Kitty Empire’s “MJ Lenderman review – a shooting star from the American south” begins:
A pedal steel guitar is weeping in one corner of the stage, comforted by a keyboard countermelody coming from the opposite end. Centre stage is up-and-coming guitarist of the moment MJ Lenderman, a study in slackerish nonc muels freewheels by his side, flinging lots of hair around.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what is intended by “nonc muels,” or what it might be a typo for. Mind you, it’s the Grauniad, so anything’s possible; I welcome all suggestions. (Thanks, Trevor!)
A kind of shoe? Mules?
Is “freewheels” a noun or verb here? Is “muels”?
Maybe: slacks and mules [mules are a kind of shoe].
Nunc brand mules.
Seems that “slacker” is a current fashion in attitude. Urban dictionary: “An underachiever or irritatingly laid-back character.” I’ve run across the word before – like “Gen Z”, “yuppie”, “millenial”, “coconut” and so on, it’s another one of those irritatingly vague notions that give people something to talk about who have nothing to say for themselves.
Note “slacker guitar hero” in the header. This is live documentary, not deprecation.
Others* have wondered too.
My 2¢ guess would be “nonchalance”. It kind of fits with what someone would write in this context. However I can’t see how that got garbled, by either human or robot.
* This on Bluesky, which is similar to Txitter but (so far) without the technical inconveniences and especially, without the slime.
Nunc brand mules.
Ding ding ding!
The Hattery comes through again! So it should read “Nunc mules”; it’s still unclear how the sentence works (to quote mollymooly: Is “freewheels” a noun or verb here?), but the main puzzle is resolved.
A further confusion is that Lenderman himself doesn’t appear to really have quite enough hair to actually fling around (less than the writer; less than me), suggesting to me that perhaps the “study in [whatever]” who may be the subject of “freewheels” taken as a verb is not Lenderman himself, but the more long-haired guitarist (toward the left side of the second photo, so on Lenderman’s stage-right side) who is named in one of the photo captions as Jon Samuels.* A semicolon following “Lenderman” might have been helpful if that’s the correct parse.
*Maybe the same “Jon Samuels” who has put out some solo work as “JR Samuels,” but I’m not entirely sure of that.
Not that I’m sure of what “freewheels” as a verb applied to a guitarist would mean in this context. Back when Bob Dylan was Freewheelin’, he had to my eye pretty short hair,* although maybe it was a bit shaggy by the standards of 1963 just before Those Lovable Moptops from Liverpool had revolutionized American attitudes toward male hair length. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan#/media/File:Bob_Dylan_-_The_Freewheelin'_Bob_Dylan.jpg
I think the comma after Lenderman could just as well have been a full stop. There are four roles (for lack of a better word) in the band. First it’s the weeping steel guitar. Then it’s the keyboard. The third is the guitar playing frontman, who is the only one with a name. Finally, and probably close to the guitarist, is the freewheeling slacker. I’d think it was the drummer if it weren’t such an unusual position for that.
That, or something got lost between “muels” and “freewheels”
Since the phrase “Nunc mules” is unknown to Google (except for one OCR error), and since none of the shoes shown on the site Stu linked seem to be mules, and since mules don’t seem like great footwear for rocking out, I’m not convinced that’s the solution.
mules don’t seem like great footwear for rocking out
It should not be necessary here to point out that true cool is a matter, not of footwear, but of headwear.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg
@David Eddyshaw: Mole had a bust of Garibaldi. I wonder if it was wearing that cap.
In this clip from the next tour date, I think it’s Jon Samuels [stage left] flinging hair and Landon George [standing stage right of Lenderman and behind] wearing mules.
In the picture I linked to, Lenderman is wearing mules, and they got a side strap like in the Nunc page Stu posted, though with a snap button instead of velcro or whatever.
(The picture is from this article. The image is clipped, so you need to open it in a separate page.)
I would respectfully direct Keith Ivey to Sugar Pie DeSanto’s 1964 classic “Slip-In Mules,” which was an “answer song” to the previous year’s “Hi-Heel Sneakers.” And for something heavier from the following decade there’s of course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mule_(song), especially in the extended (some would say overextended) live versions.
This is what I associate with “The Mule.” (I have the original magazine version; in fact, I have the entire run of Astounding from 1944 and 1945.)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=brVbfzTHods&t=10s&pp=2AEKkAIB
The Mule plot was really Azimov doing the “but wait, there’s a plot twist”! for the sake of plot twists.
OK, I withdraw at least the last part of my comment, but those look like Birkenstocks and nothing like anything on the Nunc site linked. I don’t have an alternative theory for what “nonc” could be an error for though.
Deep Purple apparently borrowed the title of their “The Mule” from Asimov, but Asimov AFAIK never tried to interpolate a six-minute drum solo into his version(s).
Maybe they’re the sort of shoes your Cajun uncle wears (probably not)? And I think Trond is right about there being some words missing between “muels” and “freewheels”.
To quote BlöödHag (from Asimov, natch):
I’ve never seen them in person, just saw once a documentary about them. They are bigger dorks than all of us put together will ever be.
@V: On the contrary, I think Asimov realized that he had run out of good ideas for stories following the original Foundation formula. “Dead Hand” is longer and less interesting than any of the other Seldon Crisis stories. It made sense to shake things up once the original idea was getting stale.
There is a Brit slang word:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nonc
Urban Dictionary also offers “to muel” as being from Special Prosecutor / former FBI Dir. Mueller – to investigate for years.
Can’t really make the semantics work, though, even as a bad joke.
Looked in a different window, and google is now offering me ads for mules. Hopefully they won’t use my search for the term nonc in their ad placement algorithms.