Capitol Steps RIP

I am a man of many strange obsessions. Lots of curious things fascinate me, including pop ephemera that is ultimately not particularly weird at all, or rather detritus that is utterly hypnotic in its banality. That’s why I am perpetually attracted to Garfield and it’s also why the recent announcement that after thirty nine years of existence, ferociously inoffensive D.C-era political pop parodists The Capitol Steps will be calling it quits is hitting me hard. 

For I am something of a Capitol Steps super-fan. For years now I have looked forward to July 4th and December 31st the way children look forward look forward to Christmas morning because on those blessed dates, the Santa Claus of comedy would drop an audio candy cane in my stocking in the form of a new NPR Capitol Steps special that would lampoon, through song, shtick and shenanigans the political events of the day.

Oh, but I would get excited when a new Capitol Steps podcast “dropped!” What joy I derived from their mild antics, from their affable eternal mediocrity, from the unrelenting predictability of all of their choices, musical, comic and otherwise! I didn’t just chuckle at Capitol Steps when they made fun of how often Donald Trump tweets or how difficult it is to pronounce Pete Buttigieg’s name: I derived some strange existential comfort from Capitol Steps’ mere existence, from the fact that our world could sustain something so wonderfully silly and bizarrely, even poignantly safe and straight down the middle. 

I’ve written extensively about my Capitol Steps obsession for this website, of course, including an epic deep dive into every song on an entire special that I wrote right after the birth of my second son, Harris, and for my Pod-Canon column at Splitsider and The A.V Club. For a couple of years I had a mock feud with Capitol Steps, or at least their Twitter account and when my wife presented me with two tickets to see Capitol Steps perform live I was both overjoyed and touched because my wife, like pretty much everybody, is not into Capitol Steps at all, and I’m pretty sure also thinks they’re simpatico singing satirist, or rather “satirist” Mark Russell, a pretty common and understandable mistake. 

Yet my wife nevertheless accepted my weird fascination with these song-spoofing paragons of affable mediocrity enough to spend one of our rare evenings out as parents getting the full-on Capitol Steps experience. I loved it. It was exactly what I thought it would be. That was the appeal of Capitol Steps: you knew exactly what you were going to get, something cheesy and corny and militantly mainstream in its feverish bipartisanship, and deeply satisfying on those levels. 

I’ve been waiting for new Capitol Steps podcasts to drop and provide the definitive satirical take on what has been, honestly, a year that has presented a fair share of challenges. Yet I can’t say I was terribly surprised when new specials were not forthcoming. The world was on fire with disease and fear, after all, and an outfit that made its living entertaining D.C. tourists and touring the country understandably faced some obstacles in a world where tourism stopped instantly and everyone had to stay the fuck at home for the survival of our country and species. 

The news that Capitol Steps was ending after nearly four decades of musical merriment was not surprising, let alone shocking. But it is depressing and disappointing all the same. Perhaps there is no longer a place in our violent, angry world for a group as mild and mirthful as Capitol Steps. 

In a nightmare realm where armed radicals fed poisonous fantasies by a crackpot wannabe dictator storm  the steps of the Capitol at the behest of their demented cult leader’s crazed ego, the Capitol Steps’ name no longer seems quite so innocuous or apolitical. 

I am going to miss The Capitol Steps. They’ve given me a lot of pleasure over the years. I’ve gotten to the point where it doesn’t matter if that pleasure is guilty or ironic; I’ve come to appreciate pleasure no matter what package it comes in, and listening to the Capitol Steps has made the world seem safer, more predictable and more cozily familiar.

The end of the Capitol Steps consequently makes the world seem a little less safe and a little less predictable. It’s another casualty of COVID 19 and changing times, and I am sick of losing things I grew up with and naively imagined would always be with us. 

That’s why it’s good that you young people all got super into Quibi and learned the important lesson, right off the bat, that if you love something, it will be cruelly taken from you anywhere from three months to four decades after you get into it. 

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