Sonically it is slightly brighter than the title track, with a higher spectral center and an especially crisp, busy upper register. The drums and guitar move with a light bounce, giving the song a nearly carefree propulsion while Bogart sings about people endlessly telling one another things they already know. That mismatch is funny because ideological exhaustion becomes danceable. The target is not political commitment itself so much as the social machinery surrounding it: attention, certainty, public correction, status and the bizarre possibility of communities devouring themselves through endless demonstrations of correctness. The line between genuine care and performance becomes intentionally blurry.
The two uploaded tracks also reveal how comfortable Bogart has become with imperfection. Neither “Men on the Verge of Nothing” nor “Brainwashers” aims for slick contemporary pop separation. Guitars blur into reverb, vocals retain personality rather than pristine polish, and the rhythm section feels slightly scuffed. “Brainwashers” is marginally louder and brighter than the title track, but both inhabit the same fuzzy garage-pop environment. The sound is clean enough for the hooks to register instantly and dirty enough that nothing feels embalmed.
“Lavender Heights” changes the emotional register substantially. The title refers to Sacramento’s gay district, and Bogart has discussed the song in relation to a period after his father’s suicide when he escaped into partying with friends. Looking backward, he also recognized how insulated that youthful world could be from questions of race and privilege. That retrospective complication is typical of the album. Memory is never allowed to remain purely sentimental. Bogart can miss a place, miss people, miss a version of himself and still interrogate what that nostalgia leaves out.
“Sunday Boy” returns to relationships but treats romance with similar suspicion. The comfort of another person can become a form of disappearance. Familiarity can turn into stagnation. The song is less explosive than the album’s political material, but its sadness may cut deeper because nothing dramatic needs to happen. Two people can simply stop being interesting to one another. Bogart’s voice, often used in earlier work as a weapon of exaggeration, is surprisingly vulnerable across this album. The camp remains, but the emotional mask has become porous.
“The Othersiders” contains the record’s heaviest historical absence. Bogart wonders where the older gay men are, and the answer hovering behind the song is the AIDS epidemic. The missing generation is not theoretical. It changes what kinds of adulthood younger queer people can imagine because so many possible models were killed before they could become old. The track’s melancholy is therefore different from ordinary nostalgia. It is nostalgia for lives and futures that were removed before they could be witnessed. That thought gives the album’s obsession with men another dimension. The problem is not simply that bad models of masculinity exist. It is that many alternative models were erased.
The closing “Imaginary Music Vol. One” leaves the record in a more abstract place. After nine songs filled with people, arguments, lovers, cultural references and historical ghosts, the final piece loosens the grip of language. It feels appropriately unresolved. Men on the Verge of Nothing does not end by announcing a new definition of masculinity or offering a manifesto for the correct way to live. Bogart is too suspicious of people who claim to know everything for that.
The visual and artistic world surrounding Seth Bogart matters here too. By 2020 he was not simply a musician moving between bands. Wacky Wacko had become clothing, ceramics, visual art, exhibitions and a larger handmade pop universe. That background helps explain why the album feels so visually legible even when only hearing it. Colors, textures, cheap materials, old punk references, television, queer ephemera and deliberately tacky objects all seem close to the music. His records behave less like isolated audio products than extensions of the same continuous art practice.
Men on the Verge of Nothing is therefore much sadder than its surface suggests. The guitars sparkle. The drums bounce. Friends appear everywhere. There are jokes about boys, experts, queerness and social behavior. Yet underneath the album is a persistent question about what adulthood is supposed to become when so many available models are either destructive, ridiculous or missing entirely.
Bogart does not solve that problem.
He makes ten pop songs while standing inside it.
