Phoebephobia

 "I wonder what Mark Fisher would have thought about the spread across all the end-of-year lists of what is effectively (regardless of genre or sonic specifics) a new singer-songwriter ethos...  recordings approached and analysed and felt largely as literary expressions... narratives of self, social comment, political stances and statements, representations of identity, thematic links  ....  the criticism surrounding it somewhat more attentive to sound and rhythm than Paul Nelson's purely literary appreciation of  Jackson Browne's The Pretender in Stranded, but fundamentally it's coming from the same place, the same understanding of how popular music works and what it's for.  

"Today, listening to and reading about this kind of album ... it feels like what's going on between artist and critics is a performance of  Importance and Seriousness - Masterpiece Theater you could call it - one that harks back achingly to a time when such major statements could be presumed to be of universal significance. In that sense, true retro rather than surface retro... "

Wheeling out these 2020 thoughts once again in honour of the new Phoebe Bridgers record....

I am not really a Phoebephobe. I saw her play a fundraiser for a Democratic candidate in 2018 in someone's back garden in Los Angeles. She was playing support to  - or sharing a stage with - Conor Oberst.  And she was fine. A pleasant sound. 

Just an up-and-comer then:  I had no sense she would become such a figure, taken oh-so-seriously by the bigwig critics. 

(Boygenius is about as milquey sounding a group as imaginable, though)

It does kind of amaze me that folks have gone back to this way of treating popular music: as literary effusions set to sound .... 

So in one of the current pieces on Bridgers there's a reference to "the line-after-line sense of surprise".

Another talks about her "filmmaker’s eye for a cold open. Sometimes her songs disorient from the jump, dropping you into an alien landscape or the middle of an argument. Other times she draws you in with a dreamy establishing shot—and then snaps it into sharp, unsparing focus.... seemingly effortless lines, lines that take a small shard of experience and hold it up to the light, .... has honed one of the most distinctive songwriting voices in indie rock today—wryly observational, ruthlessly introspective, downcast but never wallowing." 

There are parts of these pieces that deal with sound in itself - the use of vocoder, the fact that she's been listening to ambient music and it shows.... but in the end, the sonic is always in service to the literary-poetic. 

Bruce Springsteen, 1974

It threatens to make me even more Jankelevitchian in my stance

But then I remember I too enjoy the "words" part of  "words and music"

In fact, it was the words that originally pulled me into rock music - Johnny Rotten's and Ian Dury's.

As a bookworm, already writing constantly, this was my entry point, the thing that hooked me.  The clever, funny, provocative or thought provoking lyrics. The frolic of language, the wordplay, the mischief with meaning. 

The most recent example of that kind of enjoyment would be the first Dry Cleaning album, where it's the words above all, the cadence of delivery, and the tonal affect, that get me - and I do really treat the music as a pleasing and apt support, a literal vehicle for what's being said. 

So I don't dismiss the idea of the singer-writer as a poet, or a story teller

I just think it's not the whole story.

You shouldn't - couldn't - reduce In a Silent Way, or Music for 18 Musicians, or Tago Mago, or Another Green World, or Solid Air to a meaning. 

(Or Led Zeppelin or AC/DC for that matter. Or Chic. Or "It Takes Two"). 

(But nor should you do that even with text-forward works like The Hissing of Summer Lawns that seemingly invite the record to be read.) 

The instrumental or near-instrumental forms of music cannot be boiled down to semantic-expressive content....  this kind of music works as motion, as space, as immersive medium, as abstract passion play of intangibles and impressions... something to be experienced not interpreted 

The experience of time within a piece of music is not analogous to narrative (this is something the lyrics adapt themselves to....  most pop songs are not story-songs, the lyrics work through repetitions and loops that would seem like you'd lost the plot - literally - if you uttered them in conversation rather than song).

Critical formulations involving verbs like "says" when used in reference to an album or a song create the mistaken sense that a piece of music is trying to communicate something - when it might be more the case that it's trying to make you go through something.  An experience.

The experience itself is what it's about, rather than an alleged "fruit of experience"

Not a gleaned meaning, something you come away with.