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All Dressed Up, No Funeral: Guante & Big Cats’ climate crisis concept album

Guante

Surprise. The first new Guante & Big Cats album in over five years.

THE OFFICIAL BLURB: ‘All Dressed Up, No Funeral’ is a concept album about the climate crisis. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bunch of songs about trees or the importance of recycling—decorated indie Hip Hop duo Guante & Big Cats have crafted a furious, laser-focused rebuke to doomsaying, “abandon your posts”-style cynicism. This is an album about how while it is naive to believe that victory is inevitable, it is equally naive to believe that victory is impossible. It’s about how collective action can be healing, how grief can be a superpower, and how hope can—and often must—have sharp edges. 

AND A PERSONAL PITCH: I wrote most of these songs in late 2022 and early 2023, and obviously so much has changed in the world since then, and so much of my own attention has been elsewhere. So as much as this is a “climate crisis concept album,” on a deeper level, it’s really an exploration of hope, and grief, and collective action. The connections should be clear: all crises are intertwined, and we have power and agency to work together to do something about all of them too.

I feel confident in saying that this is some of the best writing I’ve ever done. And beyond my own contribution, producer Big Cats is in top form, we have knockout guest appearances from Lydia Liza and b ferguson, and the artwork by Destiny Davison perfectly captures the spirit of the project. There’s actually more content on the way too: some cool video stuff, some gorgeous commissioned artwork, and some live performances; stay tuned.

Whether you’re an indie-Hip Hop head, or someone who grew up watching Button Poetry videos, or a narrative strategist, or just a person who cares about the climate, thank you for listening. It’s not like there’s any money or prestige in releasing music as an underground/indie act these days, haha, so it really does mean even more when people listen, because this is something I *had* to get out, and share, and it means a lot to me. I hope it can be useful to others too.

Some press/commentary:

1. ‘I Love Writing About Complicated Things Using Very Everyday Language’: Guante and Big Cats Tackle Climate Change interview at Racket.

2. The Best Hip-Hop on Bandcamp, August 2024 via Bandcamp.

3. A shout out from Rebecca Solnit (!?)

4. Some kind words over at Reviler

5. We’re #3 on Racket’s list of The 20 Best Local Albums of 2024

6. A cool spotlight from Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios for their Hot Track Friday project

A few favorite moments

The full lyrics to each song are available on the Bandcamp page. These are some highlights. Please feel free to download these and share them on social media, if any speak to you.

art: Natalie Hinahara
art: Destiny Davison
art: Destiny Davison

(those last three are also available as part of a postcard print bundle!)

ALL DRESSED UP, NO FUNERAL: A deeper dive into the story of this project

For anyone who might be interested, some thoughts on the process/approach to all this, plus some recommended readings and resources.

GUIDING ASSUMPTIONS

One of my favorite memories from being a kid is reading the little liner note booklets that would come with CDs. They’d often include the song lyrics, plus other notes on the process. It’s an old-fashioned thing, but I thought it’d be fun to do for this project. So as a first step into that, I wanted to share some of the “guiding assumptions” that were on my mind as I was writing this concept album about hope, grief, and the climate crisis.

1. Stories are more powerful than facts, and relationships are even more powerful than stories. Part of creating art about social or political topics is asking complex questions about that relationship piece: What is my role in the web of people, networks, and audiences that I have access to? What do I have to offer, based on the identities I hold, my life experience, and how/where my work generally “lives” in the world?

2. Contribution, not competition. No one song, poem, or piece of art has to be the entire story. It’s perfectly fine to challenge ourselves to be great, but the goal is not just to make “great” art, or say clever things, or have the “right” politics. The goal is to add something useful, or memorable, or even just “my own” to a conversation that is, and must be, bigger than me.

3. Being right is not the same as being effective. For example, critique is definitely valuable, but if everything I create, share, post, or think is about how “other people are doing it wrong,” I am going to lose. Even if I’m right. A statement or position can be right and demobilizing, or it can be right and mobilizing. Too many of us focus too much on just being right, and not whether it’s mobilizing or not. As I write this, I’m in the middle of teaching a six-week course on the idea of “anthemic” writing: work that isn’t just “good” or “right,” but that mobilizes and inspires. Easier said than done, of course, but a useful reference point.

4. Every struggle is connected, and that’s not a metaphor. If we’re going to talk about climate, we have to talk about war, racism, policing, misogyny, capitalism, and beyond; it’s never just about climate.

5. Do something cool. Don’t underthink it, but don’t overthink it either. It’s like, the songs have to work as songs first. As artists, we have so much room to maneuver, so many opportunities to go beyond “pointing at the bad thing and saying that it’s bad.” I think it’s important to be weird, and fun, and human, even/especially when talking about this existential threat to our species and our world.

These points are the result of both my personal work (with groups like MPD150 here in Minneapolis and the general counter-narrative masculinity education stuff I do regularly) and the insight of organizations and initiatives like Narrative Initiative, ReFrame, The Opportunity Agenda, Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab, Change Narrative, Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Ecosystem, Ricardo Levins Morales’ Tending the Soil series, and others: all projects interested in the intersections of narrative, policy, and movement-building.

All that was on my mind during the process of putting this album together, but at the end of the day, it’s just music. I hope people like it; even if you don’t dive deep into all this process stuff, I hope it can be a fun half-hour playlist for a workout or whatever. I’d love for it to be useful to others beyond that, but if nothing else, it’s definitely been a useful experience for me.

So why a concept album about the climate crisis?

I’ve wanted to write these songs for a long time. On one hand, we all know that this issue is important—that it is one of the most important things we could be addressing in our work, creative or otherwise. But I think, partly despite that and partly because of that, it isn’t easy.

I feel like a lot of the art that responds to the crisis is weirdly passive. On one hand, there’s the kind of observational, apolitical, it sure is weird that we’re living through an apocalypse stuff; on the other hand, there’s the more explicit “doomer” content that, to me at least, is more concerned with sounding clever and above-it-all than sharing anything useful (and I mean “useful” in both an activist sense and an artistic sense: it’s hopeless! is just so boring to me). And I guess there’s a third hand too: the everything’s going to be fine toxic optimism stuff, which is a bridge to the overwhelming majority of art that simply doesn’t even acknowledge the crisis at all.

So going into this, I knew what I didn’t want to do. It was just a matter of finding out how to step into the topic in a way that aligned with the “guiding assumptions” I shared in the intro.

When we know what we want to write about on a content level, but don’t know where to start on a form level, what do we do?

My first impulse is often to just “say the thing.” And that can work—an example might be my poem Ten Responses to the Phrase ‘Man Up,’ which is just a super straightforward, to-the-point exploration of dominant narrative masculinity. I don’t think that approach is good or bad; I just think it’s important to mix it up, to not always use the same tactics. So I’ve really tried to challenge myself to start from a foundation of images—whether they’re memories and personal stories, or fantastical images, or whatever else. That way, I’m not just repeating slogans and jargon; the content is rooted in something real.

For example, the first line of the first song here is a concrete image, not a deep thought or manifesto. Images drive the other songs too: sitting on an airplane, crying behind sunglasses; sitting shotgun with Medusa as she reaches up and snaps the rearview mirror off; the specific day it was 92 degrees in October in Minnesota; the lost astronaut, the crunch of the apple, the robot cop, and on and on.

And while this impulse to “zoom in” is a basic building block of creative writing on that form level, I’ve found it to be a useful framework for thinking about content too. It’s like, am I just “writing about the climate crisis,” or do I have something specific to say about the crisis?

The approach, the angle, the hook

First, I knew this was never going to be an album about fossil fuel consumption, carbon offsets, or the Green New Deal. I don’t have anything useful to add to that conversation. But when we really zoom in on the topic of climate, there are elements that I am equipped to talk about, things I can potentially contribute to the larger conversation based on the work I’ve been doing over the past decade: Narrative and counter-narrative. How dominant culture masculinity, white supremacy, policing, and a bunch of other issues connect to the climate struggle. The relationship between hope and collective action.

Second, everything kind of clicked when I started to explore the topic of grief. People smarter than me have written about how the anger, fear, and frustration so many of us feel—whether we’re talking about the climate crisis, the pandemic, US funding for the genocide in Gaza, or any other issue—are all tangled up with the concept of grief. We grieve for the world, and we grieve for the absence of the world that could be, if only things were different. Grief is overwhelming, but it’s also universal: we all feel it, at one point or another, on a deep, personal level. There’s a power there.

That’s something that’s really interesting to explore as a writer: the dominant narrative of grief is that it’s a profoundly individual experience, that it’s a “bad” feeling we have to passively bear until it fades away. But when millions of people are feeling the same grief, how might that open up space for a counter-narrative? Is there something useful we can draw from that, both in terms of how we think about climate grief, but also the grief that blooms from losing people in our lives?

On a process level, I feel like this project “zoomed in” from being about climate, to being about grief, to really being about finding hope through collectivity, collaboration, and community: I feel grief the most overwhelmingly when I am holding it by myself. I feel climate despair the most apocalyptically when I am thinking about it through an individual lens, through the image of a single person staring at the oncoming storm.

And the flipside: I feel the strongest when I am working with others toward a common goal. Win or lose. So that’s where the album came into focus. These are songs about hope. Yeah, it’s all in the context of the climate crisis, but the songs aren’t really about the crisis. They’re about the power that we have to do something about it.

A handful of recommended readings and resources

Nothing super formal, just a few of the books that I was reading and/or thinking about while writing this album:

And a few articles too:

I also want to shout out b ferguson, one of the only guest artists on the album. The vocal sample on the album’s ninth track is from the first link here:

And two of my zines that fit into this conversation:

From BTS to Gramsci to Springsteen to the Simpsons to Rage: a big list of notes, references, and “works cited”

There are a ton of little references, allusions, and easter eggs on this album, because even though it’s about a serious issue, part of my approach to songwriting is just channeling all the random stuff that happens to be on my mind and having fun. I try to make the references fairly obvious; for example, there’s a moment on the album where I repeat the “some of those that work forces” line from Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.” The thing is, to me, that is a very obvious reference to one of a very major band’s biggest songs. But in 2024, with a culture that has so thoroughly shattered into a thousand micro-cultures, I have to assume that a lot of listeners aren’t going to get every line like that. So here’s a kind of informal works cited list, organized by song:

Whatever You Do, Don’t Put the Words ‘Climate Crisis’ in the Title

Nuke the Whales (feat. Lydia Liza)

Roguelike

Hey There Medusa

Look on My Despair, Ye Mighty, and Work!

What to Say to the Police

It’s the End of Their World as They Know It, and I Feel Nothing (feat. Lydia Liza)

In the Endless Dark of Night, Eating Apples

I Didn’t Believe in the Fight; the Fight Made Me a Believer (feat. b ferguson)

Never Tell Me the Odds

Once again, thank you for reading, and thank you for listening.

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