White Trash Revelry

Recent years have seen a surge of progressive artists find their footing in country music, bringing new and necessary perspectives to a genre traditionally dominated by those of straight white men. Adeem the Artist is one of the finest of that bunch of up-and-comers, introducing their clever, compassionate, and often complex take on country songwriting via 2021’s breakout hit *Cast Iron Pansexual*. *White Trash Revelry* follows that LP, marking Adeem’s first release on their own Four Quarters Records label and building upon its predecessor’s exploration of identity, class, and marginalization. Opener “Carolina” offers Adeem’s origin story, doing so with a level of nuance rarely heard in the genre. “Heritage of Arrogance” and “Redneck, Unread Hicks” both challenge stereotypes of the uneducated Southerner while admitting the region’s many sins. And closer “My America” caps the project with a weary but quietly hopeful vision of the country, though one imbued with a sense of loving skepticism and concern. “It was really important to me that I have a record that had bold, unapologetic representation but also had real characters from my family and my community,” Adeem tells Apple Music. “I wanted it to feel like these are not mutually exclusive characters or ideas. This is the only way we have of moving forward—to allow these voices to live alongside of each other and find some way to get along.” Below, Adeem shares insight into several key tracks on *White Trash Revelry*. **“Carolina”** “My dad named me after Kyle Petty. He’s a NASCAR driver. He’s a songwriter, too—pretty good songwriter. But he’s not the best NASCAR driver. No disrespect. His dad, Richard Petty, was the best NASCAR driver. They call him The King. So, my dad, with no sense of irony, named me after the son of the best ever. I saw that Kyle was playing Johnson City, and I called the owner of the venue, and I was like, ‘Look, I was named after Kyle Petty. I will sell tickets to this show. I will promote my ass off. You don’t have to pay me. Please let me open.’ That was a pretty good deal, so she gave me the gig. So, I wrote this song as I was imagining getting up in a room full of NASCAR fans at The Willow Tree coffee shop in Johnson City, Tennessee, on Bristol race weekend.” **“Heritage of Arrogance”** “I have this memory of being in Charlotte in the early ’90s, and I don’t know if it’s implanted. I don’t know if it’s a true memory or not because everything gets a little muddy back then. But it’s a memory of seeing the Klan gathered on one side of the road, and a bunch of Black activists on the other side of the road, with their fists in the air, all pissed off. And my dad just kind of being like, ‘Yeah, they hate each other.’ I had this idea for this song, and I was trying to remember if it was real or not, or if it was just a story I heard somebody in my family tell or something. And so, I googled to see if the Klan was still holding rallies in Charlotte in the ’90s. And they were. A lot. Probably a true memory.” **“Middle of a Heart”** “I wrote the song mostly for my friend Bob. He was a retired Knoxville police officer and a Navy veteran. He worked on boats. I would go have breakfast with Bob and make him bacon and eggs. And he’d be like, ‘Make some for yourself, buddy.’ We’d watch the birds outside and eat bacon and eggs, and that’s what we did. All of his kids had died and \[his wife\] Carlene died. And we would just sit there and watch TV and watch the birds. He was a good friend to me. He was a dude who disagreed with me about politics more than anybody I’ve ever known, but he put his humanity first. And, yeah, that song’s for him.” **“Redneck, Unread Hicks”** “It becomes really easy to, I don’t know, kind of view the South through a very myopic lens. It’s all white supremacists or bucktoothed rednecks, yada, yada, yada. And it’s endowed with a lot of classism, and it’s a really dangerous form of erasure, too. It’s true that Bill Lee, the \[Tennessee\] governor who ran on dismantling gay marriage, is from this area and that those are his values. But it’s also true that Martin Luther King, Jr. is from this area. Amelia Parker’s from this area; she helped found Black Lives Matter here in Knoxville and now works for the city council. There are a lot of queer folks who have fought hard and a lot of Black folks who have fought hard. There’s a lot more diversity here and a lot more nuance than people want to give it credit for.” **“My America”** “There’s this guy named Aaron Lewis, and he\'s kind of a shithead. He wrote this song called ‘Am I the Only One.’ And in this song, he has lyrics like, ‘Am I the only one willing to bleed for America?’ This guy’s not a fucking veteran. I listened to this song exactly one time, and I felt so annoyed by it that I parodied it in a silly way on Twitter. I said things like, ‘Am I the only one who’s a self-centered child? I’m only mad because my kids won’t call.’ And people told me I should put it on the record, which was really silly. But it did make me think, ‘Man, what if Aaron Lewis had enough compassion and sensitivity and care that he tried to articulate the perspective of the people he was trying to capitalize on? What if he actually loved them? What if he actually tried to understand them?’ And that song became that for me.”

I was born in Gastonia in 1988 a few months after my grandpa Booge died. He no longer remembered dad because of the Alzheimer’s and I can't imagine how painful it must've been for my father. I don't know what their financial situation was like, to be honest. I know that my grandfather had his little garage and that he didn't charge people very much to work on their cars. I know that he worked his daddy’s farm and then as a machinist, then managed an auto-parts store, that they owned a house in Mecklenburg County. Booge was blue-collar and my dad was blue-collar. I can't say if we were ever people of means. I just don’t know. My dad dropped out, got his GED, and started running the lathe when he was a teenager. One time he told me about running away to the beach with a girl he’d pined over. He described it wistfully as a teenager’s dream. She soon grew lackluster, though, and one day she was just gone. I don’t think he ever told me her name but I remember it as Tiffany. My parents were young. Dad was 23 and mom was 19 when they found themselves expecting me. They couldn't afford me. They didn't know each other. They did the Christian thing and we became a family- a package deal. The first place I can remember is the trailer on Thomas Fite in Belmont. I must've been a little over a year old when we moved in there. I played Power Rangers in the yard. Their friends would come ‘round still in the early years. I remember nights of drinking and partying and I remember these as the fondest years. There is warmth there in the trailer. In Locust, our driveway is lined with Pecan trees. Sarah & I, that is my sister, collect them and crack them when it gets cold and we fill bags and we leave them for the postman and the waste workers and Grady & Dessie who lived next door. We eat them too. Pecans are good. At night, I stay up late with my mother and we watch La Femme Nikita on the television together, fawning over Roy Dupuis. It’s a callback to the trailer where we sit snuggled close on the couch with Days of Our Lives flickering on the tube television. Marlena is possessed by a demon and I mention it over dinner. Dad gets so angry about it- me, cozied up studying the drama. Sometimes, my Grandpa- mom's dad- comes over and he smells stale. I can remember the scratch of his beard and the fullness of his laugh. He is mischievous and jovial. Sometimes Uncle Dave stops by, grandpa's brother. He's loud and raucous and funny and full of contagious joy. My uncle Richard lived with us in the trailer- moms brother. Richard has a laugh like grandpa's, like moms- sometimes, I hear it in my own throat if I'm lucky and I try to recreate it like it'll get me closer to grandpa. It's a kind of hiccupping laugh that rises from the gut like a horse, galloping. Richard is some kind of witch or Satanist- I remember through a fog- and he is reading anarchist theory. He tells me that there are demons and teaches me to see spirits in the sky; gives me a charm. It is a silver wolf with red gems for eyes. He likes good music. Mom is smoking Mexican dirt weed on the other side of the trailer. She has two friends in the neighborhood that she spends time with. Mostly we go over to their houses and I am forced to play with her kids. Lucinda is a good friend to my mother. They are bonded by their survival; victims of extreme trauma. Lucinda has bipolar disorder. She lives up the lane in a cul-de-sac. I grow up knowing her as my aunt. Faye is the other friend & alternative neighborhood aunt. Faye lives in a house on the corner that turns down our street. To me, this is the upper echelons of Belmont in my childhood imagination. She lives with Joel who is the first musician I ever meet. Joel plays Dungeons & Dragons. He has long, beautiful hair and very empathetic eyes. He always smells like weed & speaks softly. My mother told me that he was in love with her and asked her many times to leave dad to be with him. Cannot verify. He gives me my first guitar pick- it is 2mm and dark purple. Joel & Faye have been together for several years but they are not married. This is tough for me to understand at this age. When he died, I was in my teenage years. It was an overdose. Faye was devastated. She gave me a CD of his songs. I still have it. He was a beautiful songwriter. I'll never forget giving him his Dungeons & Dragons books back and explaining how they were wrong because they were against the bible. My father was truly proud of me, I think, in that moment though it brings me great shame now. Given the chance, I'd sure like to see him one more time. I’d tell him that while I’ve never made it above level 8 with any character that I’ve still learned a few spells of my own over the last thirty years. In the trailer, dad and I play games together. We wrestle like the fighters on the TV and we line up army men and throw bouncing balls to see who can knock over the most. My dad would take me to hockey games back then and sometimes we would pick up a box of tacos on the way home if the Checkers scored enough points. I loved Chubby and the cold games with my dad. We had souvenir Checkers cups and a brown food processor. Dad would toss ice cream, milk, and peanut butter in that food processer and we would have peanut butter milkshakes on weekends. We'd drink them out of the Checkers cups. Mom is obsessed with Collective Soul and Nine Inch Nails. We play it on the boombox while they take turns playing Final Fantasy III. One day, mom is so scared by a level that she calls dad and asks him to come home and help her & he does. The building where my dad works looks like a castle and it smells like the metal that is cut and milled by the big machines. His work shirts stink of aldehydes & ketones & even now, I sometimes catch a faint taste of it and I’m instantly transported back. These are some of my favorite memories. Cigarette stained memories. Alcohol scented memories. Everyone is loud. Everyone is profane. Every callous exchange imbued with irreverent humor. Aunt Peggy & her twin sister Daphne’s harmonious, boisterous laughter. Marty’s Budweiser breath, gravel voice full of slurred words and his childlike demeanor, soft & sad & pitiable like a wounded bird. Even now I can almost hear Aunt Peggy singing with her breathy, mournful soprano. My grandma tells me that my parents are lying to me and that there are monsters under the bed. She says if I get up in the night, they'll eat me. Also, I'm getting very fat. I can't say if Booge's Alzheimer’s and death severely wounded her but from stories I'm told, I surmise she was always a little evil. But she feeds me chicken skins and vinegar and buys me action figures from the dollar store. Absolute elation. In the yard at her 700 sq. ft house, I play with uncle Porter’s old toys. Po was a card, my dad tells me. He died on the lawn and nobody did anything. My cousin reminds everyone in the family of Po and for many years I looked up to him as one of the few to get out okay. I still do. Po’s boy made himself a family now. Married his dream girl and they worked together on a pair of sons sweeter than a cobbler. He comes to pick me up from school before the bell rings and I am enraptured with this vicious, frenetic energy. In the parking lot, he asks me what the safe word is and I tell him. “You were supposed to ask me!” He says. “Did you bring the Sega?” I have these power ranger action figures- a whole mess of them- and Ninja Turtles too. The power rangers’ masks pivot into their chests to reveal their natural faces. The pink ranger is in love with me. I am in love with the white ranger (formerly green) and the way the sun sets on the trailer park adjacent to our lot in reds and oranges and purples. Out in the yard, I am assembling a circus of slugs. They have assigned roles but they are underperforming and I am conducting their torpid, enervating movements with a loblolly twig and a hint of mischief. I am enamored with slugs the moment I discover them. The ignominious love affair is short-lived but oft-recalled in pleasantries and hindsight. Mom has met Jesus at a Baptist Church, though. She’s crying when she comes home and has repented from her life of sin. She tells me about him in hurried, urgent breaths. Later, she tells me that upon my birth she offered me up to God as a gift to him. Cannot verify. Certainly, though, I was born into the faith of my ancestors. Christianity was my birthright and though I try to reimagine, it will always stain the pages of my moral guide. I am twenty-two years old when I leave my parents’ house for the first time, out into the infinite unknown. In a flurry of symbolism and rage, my unconscious exorcises the first large, looming specter of my childhood trauma & I am thrust towards the truest parts of myself uncomfortably, armed with a watered-down accent and an arsenal of potato chip casserole recipes. My entire childhood is white trash revelry. Big Dave, the biker my grandfather is friends with, who is on the run from the Hell’s Angels’ pops by the trailer for a meal. Richard brings his girlfriend by and they smoke a joint and we rent a film from the blockbuster in Gastonia. I wish I could slip back inside. I wish I could visit the trailer and see my parents in their youth, still full of hope and playing video games. I wish I could make my grandpa pizza. I'm proud of the way I resemble him when my beard is full and I bet he would love my pizza. I feel so far and away from all of the people who were pillars of my youth. Hardly a one remains. I am just this lost villager from a forgotten & abandoned people; a punchline in some white liberal's social media diatribe. A white trash wanderer- living ghost of my ancestors. ++++++++ This record was funded largely through $1 contributions via Venmo, Cashapp, & PayPal from people who believed in me or thought it was a quirky fundraising idea. It was an impossible dream to create this album that meant so much to me manifested by the kindness of others. The above essay was written 2 years ago and the songs on this record largely fell out of it. The players on this record were folks I had dreamed to be able to pay well to perform with. The studio we recorded in was a block or so from the first apartment I ever lived on my own. A lot of meaningful pieces came together for this and it all began with a phone call to my friend Kyle on October 30th, 2021. I said, "I want you to do something on my new album yet but I haven't decided what yet." He said, "Why don't you let me produce it & my buddy Robbie Artress can engineer?" I said, "Well, we'd have to raise at least 5k by the end of the week to hire the folks I'd want to hire and all that." Kyle said, "Maybe you can, I don't know." So, that night I posted a silly Tik Tok saying all I needed was 15,000 people to donate $1 each for the album to be funded. That included a budget for production, mastering, publicist, radio, & the whole shebang. By Tuesday, we had $5,000. I paid for the studio time and started asking people if they'd come. By the end of December, all the parts had been tracked & I was slack jawed. I threw a little party at my buddy Troy's tattoo shop. We got tattoos and ate barbecue & listened to the first mixes and took photos for the album cover & accompanying lyric book. What a rush, the whole thing. A whirlwind.

'White Trash Revelry' offers no elegy for hillbillies. Through deeply empathetic songwriting, Adeem the Artist has made one of the best country albums of 2022.