Album of the Week: The Afghan Whigs — Gentlemen (1993)
By 1993, the Afghan Whigs had already spent years proving they didn’t fit the Sub Pop mold. Cincinnati rockers who stood out among the grunge roster for their soul influences, splitting the difference between Hüsker Dü and Prince, they’d built a reputation on brooding, off-kilter records before jumping to a major label. Gentlemen was that jump, recorded largely at Ardent Studios in Memphis with Greg Dulli producing, released October 5, 1993 on Elektra.
I hit this record hard in my early twenties, full hormonal force, a young man coming into his own adulthood with all the swagger and sneer that entails — and Gentlemen has swagger and sneer to spare. It took years, and more importantly actual experience, to hear what was really on the record. What I once heard as pure attitude I now hear as something closer to confession.
The title is the album’s first joke, and its cruelest one. Dulli intended it ironically — the record chronicles a bitter breakup, guilt, manipulation, self-righteous anger, and raw, unhinged obsession, all filtered through a narrator playing a character while genuinely seeking catharsis. This isn’t a breakup album in the diaristic, wounded sense so many alt-rock records of the era leaned on. Dulli casts himself as the villain of his own story and dares you to still find him charismatic.
What keeps Gentlemen from collapsing into pure ugliness is the same thing that made the Whigs outsiders on Sub Pop in the first place — the soul. Dulli’s clearly studied Stax and Al Green as closely as he’s studied punk, and that tension between grimy alt-rock guitar and genuine R&B phrasing gives the record a swagger most confessional rock albums don’t have. It sounds seductive even when the lyrics are indefensible, which is the whole, uncomfortable point.
I still love this record, but I see it more clearly now for exactly what it is — the ugly breakup album, dressed up as a strut. Dulli remains, in my book, one of the most underrated songwriters of his generation, and Gentlemen deserves a lot more shelf space in the conversation than it gets.