Earlier this summer, the singer and guitarist Mk.gee played two sold-out shows at the Stone Pony, a rock club just off the boardwalk in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The venue, which opened in 1974, is situated in a squat, salted building that previously housed Mrs. Jay’s, a restaurant with a rough-and-tumble beachside bar next door, where broiling bikers once flushed down hot dogs with sweating pitchers of beer. In the seventies and eighties, the local upstart Bruce Springsteen was a regular patron and occasional performer at the Stone Pony. “That’s where I spent my Fridays and Sundays and I had no interest in what was going on in New York City or L.A.,” Springsteen told Nick Corasaniti, the author of “I Don’t Want to Go Home: The Oral History of the Stone Pony.” “I always said, ‘No, no, no,’ This is interesting. This is interesting to me.” Mk.gee, whose name is Michael Gordon, was brought up farther south, in Linwood, but seemed to feel similarly about the place. (He has applauded what he calls the “deep, mad sincerity” of his home state.) The Stone Pony can accommodate around eight hundred and fifty people; a few days later, Mk.gee would play for some fifty thousand at Governors Ball, a festival in New York City. Gordon has appeared on “S.N.L.,” and received affirmations from Justin Bieber (Gordon is a co-producer on a song from “SWAG,” Bieber’s new album), Bon Iver, Frank Ocean, John Mayer, and Eric Clapton, who compared him to Prince and said, “He has found things to do on the guitar that are like nobody else.” This summer, Mk.gee (pronounced McGee) is touring the U.S. and Europe. Already, it seems unlikely that he will ever perform in a room this small again.
Gordon, who is twenty-eight, is a wildly compelling figure in the pop landscape. It’s been a while since someone figured out a way to make the electric guitar sound not only interesting but expansive, dangerous, infinite, pliable. Gordon began releasing music in 2016, but he didn’t put out his début studio album, “Two Star & the Dream Police,” until last year. It was one of my favorite records of 2024, gorgeously sleazy and vaguely unsettling—an R. & B. album, sort of, only filtered through punk and psychedelia and something stranger, darker, and more spiritually nebulous (the internet). Gordon is a voracious pillager, and his work contains echoes of dreamy, melancholic pop songs from the eighties and early nineties, including Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” Bruce Hornsby’s “Set Me in Motion,” and, perhaps most palpably, Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight”—it’s the same articulation of yearning and menace, big desire and big ennui.
I attended the first night in Asbury Park. The crowd was young, rapt, tightly packed. The rapper Lil Yachty was there. “Jersey, is this my town or what?” Gordon asked from the stage. People went bananas. Kids had been lined up on the sidewalk since at least midafternoon. Gordon is an entrancing but mysterious presence in a room. He played a vintage Fender Jaguar, wore work boots, and assumed a wide stance. His face was hidden by wavy tendrils of hair. He was either shrouded in haze (the gasps of the fog machine eventually became indistinguishable from the vapor being collectively exhaled by the crowd) or obscured by low-angle backlighting. On paper, that effect might sound vaguely noirish—a forties gumshoe sparking up in the murky glow of a gas lamp—yet here it felt futuristic, almost extraterrestrial. It also looked extremely cool. (These days, opacity and obtuseness can feel like stylish munitions against a culture of relentless surveillance—hiding reconfigured as a kind of radical gesture.) Mk.gee’s music sometimes reminds me of the disorientation that comes from scrolling Instagram for a little too long, easing into a degraded sense of what is real and what is fantasy, of who you are and what you want. Gordon is interested in interrogating those odd, transitory, dissociative states—the moments in which we are deeply unmoored and aesthetically adrift. Though his guitar playing is tactile, occasionally virtuosic, he also seems to be purposefully making music that sounds like Phone. Something about it forces a person to consider her own catastrophic overreliance on technology, and to choose peace. (By the end of the evening, I was prepared to fastball my device into the frothing depths of the Atlantic.)
Gordon was accompanied by the multi-instrumentalist and programmer Zack Sekoff and the guitarist Andrew Aged. The trio played “ROCKMAN,” a one-off single from 2024. It’s an ambitious and idiosyncratic song that specifically recalls the Police. (I hear “Wrapped Around Your Finger” in the verses, though you could probably take your pick of singles to compare it to—Gordon mimics then reconfigures Sting’s phrasing and lopped-off delivery, the particular way he backs off a note.) Still, Gordon is not a romantic, and, whereas “Wrapped Around Your Finger” is about eternal, reluctant devotion, “ROCKMAN” positions love as less certain and more threatening. (The cover photo from the single is of someone pointing a handgun at a modular synthesizer.) The first verse is equal parts horny and portentous:
Yet, by the time Gordon arrives at the chorus, his voice is so suffused with tenderness—he sings in warm, cascading harmony with himself—that “ROCKMAN” begins to feel as if it’s actually about pining, or the act of slowly annihilating yourself for a person who’s hovering slightly out of reach. Gordon can be a bit of a trickster, and his songs rarely do what it seems like they should; resolutions are scant, and his hooks, though gripping, are often buried or interrupted. Everything sounds wobbly and underwater. Occasionally, an errant sound (an eagle screeching, the clanging of metal, a whisper) drifts through a verse. Around two and a half minutes into “I Want,” a ballad of obsession and self-doubt (“I’m not your hero / But I got his desire,” Gordon moans), the track briefly becomes an entirely different tune, gnarled and jerky, then finally slips back into place. In an interview with the Times last year, Gordon referred to his work as “refractions of perfect songs” and brought up a friend’s characterization of his writing as “trying to remember what pop music sounds like.” These are hits, made surreal. Gordon is not an especially confessional writer, but his voice, which at times stretches into a coarse falsetto, contains enormous amounts of emotion. “Alesis,” one of the best songs on “Two Star & the Dream Police,” is about estrangement and oblivion:
In Asbury Park, Gordon let the crowd sing the “Why me?” part, and we delivered the line with fervor. The question felt more confrontational than self-pitying. Even when Gordon’s songs don’t make narrative sense, they are underpinned by feelings of dread, longing, and frustration; some of them are nearly combative. Part of that seems inherent in Gordon’s creative philosophy—he likes wonkiness, and thwarting expectations, and never being perfectly legible or complacent. Even the Stone Pony dates had flickers of defiance—it would have made more sense, maybe, for Gordon to post up at a club in Brooklyn. Instead, he put on a show for restless Jersey teens, and anyone willing to make the journey from elsewhere, to drive toward the ocean until they ran out of road. He closed his encore with “Candy,” a song he had also played earlier in the set. (He does that sometimes.) It’s probably Gordon’s most forgiving and humane composition. “I’ve done some bad, I won’t fake it / I got patterns, don’t think I’ll shake it,” he sang, his voice soft. “Ah, but you fuck up too, and that’s fine / I cut you slack, you cut me mine.” The idea seemed to be that we all lose our marbles sometimes. The audience, hungry and eager, screamed along. ♦
