Destroyer vs. Taylor Swift, or Why Al-Qaeda Should Have Won
I’m gonna pre-empt this piece by saying I have a fair bit of respect for Rob Harvilla. He’s one of the only pro music critics who really pays attention to country music, writing critically on both radio-ready and more traditional versions of the second most popular genre of music in the United State at a time when a lot of writers are loathe to pay attention to anything not happening in their backyards. Dude’s been kicking around the industry for at least a decade writing for every site you can think of, mostly good pieces too. He’s OG. So there is absolutely no excuse for him to be churning out writing like this hit job for Deadspin on the indie rock musician Dan Bejar, a piece that is pretty much useless to anyone except himself from the opening paragraph onwards:
“Dan Bejar is the sort of fussy, opaque, perpetually dissatisfied art-rocker type who’d delight in the fact that it’ll probably take me two paragraphs to explain him to you to anyone’s satisfaction. He hails from Vancouver and looks like the insouciant, chain-smoking, Sartre-quoting philosopher genius/doofus your beloved college girlfriend dumped you for; since the mid-’90s, he’s put out nine records under the (very cool, and somehow available) name Destroyer, a ridiculously random and combative and self-annihilating body of work that encourages you to have a Favorite and, more importantly, a Least Favorite. I’m partial to 2006’s knotty, elegiac Destroyer’s Rubies, which is like reading Ulysses while lazily floating down a river on a blowup toy alligator; I am least partial to 2004’s Your Blues, which sounds like a drunk merry-go-round committing suicide and is super helpful if you need to clear a crowded room in 15 seconds. There, I did it in one paragraph.”
The sense of smug self-satisfaction emanating from this graph is so rank you could vacuum-seal it and it would still stink up your house. First off: it’s absolutely not OK for writers to talk smack about Taylor Swift or any female artist’s looks. So why is it OK to do that with Dan Bejar’s? Making fun of guys who look like insouciant, Sartre-quoting philosopher genius/doofuses…homie have you checked a mirror lately? You look like THIS:
Then there’s the bit about a body of work that encourages you to have a Favorite and Least Favorite…as if the very act of forming opinions on an artist’s discography is somehow worthy of derision. Like cataloging your thoughts is something only nerds that like Destroyer could possibly do. Whatever, Harvilla tells you his favorites anyway, and then he congratulates himself for being able to do so. Are we supposed to be impressed that Harvilla is doing his job? Give yourself a gold star why don’t you. What really motivated me to write this post, however, is his thoughts regarding Bejar’s criticisms of Taylor Swift, which come from this Pitchfork interview and which I’m just gonna quote for your convenience:
Pitchfork: So you’re not listening to Taylor Swift in your downtime.
DB: Not too much. But, because I have a young daughter who’s in school now, I had this sneaking suspicion that Taylor Swift might be the dominant cultural theme of her generation and that I should listen to a song by her because I had never heard one. This was a couple of months ago. So I checked it out, and it gave me the willies. It wasn’t a reactionary thing. It was more from just hearing these hack nu-country melodies with dumb lyrics and some very advanced Pro-Tools production techniques that could dazzle certain music critics. I’m familiar with the fact that people who I count as intelligent are really into this woman’s records, and I don’t want to make this about Taylor Swift. I just generally have a more elemental take on things and I can’t hold up Taylor Swift as being either a figure of light or a figure of darkness because I feel like it brings down my poem to a level that’s too mundane. [laughs] So instead of being flabbergasted or outraged or dismissive, I really just want to pretend that those things don’t exist. Maybe I’ve always done a little bit of that, but I’m really steering into it now.
So what Dan Bejar is doing here is pretty much what a lot of successful musicians and also critics do. They study what’s popular and important, and try to break down why these songs are popular and important. Bejar is also attempting to take an interest in what his daughter is into, which is generally just good dad behavior (Bejarvior?). He draws a conclusion—Taylor Swift is popular because her songs are catchy, have simple melodies in popular chord progressions, and are produced in cooperation with proven industry hitmakers. On her album 1989 she has Max Martin executive producing—he’s written for Britney Spears, N’SYNC, Katy Perry, pretty much everyone big in pop music. That’s a name you might be familiar with. She also worked with people like Imogen Heap (an immensely popular solo artist in her own right), Timbaland protégé Ryan Tedder, who sings and plays Piano in OneRepublic and has written and produced for Beyoncé and Ariana Grande, and Shellback, who produced and wrote “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love” for Usher and was Billboard’s #1 Producer of 2012. To sum up, she’s got a team of proven hit-makers around her, the biggest hit-maker of them all.
No wonder 1989 is so popular, then, because it’s written by the same team that’s written at least half of the songs you’ve heard on the radio this decade! Obvie! That sort of music just isn’t Dan Bejar’s cup of tea, but he recognizes that a lot of people he respects truly, sincerely enjoy her music and he has no problem with it existing. So when he says he can’t call Taylor Swift a figure of light or a figure of darkness “because I feel it brings down my poem to a level that’s too mundane” he’s saying that to simply say “Taylor Swift is bad/good for the world” is the type of thinking that belongs in a high school music classroom—because she is neither. With the advent of the internet it has become easier than ever to create your own world, to exclusively pay attention to what you want to pay attention to. YOU choose the people in your Twitter feed! In Dan Bejar’s world, Taylor Swift exists as an artist his daughter enjoys. That’s it, and there’s nothing wrong about that.
taylor swift: more popular than apples (the fruit and the technology company)
This brings us back to Rob Harvilla, whose Twitter feed is comprised of mostly professional pop critics who see Taylor Swift as a VERY BIG DEAL and anyone who is dismissive of Taylor’s music as a threat to female songwriters or critical acceptance of pop music or whatever. So it’s his natural reaction to whine about other people disliking things that he likes, because music critics exist in a self-reinforcing feedback loop where any opinion differing from the consensus of your clique (Taylor Swift is good! Jack White is bad! Dan Bejar is crying white male tears!) is a threat that should be dismantled. That is why Harvilla is mad that a single indie rock guy doesn’t really like Taylor Swift: because thoughts like Bejar’s threaten the social pressure he experiences from his feed, a pressure that says you should like pop music or else you are a bore. Harvilla puts food on his table based upon the frequency and quality of the opinions he generates as a professional opinion-haver. It benefits him to run with the pack on these things.
But wait, you might say, I thought critics reflexively hated pop music! Well, since the 90s, there has been a rise in what is called Poptimism amongst professional music writers. To quote Maura Johnston writing for Noisey, Poptimism “is about throwing out the artificial distinctions that elevate Serious Mass-Appeal Music (usually made by men, and with guitars) over Frothy Bubbly Stuff (which often appeals to women as much as, if not more than, it does men).” That means being able to recognize that Soulja Boy’s “Crank Dat” is just as difficult a song to write as Nas’s “The World Is Yours”. Soulja Boy can’t write lyrical hip-hop, Nas can’t write chart hits, both, importantly, have tried and failed. That doesn’t diminish the fact that Soulja Boy and Nas are both insane geniuses who deserve their spots in a figurative Hip-Hop Hall of Fame. They just excel in different ways. If you want to see how musicians articulate Poptimism without using the term, I defer to will.i.am.: "[‘Boom Boom Pow’] has one note. It says 'boom' 168 times. The structure has three beats in one song. It's not lyrics — it's audio patterns, structure, architecture. Lots of people say, 'Black Eyed Peas shit is simple,' and I'll be like, 'No, fool, it's the most complex shit you even could fathom, that's the reason it works everywhere around the planet.'”
So make no mistake, in his spirited defense of Taylor Swift’s complexity, Rob Harvilla is a poptimist, but he would rather pretend that because he knows what poptimism even is (unlike 99% of adults in America) he is somehow Above the Fray and totally immune to the criticism, ‘”oh, you’re just a poptimist.” Deadspin is ostensibly a general-audience sports website, but make no mistake, Harvilla’s piece is not written for Deadspin readers but rather the people in his Twitter feed. THAT is why he nods in the direction of the Poptimism debate without ever engaging it. THAT is why he throws around terms like Poptimism and Rockism without ever bothering to define them for the uninitiated. He just naturally assumes his readership is on the same page as him, which is a SERIOUSLY LAZY and irresponsible behavior for a writer to have. In this Deadspin piece, Rob Harvilla is not trying to prove a point, but rather attempting to assert his own worthiness as a participant in an increasingly nebulous conversation. Critics who write for the purpose of seeking RTs and Favs from other critics are a good argument for why Al-Qaeda should have won.
Like dude, why are you trying so hard to defend Taylor Swift? She’s the single most popular musician in the world! As in number one, at the top, the only artist still capable of selling 1.3 milli first week. On the 2014 Pazz & Jop list, which is the aggregated list of every professional music critic’s favorite records of the year, she placed NUMBER SEVEN. People who write for Pitchfork and The New York Times and Stereogum—the very outlets that praise Destroyer—thought her album was better than albums released that year by Flying Lotus, Sharon Von Etten, Aphex Twin, Lana Del Rey, Freddie Gibbs & Madlib, fucking Leonard Cohen… The only world in which Dan Bejar dismissing her music is a threat is the one that exists inside your own echo chamber. If you want to be afraid of something, be afraid of your own inevitable mortality. Don’t be afraid of a diversity of opinions, and certainly don’t be afraid that the music of Taylor Swift will never, ever appeal to everyone under the sun.
I have one last thing to say regarding poptimism: disliking things because they are popular is silly from a critical perspective, but for the average person it is a completely legitimate consumer behavior. People refuse to watch Game of Thrones or just accept that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016 for the same reasons they won’t listen to Taylor Swift: Because in America, we hate the idea of a coronation. We hate the idea that someone else can decide what we want for us. In 2015, it has become uncool to dislike what is on the radio, and that is completely. fucking. insane.
Here are some completely unrelated songs that I think are good that I’m going to embed in this piece so that hype machine crawls this post and more than three people actually read it HA HA
