by David Wilikofsky
I’ll be frank: it has been a difficult few years to be American. If you keep up with the news I probably don’t need to elaborate further, but from my vantage point America has seen itself embarrassed on the world stage while rapidly fracturing internally. As an ex-pat living in England, Robert Stillman has a unique viewpoint on the weight of American-ness; he’s at once divorced from the day to day of American life but also a representation of American culture to others abroad. While in his position “it is tempting to claim one’s favorite trappings of ‘American’ and disassociate from the rest,” with his latest album he seeks to do the opposite by trying to answer a seemingly simple question: what does it mean to be American?
I’ll give a spoiler upfront: Stillman doesn’t offer any concrete answers to the question. The album is a document of Stillman’s personal exploration and interrogation of Americanness through its musical language, pulling from genres and idioms that span the history of American popular music. These ideas meld together, leading to a slippery sense of genre; one minute you might be listening to frantic jazz improvisation, but in the next it will transform into a fragile strummed folk melody. Though much of the music here is gently melodious, there’s often a dark underbelly that slowly exposes itself. The melodies of tracks like “It’s All Is” and “Acceptance Blues” dissolve into a buzzing voids of noise by their end, while the halting melody of the titular track builds to a cacophonous din as different musical thoughts try to drown each other out.
Though Stillman is exploring emotionally charged topics, the music doesn’t ever feels angry or hopeless. Stillman sees the album, along with the choice of title, as an “act of radical acceptance,” not just our current reality but of everything, good and bad, that has made America into what it is today; ultimately, he believes we can only move forward and affect real change by reckoning with our shared history. Given his goals, it feels appropriate that the music actually ends up sounding like some platonic ideal of the American experiment: different sounds and voices existing in harmony, deriving their power from working together rather than in opposition to one another. Despite grappling with such heavy questions, What Does It Mean To Be American? ends up being an uplifting listen: it’s a glimpse of what could be if we all put in the work.