My mom’s hairbrained advice to me when I was younger was that I should move to England to pursue music. She was born there, and my Grandma Mary — a somewhat difficult woman who, whenever my sister and I would complain about having to go see her, my mom would defend by shouting, “GRANDMA MARY SURVIVED THE BLITZKRIEG!!!!” — was from Manchester. From being a teenage girl during the height of British Invasion (she used to brag about how on a trip to visit her grandmother, she got to touch the outside of the Cavern Club), to obsessing over how MI6 killed Princess Di, to now watching her beloved Acorn TV all day, my mom just loves British shit in general. And her thinking was that if I went to England, I could pick up all the local slang to use in my song lyrics, while also seeming exotic as an American from New York.
I imagine the Brits would hate a guy like that. But it’s cool that Jim E. Brown, the 19-year-old obese alcoholic Mancunian alter ego of a guy from Philadelphia, seemingly does so well across the pond. He’s basically the embodiment of how most Americans see British people: the disgusting and pale result of centuries of inbreeding on a tiny, grey island smaller than Michigan, musing about the grossest food imaginable. And yet, my lazy Google searching indicates that when Brown holds this unforgiving mirror up to their faces, Mancs happily play along in interviews and sing every word of his songs back to him at shows.
I first heard of Brown when my band Hit played a show with him in Brooklyn a couple years ago. All I knew going in was that he had a song called “I’M AN OBESE ALCOHOLIC” where he says the title of the song. At the show, he performed a tune called “SOMEONE LEFT 4 CHICKEN FILLETS IN MARIE LOUISE GARDENS,” and passed around heavily pixelated black and white printouts of the offending fill-its. I’ve seen him perform once since then, but frankly, his constant deluge of output — AI-generated Instagram carousels chronicling everything from losing custody battles to dating the judge who took his kid away to her dying to Brown himself dying, plus several self-published memoirs and seemingly a billion albums — is too much for me to keep close tabs on. I’ll check out his food review videos when they don’t look too nasty, and note when I scroll upon a good song.
One that’s stuck with me is “The Queue at Greggs,” from his most recent album I Urinated on a Butterfly. It’s a melancholy number about how the lines at the British bakery chain are so long they make him want to self-harm, as he needs the instant gratification of stuffing sausage rolls and steak bakes in his gob. It’s so simple yet well written that while it is funny, I think I almost tune out the humor and connect with Brown’s yearning to “imbibe and devour” on an earnest level.
The time I played with him, the crowd was pretty sparse, but there were a few people there rocking matching Jim E. Brown shirts, which impressed me. The second time I saw him, a year or so later, he packed the house, and attendees dressed up apparently as characters from his songs or something, and tried to riff with him from the crowd, seemingly to his annoyance. It was like what I imagine showings of The Room or Rocky Horror or whatever are like, and I mention it to illustrate how in the grand scheme of things, I probably do not truly Know Ball when it comes to Jim E. Brown. Does he have any songs where he pronounces the letter H in the funny British way — haytch — like Mark E. Smith? I couldn’t tell ya, but that I even ponder it goes to show that all those blood-sucking music industry types might be onto something when they talk about “world building.” No one ever thinks about how I pronounce the letter H…
Hit’s latest single, “Pure Unreal,” is out now.
