The Disquieting Genius of David Thomas

Remembering how the recently departed Pere Ubu frontman brilliantly skewered adolescent male despair.

David Thomas performs in Vienna in 2009.

David Thomas, singer and sole permanent member of the long-running rock ‘n’ roll band Pere Ubu, died last week at the age of 71. Hearing of his death, I found myself reminiscing about the first time I saw the band in 1993. I was 19 years old, and Thomas was—well, at the time I couldn’t have told you how old he was. To me then, he just seemed Old in the general sense. He wore a bowler hat and a black suit; he had a soul patch pinned beneath his bottom lip and a mischievously imperious way about him.

Watching him command the stage in Cincinnati that night, waving his hands around a theremin and vocalizing in a way only a generous listener would describe as “singing,” felt like an initiation of sorts. Maybe it was. Pere Ubu weren’t a popular band at the time; they had never been popular in any meaningful sense. They were, though, considered An Important Band in the post-punk era, which is why They Might Be Giants—whom I had come to see—invited them to be their opening act. “Here is a band,” TMBG was telling us teenage dipshits, “that deserves your respect and attention.” And anyone familiar with Thomas knows it was impossible not to give him your attention. The force of his oversized personality and carnivalesque stage presence demanded it.

I would like to tell you that I became a stalwart Pere Ubu fan that night, a true-believing convert to whatever cosmic creed Thomas was preaching. But I didn’t. Like Captain Beefheart before them, Pere Ubu wove some pretty audaciously unpalatable noise into their music. As a fan of engaging melodies and tuneful singing, I could only tolerate so much of David Thomas and his band of Cleveland weirdos before retreating back to my R.E.M. and Smiths CDs.

So I admired Pere Ubu more than I enjoyed them. And, after seeing them all those years ago, I filed them away in my mind as an estimable band, but not essential listening. As such, I’m supremely unqualified to attempt a comprehensive encomium of David Thomas’s catalog of music, which includes not only nearly 20 Pere Ubu albums but also countless solo and side projects. I’m scarcely more qualified to expound on the merits of what I believe to be the best Pere Ubu song, “Final Solution.” Nevertheless, that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of this essay.

“Final Solution” was originally written and performed by Rocket From the Tombs, the even more unhinged project from which Pere Ubu sprung. One could argue that it’s not Pere Ubu’s best song—that it’s not even the top track on Terminal Tower, the compilation CD where I first encountered it. One making that argument would likely nominate “Heart of Darkness”—ranked by Rolling Stone as the 72nd best debut single of all time—as the band’s crowning achievement. Obviously, I disagree with my imaginary interlocutor.

While “Heart of Darkness” is a pithy distillation of the avant garage aesthetic that defined Pere Ubu’s early years—an era most agree was their best—“Final Solution” is something else altogether. Fifty years since it was recorded, it has lost none of its edge. If anything, it gleams even more menacingly in the context of the current age, when the antisocial adolescent male rage it so vividly animates has reached a sort of critical mass with the so-called incel movement. Viewed through a cracked lens, “Final Solution” could be seen as the ultimate incel anthem—although Pere Ubu deserve better than to be associated with anything so sad and repugnant. Besides, “Final Solution” is a parody of teenage alienation, not a celebration of it. But the satire is cloaked in such a convincing veil of anguish that one could easily mistake it for an earnest call to action. Thomas leaves so little distance between himself and his protagonist that the song feels hauntingly real.

And then there’s the song’s title. According to Thomas, it’s a reference to the Sherlock Holmes short story, “The Final Problem,” not to the Nazi extermination plan. But the song sounds like it could’ve been inspired by death camps—its spare, tightly controlled intro is as chilling as anything Joy Division recorded. But what Thomas and his bandmates were really evoking wasn’t Auschwitz, but the dismal situation in Cleveland in 1975, when the infrastructure was in a state of advanced decay, the skies were choked with smog, and the river was literally flammable. This is the world where the protagonist of “Final Solution” has come of age, a place Thomas and his bandmates evoke with jagged darkness: lurching bass, grinding guitars, and a helicoptering synth conjure an industrial wasteland drained of hope.

“Final Solution” is grimly funny, but mostly its oppressively grim. Thomas chants the first line—“The girls won’t touch me ’cause I got a misdirection”—pronouncing “girls” like “gills,” suggesting that our protagonist may have an embarrassing speech impediment. He finishes the rhyming couplet with more pathetic self-deprecation: “And living at night isn’t helping my complexion.”

Thomas may be poking fun at the boy’s self-pity, but it seems to me that he also understands it. As the song chugs on, the ironic distance between singer and song narrows even more, and the blasts of hissing guitars that punctuate each rhyming couplet explode with cathartic exultation. It’s a song that can be read as absurdly hilarious and, at the same time, harrowing and even heartbreaking.

“Final Solution” was inspired by—and structurally imitates—a Blue Cheer cover of the corny 1950s bubblegum rock hit “Summertime Blues.” This brilliant bit of subversion is just another reason why, when it comes to depicting maladjusted adolescent male frustration, “Final Solution” is eons more effective than emo anthems by the likes of Wheatus or Fall Out Boy. It captures the humiliating pain and rage-inducing alienation with uncanny precision, while also acknowledging how pitiful it all is.

RIP, David Thomas. I fully approve of your strange kind of wit. The world is better for it. Godspeed.