Adeem the Artist has declared this to be their “weird summer of chaos.”
During a phone interview with Little Village, Adeem the Artist spoke quickly and eloquently, a gentle type of proselytizing that led them at one point to say, “I’m grateful for the opportunity to get to sing my songs and tell my story and in some small part, I hope to establish the terms for conceptualizing a better world.”
Adeem the Artist — who also goes by Adeem Maria — is a pansexual, non-binary musician and activist. They have spent years writing and singing earnest, devastating and sometimes wickedly funny country and folk songs. On Friday at 9 p.m., that legacy of performance brings them to Iowa City’s Trumpet Blossom Cafe (310 E Prentiss St). Their latest full album, last December’s White Trash Revelry, caught wide critical acclaim and landed Adeem a nomination for the Emerging Act of the Year at the 2023 Americana Music Awards.
Then, this summer, things got “weird.”
First, in June, Adeem was invited to perform two songs from White Trash Revelry at the Grand Ole Opry: “For Judas” and “Middle Of A Heart.” Their name was even printed on one of those famous metal signs that hang on the dressing rooms of performers making their Opry debut. Now, that sign adorns the mail drop slot in their home.
Then, in July, Adeem the Artist was featured in the pages of Rolling Stone. Somehow, they managed not to find out about it for weeks.
“I didn’t know I was in it. Nobody tells you if you make it into print. Nobody. Somebody was like, ‘I saw you in the Rolling Stone.’ And I was like, ‘No you didn’t. You saw me on the website.’ They were like, ‘No. The issue with Janelle Monáe on the front. You’re in that.’ So I went on Amazon and pulled up all the Rolling Stone issues and found the cover and bought it.”
Beyond all of this, however, it’s just as likely you know them more recently from their song “Sundown Town,” a satirical take down of Jason Aldean’s conservative baiting, garbage can-country song, “Try That In A Small Town.” Vulture, Rolling Stone, Billboard and many others ran articles on Adeem’s cover, the latest in a long string of musical responses that Adeem the Artist has released over the last few years, taking on everyone from the governor of Tennessee to Toby Keith.
“People accused me of lacking nuance in my criticism of Jason Aldean. I was like, ‘You know I spent 10 minutes writing a joke song and posting it on the internet, right?’” Adeem said. “I think me taking swings at Aldean the way that I did, or me taking swings at Morgan Wallen or Toby Keith or the governor or the mayor of Knoxville, that is all from a place of being concerned for my kid’s safety … I don’t want my kid to grow up in a culture that admires and rewards white supremacy and patriarchal standards that will make my kid grow up in a world that is so effusively in denial of real, tangible change.”
Adeem, a seventh-generation Carolinian who has called Knoxville, Tennessee home for several years, said what’s worse is people doubting or discrediting their so-called “country music credentials.”
“One person said that he listened to ‘Books & Records,’ and he was like ‘I can tell you’re making all this up and that you have no idea,’” Adeem recounted. “That song is absolute first hand, like that’s me. That’s my granny Marie. … A lot of these country music world people just think that I’m an impostor. And it’s like, the reason is because they don’t want queer people to be seen. For so long, the only way you could thrive in any meaningful way was to get the fuck out and go to the big city.”
“Sundown Town” is an unquestionably blunt object from a musician that has otherwise made their name by delivering decidedly modern and sometimes haunting lyrics with a knowing and well-seasoned voice, used as often for singing as it has been for chanting at protests. (They are unofficially the first person to put “free Palestine” into a country song on “Rednecks, Unread Hicks” off of White Trash Revelry.) Through their songs, equally indebted as they are to both Woody Guthrie tunes and internet meme culture, Adeem considers their upbringing beneath Confederate flags, testifies about a family member’s battles with substance abuse and reevaluates the heritage that they have inherited with a bittersweet sense of both celebration and condemnation.
Throughout White Trash Revelry, but particularly on the song “Rednecks, Unread Hicks,” Adeem reclaims and recasts many of the stereotypes surrounding folks trying to survive and maintain inclusive communities in red states.
“I know so many ‘rednecks’ really trying to practice true harm reduction in their community and provide for those who have needs, doing what would have been clergy work when I was growing up,” Adeem said. “But now so many of those kids who grew up watching that are agnostic or atheist and queer, and don’t belong to any church that would have them. So mutual aid became the label for what would have been ministry before.”
I ask them if they see themselves as being brave for being truly vulnerable in their art and opening themselves up to the worst of the internet by lampooning “rich kid country” musicians and compassionless politicians alike.
“I’m hesitant to think of myself as courageous or brave. I think I’m probably more audacious. I think I have a sort of audacity,” they said. “I feel constantly the tension between being rooted in a profound tradition that I have an admiration for … I think I feel a lot of frenetic energy between tradition and progress rubbing up against each other. That’s the creative energy that moves the needle forward and imagines new possibilities.”
Avery Gregurich is a writer living and writing at the edge of the Iowa River in Marengo.
