Adeem The Artist bringing fresh views to Iowa City concert

Salt and peppered with autobiography and unapologetic discourse, Adeem The Artist’s “White Trash Revelry” is a fresh treatise that confronts a broken heart and a dirty-window-view of a polarizing South.

Their previous effort, “Cast Iron Pansexual,” found the native North Carolinian running the gauntlet of realizing their nonbinary identity – the comfort of finally knowing, the fear of rejection, and especially the uncertainty of being other in often-tribalist Appalachia.

If that sounds niche, it is. But it’s also compelling to any outsider, full of ridiculously sharp wit and the kind of storytelling that pushes pulses. Audiences will hear that Friday night when Adeem performs at Iowa City’s Trumpet Blossom Cafe.

“White Trash Revelry,” which is Adeem’s seventh full-length studio album in a recording career that dates back to 2011, wields the same craft, perhaps with even greater savvy, widening the aperture for Adeem to address the marginalized, as well as the 21st century Southerner sick of romanticized stars ’n’ bars waving and selective denial.

Following a successful crowdsourcing campaign dubbed “Redneck Fundraising” and armed with a batch of tunes addressing poverty, addiction, and the foolishness of culture wars in America, Adeem (whose birth name is Kyle Bingham) enlisted fellow singer/songwriter and Tyler Childers’ tour manager, Kyle Crownover, to produce.

At Crownover’s suggestion, Adeem reached out in faith to an amazing roster of talent that proved more than willing to join the effort, including guitarist Joy Clark, banjo player Jake Blount, drummer Giovanni Carnuccio, bassist Craig Burletic and guitarist Jason Hanna.

“I wanted to record it in Knoxville. It’s where I live. It’s been a really special place for me for a long time, and I was able to find this studio that was a block from my first apartment I ever had and three blocks from the house I live in now. I live in the same neighborhood,” Adeem said in a recent interview.

“ ... I flew everybody in. I got an Airbnb in Knoxville, everybody met on the first day, and in three days we banged the record out. I’d play a song, we’d talk about the song, and then we’d run it as a band, and then we’d track it.”

Much of “White Trash Revelry” addresses the misconceptions and stereotypes of the South, especially in relation to racism and Adeem’s personal journey of understanding and confrontational awareness. In the song “Heritage Of Arrogance,” Adeem declares “I’ve been learnin’ our true history and I hate it.”

“I think that one thing I’ve struggled with — and this album is part of me working through — is that I think the impetus when you first get privy to these layers of injustice is to validate yourself as one of the ‘good whites,’ you know what I mean? Like, ‘I’m a feminist and I’m an anti-racist,’ and all that. And I think that’s good,” Adeem said.

“I think it’s a good impetus — it's shame for having believed wrong things and learning about it. But I do think that one of the biggest ways we make an impact on the culture is by owning it in a way that uses that language.

“I want to be really clear that the way I talk about misogyny and racism is not as one of the ‘good’ higher-minded feminist anti-racists. I am approaching it as somebody who is still actively working to dismantle my implicit biases, still working to uproot my misogyny and my racism,” Adeem said.

As a queer artist witnessing a conservative push to undo years of progress, while simultaneously imposing civil rights-crushing legislation, often under the banner of “Christian values,” Adeem The Artist sees the attacks as merely selfish politics.

“I take umbrage with a lot of the ways that language is used to create divisiveness in culture. Like right now, I’d say the biggest way that’s manifesting itself in my life and in the culture at large is the narrative being forced by Republicans that Christians and queer people are at war with each other, which is largely false.

“Actually, the war that’s happening is Republicans against seats they can’t win unless they come up with some ridiculous red herring to throw into the conversation. There are so many queer-affirming churches now. There are so many people in the queer community who are Christians,” said Adeem, who keeps their own counsel on religion and values.

“I don’t believe there’s nothing, so I guess I’m pretty definitively not an atheist,” Adeem said. “Culturally, I consider myself Christian. I mean, I was promised to God before I was born, I grew up memorizing the Scriptures. Those were the metaphors that I projected myself onto and the mythos through which I explored my own development and self growth for decades of my life, so I think I’m probably somewhat of a non-believing mystic. I think that’s probably the pocket I’m most closely falling into right now.”

“White Trash Revelry’s” finale, “My America,” channels the recycled myth of the country’s “Golden Age,” a view that inclusion of all people of color, LGTBQ+, non-Christian, or any other persons who defy a national “standard” somehow robs them of their identity and core freedoms.

“You know, there’s the line about, ‘You can call me a white supremacist, whatever helps you sleep,’ that’s a really jarring and combative line,” Adeem said. “I think it’s one that makes everybody clench their jaw a little bit because you almost want to respond viscerally to it when you hear it. That’s exactly the point, and that was a big part of it – inviting disparate perspectives to have space to dialogue.”