Words Fail Carly Rae Jepsen

I don’t read conventional music journalism/album reviews so much any more, because they increasingly drive me to despair. More and more, I perceive the insufficiency of writing when it comes to dealing with pop music. Music writing is its own genre, of course, and it can be very powerful, but it is also guilty of producing a whole load of bizarre value categories and interpretative frameworks in its desperate attempt to differentiate, define and assess musical phenomena. Most of all, I really believe that most of the dominant music review ‘narratives’ — i.e., the ways in which a review is given its own ‘literary’ structure — have very little if anything to do with how people actually listen to music.

Two recent and extensively discussed albums — Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION and Ryan Adams’s 1989 — provide perfect examples of this. I have to thank my friend Georgia (@gmllgn) for alerting me to the controversies surrounding both of them; her arguments were the motivation for this post. While both album releases were their own events, reading the resulting critical reactions alongside each other proves fascinating. The Ryan Adams album is a song-for-song cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989, with each song reworked/reinterpreted in Adams’s own style. This provided some (but thankfully not all) reviewers with the opportunity to rehearse their most unreconstructed rockist arguments, about Adams finding the depth and the complexity in Swift’s superficial music, etc. etc. This is a line of argument that is quite unambiguously sexist, in 1) its arbitrary attribution of certain values (depth, complexity) to some sonic characteristics and not others, and 2) its privileging of these (usually ‘masculine’/rock) values over others (usually ‘feminine’/pop). For a round-up of such critical reactions and analysis of their problematic aspects, Anna Leszkiewicz’s article ‘Ryan Adams’s 1989 and the mansplaining of Taylor Swift’, in The New Statesman, says it all.

Adams’s project, like any white indie guy’s appropriation and ‘authentication’ of a female pop artist’s music to make it palatable for his own earnest white male audience, was quite straightforwardly sexist, even before the critics weighed in. The case of E•MO•TION is far more complicated. It is, of course, an incredible album, with brilliant pop song after brilliant pop song, no filler. It is even better than 1989 (the original). And yet it has proven near impossible for some critics to write about. I am mainly talking here about the review by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian (that Georgia discusses, below) and the eerily similar review by Corban Goble in Pitchfork.

Some heartening notions...

I try more and more to view art and culture, as a whole, with as much optimism as I can muster. It isn't hard at the moment, because I genuinely think that pop music has never been better (and the same could be said for cinema and television). There are various lines of cynicism that it can seem easy to subscribe to, but when I start to become more cynical about contemporary culture, then I will know that I am old. Meanwhile, here are some nice (alphabetised) quotations from Pitchfork's column, Poptimist (by Tom Ewing), which present a more upbeat take on some familiar moans:

'B is for Bloghouse: And Bleep, Broken Beat, Bassline... the proliferation of electronic microgenres seems to truly rile some people, who assume any differences are barely detectable. In fact these taxonomies are vital for tracking shifts in the bigger pictures: ways of telling stories about scenes which are often still doggedly star-free. Besides which, they're so much fun-- each one the light-trail of an idea being tested and refined in public.'