my mortifying month
This is mainly just a link to my latest Pitchfork column.
As a bonus, though — this month has been so mortifying that I actually have to tell you about it! It’s a story of heavy-duty teeth-gnashing, and the cautionary tale of a writer who slowly realizes that he has forgotten something basic about the use of the English language.
It starts like this. At the beginning of the month, I was working on a piece for New York about new albums from Wilco and Feist. As I was listening to and reading about them, I came across a quote from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, in which he said he was sure plenty of people would react to his band’s album with a knee-jerk “meh.” And I thought: He’s probably right about that! Anyone who’s watched the reception of albums like these has surely noticed that the “meh” issue is a big point of contention. Lots of people have pre-existing suspicions about the music being categorically “dull.”
So I figured I’d write an essay about that phenomenon. The piece was aimed at people who aren’t music geeks. It was intended to outline some facts I imagined weren’t that controversial:
- Wilco and Feist have new albums out, and here is what they sound like.
- As it happens, there is a pretty popular pocket of indie acts making well-crafted, classicist music like this, with a wide, cross-generational appeal — almost like an adult-contemporary sort of appeal, at times.
- There are some listeners who find that sort of thing tiresome, and have basically reactionary responses to it, like suddenly craving music that’s less tasteful.
- People argue about this a lot.
So I sat down and wrote a bunch of words I was pretty sure meant that — a rough overview of a thing geeks fight about. That was the extent of the article’s content. I thought so, anyway. I went over it a few times (and even got annoying and obstinate with my editor) in an effort to make sure it contained no personal opinions about this whole phenomenon. The one personal judgment I slipped in was that I think the “reactionary response” — the sudden uptick in space for music that’s self-consciously working to be adventurous — is something I like seeing. But for the most part, there were only two goals: (1) to explain to an ordinary person what’s at stake in the politics of taste surrounding these acts, and (2) to express some sympathy for a guy like Tweedy, who knows his work will into this “meh” eye-rolling no matter what.
All of this was a massive and ghastly mistake, and apparently my biggest-ever failure of communication as a writer, which is saying a lot. This thing was a massive debacle. At present I am very nearly afraid to talk to anyone — friends, family, grocery clerks — because I am no longer confident the words coming out even mean what I thought they did. Apparently, every last person who read the article was positive I was saying that this music was awful, that I didn’t like it, that I thought it was too safe and tame, and that I had something against Sting.
But!..but!..but!… Maybe this is a sign that a disproportionate part of my web reading takes place in the music-geekier corners of the net, but hasn’t this idea been tossed around for quite some time now? Over the past two years, at least, it seems like I’ve been reading arguments about the taming of indie, the mainstreaming of indie, about what happens as indie grows up. I’ve read blog posts somewhere about the Feist album from a couple years ago, worrying over whether it could be considered dinner music, and if so, what’s wrong with music to eat dinner to, anyway? Nitsuh himself had an excellent column in the Pitchfork decade-end wrap up about the evolution of indie into something more mainstream and sophisticated, and what that might mean for the direction of music.
I read the original NYMag article, and I’m baffled that it’s controversial. Nitsuh is an important music writer, one of the most insightful that I read on a regular basis. If there was anything wrong with this column, it was that it seemed to blatantly state the obvious. I didn’t read it as carrying the author’s opinion on any of the artists mentioned; it was clearly a “this is what some people say” type of piece. But even if it had, would that really be so offensive?
