jeff buckleyism: masculinity and prose

on myth, elegies, and transcendence of gender through lyric.

so he prevailed on willing Icarus;
encouraged and instructed him in all
the fatal art; and as he waved his wings
looked backward on his son.
…
proud of his success,
the foolish Icarus forsook his guide,
and, bold in vanity, began to soar,
rising upon his wings to touch the skies;
but as he neared the scorching sun, its heat
softened the fragrant wax that held his plumes;
and heat increasing melted the soft wax—
he waved his naked arms instead of wings,
with no more feathers to sustain his flight.
and as he called upon his father’s name
his voice was smothered in the dark blue sea,
now called Icarian from the dead boy’s name

from ovid’s metamorphoses

i. the fall

the father: tim buckley. daedalic in the world of folk music— this story’s fatal art. his prison fatherhood, leaving his son drowning in his legacy.

tim buckley

despite his father’s apathy and negligence, jeff buckley followed in his footsteps. in a twist of fate, inventiveness and talent, jeff soared. in fact, he overshadowed his negligent father by far, yet he himself didn’t know this: “i just want to be as good as my father,” he expressed, harboring anxiety towards recording his second studio album, which would never see the light of day.

the relationship jeff had to his father’s legacy was likely complicated and nuanced in a way that i cannot fully embody or explore, but it is a tale that is echoed eloquently in a vastly different artist’s discography:

mama, i’m chasing a ghost
do i look like him?

like him tyler the creator

wow, i’m disappointed in me, this ain’t like me
how could i be so reckless? this ain’t my lifestyle
never had no scare in my life ‘til now
ain’t in the space to raise no goddamn child
hey, jane, i’m terrified, petrified

hey jane, tyler the creator

before i get into the topic of this essay, i want to briefly discuss tyler the creator because his musical journey perfectly encapsulates themes similar to buckley’s personal background. chromokopia weaves from tyler reckoning with his sexuality as a non-monogamous, bisexual man, to the anxieties of resembling his absent father. hey jane is a particularly interesting song, written and sung by tyler himself, but spoken from the perspective of both himself and jane. in it, he recognizes and acknowledges his misdoings and selfishness in hoping that jane doesn’t keep the child, meanwhile jane struggles with her own embodied experience as a woman who longs for a child and is running out of time. central to the struggle is that tyler is not in the space to raise a child, but he resents his father so deeply for abandoning him and his mother that he can’t in good conscience run away from the problem.

chromokopia is entirely accompanied by samples of voicemails from tyler’s mother. on like him, she pleads for him to forgive her for not letting his father into his life, however tyler himself explores his ongoing resentment, literally asking if he looks like his dad, making us question wither the son is destined to embody the sins of the father? it’s a unique interplay with tyler’s past discography. answer from wolf (2013), is framed as an imaginary, scathing voicemail to his father. ironically, in answer, tyler equates his father’s absence to his father’s lack of masculinity, which he further equates to homosexuality, directing the f-slur multiple times into his father’s voicemail inbox. this direction of anger embodies the concept of hegemonic masculinity: men monitor one another’s masculinity along the basis of what is socially constructed to be definitively not masculine; thus gay or feminine. i would not go so far as to say tyler was immature in answer, but it is clear he has progressed greatly since then, coming to terms not only with his own sexuality and masculinity, but expressing his resentment towards his father in more abstract and yet compelling terms. asking his mother if he resembles his father has a stronger implication than outright calling his father a f*ggot, in my opinion at least. take it a step further and we are seeing a version of tyler that holds himself to a very high standard and (presumably) feels secure in his sexuality and masculinity, no longer perpetuating that cycle of hegemonic masculinity born out of sexism. and while this essay isn’t about tyler, the theme of song as rhetoric and the interplay of masculinity, sexuality, and fatherhood, are all tangential, just stick with me.

don’t be like the one who made me so old
don’t be like the one who left behind his name

dream brother, jeff buckley.

a plea to a friend against abandoning his pregnant partner, dream brother is jeff buckley’s way of addressing his own trauma, having been abandoned as an infant by his father, who left to become a musician and overdosed when jeff was eight.

as the singer in dream brother examines the perspective of both father and child, the musical tension ebbs and flows through the music’s sweeping crescendos and decrescendos. buckley’s voice builds up alongside a hypnotic, almost anxiety inducing chord progression, culminating in a release of that tension embodied through cymbals softly pulling the noise back. all of buckley’s songs are immersive, but this one brings about a uniquely physical experience, pulling you in and drawing you out. it is clear that buckley had both empathy and resentment for his father’s actions. the success of his career likely spurred conflicting feelings within himself.

dream brother narrates an “oppositional, anti-heroic, anti-oedipal non-narrative or post-narrative,” in an attempt to escape the “historical, emotional, and existential pasts inevitably conjured by musical memory” (oliver lovesey). in essence, the deconstruction and altering of musical norms in tandem with the song’s simultaneous sense of empathy and resentment for it’s subject spits in the face of the idea that jeff is pursuing his father’s legacy. in fact, jeff despised the idea of becoming a musical icon. he did not want his personhood minimized by his story and by the public. in allegorizing his friend’s situation to that of his own, he not only draws from a very real and raw situation, but he is also exploring the nuanced range of emotions he himself has explored regarding his own trauma, providing dimensionality to a version of the story the public is accustomed to. sure, they both became musicians, but jeff imbued his career with his own virtue and character, one that rejects the oedipal notion of the interconnectedness of the father and son’s fate and demise.

but his father’s legacy did haunt him. the onset of his second album’s recording sessions led buckley down a panicked road in his last few days. while in memphis to record his second album, his loved ones noted his unease. he even applied to be a butterfly keeper at the zoo— maybe a desperate plea to break the fate of his father, to take his life in a different direction.

but the currents of life were not forgiving.

the lament for icarus (1898) by herbert james draper

“we know that jeff was happy at the moment that he walked into the water. he was singing a song and talking to his friend about love.” buckley’s mother told The Guardian.

the night of may 29, 1997, buckley and his friend, keith foti, were listening to music on the banks of the mississippi. buckley waded into the water, fully clothed. erratic, maybe, but the image buckley’s mother paints sticks in my mind. swimming, quite literally letting the world wash over you, is intrinsically freeing. i imagine the moments before the night turned sour were rather cathartic for buckley. foti remembers calling out to buckley as a boat passed, then turning to drag the boombox on the shore away from the wake. jeff was not seen alive again.

likely pulled under by the wake of the boat and the weight of his clothes, buckley drowned that night and his body was found on june 4th, identifiable by his belly button ring and specks of green nail polish on his toes.

much speculation followed— overdose? suicide? but toxicology reports found that there was nothing in his system, and family and friends can account for his mental wellbeing.

buckely’s manager, dave lory, distraught, sought out a psychic after the incident, before his body was found. she reportedly told him that jeff was gone; he hadn’t intended to die, but he hadn’t necessarily fought it.

again, all speculation, but bearing in mind the intense fear he held towards the upcoming recording of his second album, it is possible to ascertain that when a freeing moment turned dark, he may have let himself over to the icarian twist of fate. a fleeting feeling of liberation given over to the earth, snuffed out shortly after. it is devastating and haunting, a son following in the path of his father, succumbing to inconceivable tragedy.

ii. rilkean heart: lyricism

and because i often relate things to medievalism one way or another, i would like to cross-compare the fundamental similarities between jeff buckley’s lyricism and a series of poems known as the medieval elegies.

while today the term “elegy” connotes mourning, medieval elegies were meant to be meditative. they usually focused on vague, universal themes. spoken by an undetermined character in a situation which readers are unfamiliar, they allowed for the reader to project their own experiences onto the speaker, much in the same way buckley’s lyrics resonate so strongly amongst listeners. often centering around isolation, love-lost, and worldly ruin, the medieval elegies call to mind buckley’s magnum opus: lover you should have come over.

lonely is the room,
the bed is made
the open window lets the rain in
burning in the corner is the only one
who dreams he had you with him

my body turns and yearns
for a sleep that won’t ever come

it’s never over
my kingdom for a kiss upon her shoulder
it’s never over
all my riches for her smiles when I slept so soft against her
it’s never over
all my blood for the sweetness of her laughter

— from lover you should’ve come over.

compare to wife’s lament:

so we often swore
that only death could ever divide us,
nothing else— all that is changed now;
it is as if it had never been,
our friendship. far and near,
I must endure the hatred of my dearest one.

they forced me to live in a forest grove,
under an oak tree in an earthen cave.
this earth-hall is old, and I ache with longing;
the dales are dark, the hills too high,
harsh hedges overhung with briars,
a home without joy. here my lord’s leaving
often fiercely seized me. There are friends on earth,
lovers living who lie in their beds,
while I walk alone in the first light of dawn

both of these works use the forces of nature to enhance depictions of their suffering. in lover, the rain seeps into an interior space, an embodiment of the pervasive nature of suffering and loneliness. the rain also shows up in an earlier verse: “looking out the door, i see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners/ parading in a wake of sad relations/ as their shoes fill up with water.” the speaker in lover (likely jeff himself), positions himself as an insider looking out— framed by the door and the window. in both of these instances of imagery, suffering is embodied through rain, an unforgiving torrent, indifferent to man. this is a theme we see constantly in medieval elegies. the anglo-saxons writing these elegies, or copying them, were surrounded by the ruins of the pagan past of the land they inhabited. they saw the world’s indifference to the people who came before them. they knew life was fleeting and preservation not guaranteed, just as the fleeting nature of the relationship of lover is expressed through glimpses of a past made unattainable. both buckley and the wife of the elegy lament over a past no longer accessible to them.

temporality and isolation are major points of focus in both the works of buckley and of secular medieval writers. like buckley, the wife of wife’s lament is isolated. she is literally thrust into a woodland wherein she is exiled from civilization. she reflects upon all that she does not have in much the same way buckley reminisces his love lost. their mirrored isolations have physical effects upon them. buckley describes his suffering as feverish— “burning in the corner,” and unable to sleep. the wife’s suffering “seizes” her, making her a passive actor in the fate handed out to her. in these elegies, the concept of fate is embodied by the Old English word wyrd, which translates more accurately to “what happens.” the concept of fate is interesting— it gives the sufferer something to blame, and yet it is an abstract concept that is not necessarily wholly attributable to the suffering of the speaker. in the case of the wife, her lover’s kinsmen supposedly exiled her in some kind of scheme. in lover, buckley laments his own mistakes and selfishness. but there is nonetheless a pervasive sense of mourning, of lack of control, of remorse at what has happened rather than outright regret. it is an interesting way of looking at the interplay of time and fate. the temporality of the two love affairs, the break, the past and present; the pristine versus the ruined. the wife is banished from society; she is cast out into the wilderness where man-made structures don’t stand and she walks among the wilds. there is an implication here— what she wouldn’t do to rejoin society. on the other end, buckley is willing to sacrifice his metaphorical “kingdom,” (that is, material and earthly goods) to have his love back. i find this shift in thinking interesting. the anglo-saxons viewed their world as sublime. architecture stood as a reminder of man’s achievements, a unifying cultural force. but they were also surrounded with the ruins of the land’s heritage. the temporality of the world was a pervasive source of cultural anxiety. goodness and glory were embodied through their literal construction of the world around them, but these buildings were also a reminder that quite literally nothing lasts. thus it is interesting that buckley claims he is willing to give all of that up. the interplay between these ancient works and buckley’s relatively newer ones seem to beg the question, if nothing lasts, what makes anything worth it?

buckley was also inspired by rilke’s dunio elegies. so much so that buckley’s ex-girlfriend, elizabeth fraser of the cocteau twins, wrote rilkean heart to pay tribute to jeff after his passing. while not medieval, rilke’s elegies mirror the elegies that came before. a chain of human emotion and empathy passed from generation to generation, spanning experience, time, and culture.

lovers, if they knew how, might utter
strange things in night air. since it seems
everything hides us. look, trees exist; houses,
we live in, still stand. only we
pass everything by, like an exchange of air.

— the second elegy, rilke.

we have heard many things of Maethhild
her desire for Geat was do seep, boundless,
that her sorrowful love stole all sleep.
that passed away, so can this.

— from deor, medieval elegy.

these lyrics bring to mind the ache and sleeplessness of love, the consciousness of that which is around us, the temporality of existence and of human structures (kingdoms! houses! …ruins).

though more than a thousand years passed since the documentation of the elegies and buckley’s lover, the interconnectedness of human experience prevails, and stands as a testament to buckley’s exploration of vulnerability and human emotion. which is where i’d like to bring gender into the conversation.

iii. paradoxical masculinity: you’re not him.

wife’s lament is one of the two elegies scholars are certain are meant to be read from a woman’s perspective. authorship is far less clear, but putting that aside, the themes expressed in wife’s lament clearly transcend both time and gender, and yet, though many have tried, no male songwriter has quite transcended gender lyrically and vocally in the way that buckley did.

there is a tenderness and vulnerability with which he handles his own songs and covers that is frankly unmatched. and nor does it need to be matched— every time a straight white man claims to be emulating jeff buckley, an angel dies.

jokes aside, it is important to note that not only was buckley’s lyricism genderless and poignant, but his voice was radically unique. so unique that in 1994, thom yorke was so moved by one of jeff’s performances that he left and recorded the iconic fake plastic trees, later noting that jeff’s performance made him realize that the voice is the “zenith of all bestowments,” and that vulnerability must come through vocally to create strong music.

you can hear the moment yorke returned to the studio after watching jeff. though his vocal range is far from buckley’s, the jump from low, guttural growling to the high falsetto at 2:56 (“she looks like the real thing/ she tastes like the real thing/ my fake plaaaastic love”) is very buckley.

buckley engaged with queer theory. at the time of his death, giovanni’s room by james baldwin, the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde, the second sex by simone de beauvior, and gay culture in america: essays from the field were on his bookshelf.

his understanding of gender comes through in his cover of nina simone’s lilac wine, an operatic rendition of a classic. his voice becomes “transgendered,” (ethan hine) through the intimacy expressed by both lyric and the rawness of the vocals against the spare instrumentals.

in an era where subgenres of rock were bursting from the seams of genre confinements, buckley was much like his contemporary kurt cobain, in that the radicality of his music and expression were forms of gendered subversion. for example, his choice to warble at higher octaves and to lean into tenderness pushed against the standards of rock, which tended to be hypermasculinized. even other rock singers who could hit those higher octaves still sounded masculine, opting for grating shrieking vibrato accompanied by soaring guitar riffs. buckley made the conscious creative choice to let his voice remain feminized when he hit those higher notes, and rather than always lean into the instrumentals, he leaves much of his music raw and medetative, stripping away the layers so as to really be heard. he exposes himself, an act of radical, genderless vulnerability.

so real both literally and musically challenges concepts of authenticity within the alt-rock scene. influenced by a panoptic desire to be perceived as one thing or another, most alt-rockers were pandering to a sort of image or nonchalantness. instead, “he wails, but in prayer for things grunge wouldn’t touch, like true love," so real “mentions explicitly a ‘realness’ grunge could not admit to for fear of losing credibility,” (valentine lambkin). buckley’s deconstruction of the apathy of grunge in so real is a challenge to the lethargy of masculinity. it emphasizes the irony of the effort that goes into the presentation of masculine ease.

in today’s terms— the alt-rockers that paved the way for shoegaze midwest emo dirty grunge house show mosh-fiends weren’t as authentic and “deep” as it would seem. the era of alt-rock worshipped by the anthony fantano crowd were still performing a version of masculinity that pandered to binary ideas of masculinity which valued regulated emotions, pseudo-intellectualism, and a pervasive sense of women-hating. i’ve seen it time and time again in the male dominated music scene of my campus. i would call it the you’re scaring the hoes paradox. or the you’re NOT him paradox, because the slimy alt-rock scene chronically misunderstands jeff buckley and heralds him as an idol of hypermasculinity. there is a very real issue of men advocating for the deconstruction of normative masculinity while upholding patriarchy and misogyny. this phenomena emphasizes men’s emotional needs while failing to recognize that they, too, are victims of the patriarchy. instead, this frustration manifests in a form of misogyny that frames women as the cause of men’s issues. this relates back to jeff buckley because in recent years, we have been subjected to this new form of hypermasculine misogyny disguised as masculine gender-nonconformity that surmounts to nothing but a form of leftism without empathy. you can’t claim to emulate jeff buckley if you’re an asshole with nail polish on.

this abbreviated comment left on an anthony fantano video. i hope this diva is thriving.

moving on from that tangent…

the notion that a voice can be gender nonconforming is rather interesting, and paired with the intense radical vulnerability of his lyricism, speaks to the means by which gender is both constructed and deconstructed in a pervasive manner.

the fact that we ascribe certain gendered associations to genres of music and styles within those genres is an idea very reminiscent of judith butler’s gender trouble.

we are always doing gender, even in being non-confirmative. buckley’s music did gender in a transcendent way— in a way that allows for his music to stand as genderless and universal. it’s human music. the presence he had as a musician was heartbreakingly short-lived, but his legacy is so much more than that tragic icarian demise. pour yourself a glass of (lilac) wine and listen to grace all the way through when you get the chance, and listen to the rawness, power, and vulnerability that pervades each and every track.

a final thought: give indiana by adrianne lenker a listen. while i can find no confirmation that this line is in any way a reference to jeff, i have a hard time imagining otherwise:

“the mississippi river won’t kill you/

unless you stand to close, my dear.”

references:

Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VIII: 183-235)

“a translation of ‘Daedalus and Icarus,’ by C.A. Adderley, 2023 https://veritasjournal.org/2023/05/18/a-translation-of-daedalus-and-icarus/

https://allthatsinteresting.com/jeff-buckley-death

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jeff-buckleys-body-found-in-memphis-58208/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/poetry-that-inspired-jeff-buckley/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/foreshadowing-in-jeff-buckleys-grace/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-a-jeff-buckley-concert-changed-radioheads-fake-plastic-trees/

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/song-to-the-siren-how-his-fathers-song-connected-jeff-buckley-to-elizabeth-fraser/

Lovesey, Oliver. “Anti-Orpheus: Narrating the Dream Brother.” Popular Music, vol. 23, no. 3, 2004, pp. 331–48. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877506. Accessed 6 Feb. 2025.

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8114.Jeff_Buckley_s_Bookshelf

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/story-of-massive-attack-teardrop/