#tbh I wasn’t vibing with Martin at first but now he’s my silly guy I love him

[potato-lord-but-not]

I love gay people 🫶🫶

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The Death of the Auteur

Amanda Petrusich is a rockstar. Figuratively. She’s not a musician. She’s a writer.

Her wiki says that she’s “an American music journalist and the author of three books” – 2007’s Pink Moon (a 33 1/3 series dissection of Nick Drake’s ’72 classic), 2008’s It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music (a sorta travelogue in search of what matters about roots-y bands), and 2014’s Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (descriptive title). She’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a former staffer at Pitchfork, and a current staffer at The New Yorker. She’s a member of a rock scribes guild that includes Robert Christgau, Michael Azerrad, Anthony DeCurtis, Greg Kot, Jim DeRogatis, and the ghost of Lester Bangs. (All dudes.) Along with her contemporaries and cohorts Jesse Jarnow, Sasha Frere-Jones, Hua Hsu, and a very few others in that field, she’s good at her job. Fwiw, she’s the best.

What makes her the best? She understands that, pace comedian Martin Mull, “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” So she straps on her tap shoes and just goes. Her stuff is always well-phrased, sure, but also well-structured. Her pieces typically feature something professional, and big – historical perspective, like she’s researched and listened. They also typically feature something personal, and small – individual perspective, like she’s lived and breathed a life informed and enriched by music. A jab here, a digression there, and then a deeper digression here and there. Grace, above all, everywhere. She makes me want to write – to write better, smarter, tauter and looser at the same time. She probably had/has good editors, but the craft and art is hers.

This post isn’t entirely about Amanda Petrusich. It’s also about Roland Barthes. I’ll get there, promise. (I’m assuming the tl;dr crowd checked out way before now. If you’re still with me, cinch up and hunker down.)

Last week, LN banned Ryan Adams for his indefensible treatment of women. I liked alot of Adams’ songs (tbh, who didn’t dig “New York, New York” post-9/11?), as well as his prolific output (another new album, I guess I’ll check that out). The things that kept me from loving him were his work-like approach to songwriting, and his generally douche-y look and demeanor.

The Pitchfork review of his 2008 record (with his occasional band, The Cardinals), Cardinology called it “melodically sound, remarkably insular and largely unaffecting.” That gets to my former point re: songwriting. I feel like there’s another review of another album on Pitchfork that riffs on how Adams’ music is simply finger exercises in mopey, alt-country. There’s nothing of him in his songs, just distant musings on relationship tropes that use rural, everyperson scenery, as well as vaguely twangy delivery and dated Nashville/Muscle Shoals instrumentation/arrangements, to provide cred. I scoured P4k (wow, they hate and love him in almost equal measure), but couldn’t find what I remembered. Trust me that that review exists. Or don’t, and just buy what I’m trying to say. Dude is “good” at his job. And it’s just a job. To borrow from P4k again – its take on 2005’s Jacksonville City Nights: “Nearly a dozen albums in, counting Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams’ shtick is that it’s all shtick.”

And then it wasn’t. He married and divorced Mandy Moore, decided to devote an entire album to the demise of that relationship – 2017’s Prisoner. Here’s his comment about it to the Japan Times:

“I started writing this record while I was going through a very public divorce, which is a humiliating and just a f—-ing horrible thing to go through no matter who you are. To be me and to go through that the way that I did was destructive on a level that I can’t explain. So a lot of extra work went into keeping my chin up and remembering what I did and what I loved about who I was.”

That hints at my latter point, and feeds the former. “To be me” is the weird part. Like he needs the interviewer knows that he’s a sensitive, press-shy guy, so any details of what that process entailed – the pains, the doubts, the regrets, the gotdam details of who gets the kids/pets and when (full disclo, I’m divorced, too) – was off-limits because of, well, him. But it was all good because of, well, him. He told the JT that he wrote “quite literally 80 songs, probably more” (OMF, that’s such a Trump quote) for Prisoner, discovering that he could “write out the bulls—- so I could get back to myself and say, ‘Cool. This is what is real.’ ”

That record is ok, but there’s nothing real about it. Again, P4k, from it’s review (after quoting some lyrics):

“[L]ines that feel like placeholders for universal truths or even personalized expressions of pain that rarely emerge. While it’s impossible to evaluate the album’s sincerity, inspiration is a more tangible quality, and Adams comes off like an A student uncharacteristically frozen by an essay prompt, filling the margins with the hopes that his reputation can get him out of this jam, this one time.”

Reputation, ok. That definitely goes to the latter point. Adams has a difficult one. The Ringer says, “Adams’s reputation has long preceded him, by design, like a human shield.” Basically, he’s difficult, and revels being so because he thinks he’s some sort of rock genius auteur – the attitude, like the disheveled hair and the frumpy clothes, serves the grander brand. Per Spin, he has used his influence to get websites to remove negative content about him – namely, a 2017 Consequence of Sound profile about Phoebe Bridgers, a singer-songwriter, a member of boy genius (whose s/t ep was my fave record of last year), a co-founder of Better Oblivion Community Center (with Conor Oberst), and, least of all, a former parter of Adams. What was so bad? In the profile, Bridgers observed that Adams “wigs out at people on Twitter all the time,” but added, “Do I ever text him and say, ‘Stop?’ Never. I think I’d wind up on the wrong end of a Twitter rant.” Wow.

Adams has also flexed on critics who have given his music less than glowing reviews. That includes Amanda Petrusich. She has previous with him. For P4k, she savaged his 2003 album, Rock N Roll, which then prompted him to summon her (via people) for an interview. It starts with AP saying that he talks fast, and then Adams hearsaying his “writer” friend informing that the website is “not very cool at all.” Ugh. He tells her that P4k is a “good resource,” which has a nice vibe because it supports indie material. To relate, I guess, he adds, “Today I got the first Pussy Galore record for $50,” (I doubt that), which he had been “looking for for so fucking long”  because he gets “cool records.” But. if I wasn’t him, he’d pass on Jon Spencer and Neil Hagerty, and “be like, ‘Dude, you have to check out this record, Gold, it kicks ass.’ ” (Aside: In the history of the world, there has never been a human being who has gone into a record store to buy Dial M for Motherfucker and settled for Gold, not even Mad Ego’s Ryan Fucking Adams.)

And then AP prods him, and mentions his comment that rock journalism is just exhibitionism. She says that she’s not cool and listens to the Grateful Dead (so do we at LN!!). His response:

“I fucking love the Dead! Jesse Malin got me a coupon for a Steal Your Face tattoo for my birthday. ‘Cause, you know, I want to be badass. [Laughs] There are a lot of things expected and not expected. I mean, back in the day, Jim Morrison fucking going crazy in Florida and maybe or maybe not pulling his penis out, or attacking a police officer– all this unbelievably decadent shit. That was news. Now it’s ‘singer/songwriter can be slightly hotheaded.’ I’m not trying to hurt anybody.”

Or maybe he was. Last week’s ban post linked the New York Times article about Adams’ abuse of women. I don’t need to revisit that, but here’s his preemptive tweet (since deleted, typos are his) before the article was out:

“Happy Vanentines day @nytimes. I know you got lawyers. But do you have the truth on your side. No. I do. And you have run out of friends. My folks are NOT your friends. Run your smear piece. But the legal eagles see you. Rats. I’m f—ing taking you down. Let’s learn I bait.”

Last week, The New Yorker published Amanda Petrusich’s “Ryan Adams and the Perils of the Rock-Genius Myth.” There, she mentions that Adams is now under investigation by the F.B.I. for communications with a then-14 year-old fan, which may have crossed legal lines. (Adams’ attorney denies any wrongdoing by his client. And, as I said in the ban post, the presumption of innocence is constitutionally important.) AP also mentions comments by Bridgers on social media, where she described Adams as stifling, domineering, and frightening. Bridgers thanked her friends, band, and mom for support, then called out Adams’ “network,” none of which, she says, “held him accountable,” but rather “told him, by what they said or what they didn’t, that what he was doing was okay.” AP says:

“What Bridgers is emphasizing—that most people who have been subject to this sort of behavior can just as clearly recall the dude in the room who refused to meet their gaze, who was visibly uncomfortable but nonetheless remained silent—feels more important than ever to remember. It’s not simply the alpha abusers at fault for poisoning the music industry but also the whole odious web of enablers that surrounds them.”

AP continues (and this is a long quote, but it’s so finely rendered, and provides such great insight into her experience as a serious journalist who happens to be female, that you should read the whole damn thing):

“It almost feels silly, in our present era, to point out that sexism is pervasive in the music business, from the major labels on down—it’s now so ingrained in the system as to simply be presumed. Nearly every woman I know who works in music has a bottomless grab bag of stomach-turning stories about being harassed at shows, demeaned during interviews, inappropriately and aggressively propositioned, objectified, insulted, or treated as a joke. For most of us, it goes on until these sorts of incidents become normalized—a job hazard that you don’t think about because you’ve never known another way of working. ‘The concept of male genius insulates against all manner of sin,’ the critic Laura Snapes recently wrote in the Guardian. For men, childish or cruel behavior is often not just excused, but lauded—held as evidence of passion, vision, verve. A man behaving hysterically can be reconfigured as brilliant, whereas a woman doing the same thing will, in all likelihood, be dismissed as a maniac. I think often about a conversation I had with the musician Chan Marshall, who records as Cat Power, in Miami, in 2014. Marshall has been subject to several decades of name-calling for her occasionally erratic behavior, which has included walking offstage mid-show—something dozens of male rock stars have done before her. ‘I’m not crazy,’ I recall her telling me.

When I first started working as a music critic, in my early twenties, the industry was still almost exclusively male. My first real writing job was for the music-reviews site Pitchfork, where at times I was one of just two, maybe three, women on staff. My early editors and colleagues were supportive and encouraging—I was fortunate—but music criticism itself has problematic roots. The practice was largely founded and developed by male writers, who understood hedonism as a display of authenticity (maybe as the only display of authenticity), and its language still hinges around vaguely mystical ideas about art-making as a kind of bloodletting. For decades, that language has been used to protect and enshroud troubled men, and to dismiss and humiliate women working in the same register. I learned the vocabulary of the trade as a young critic, and the process of un-learning it has been slow, deliberate, and difficult.

Part of the problem is that music thrills and bewilders us in a way that can feel at odds with natural laws, so we instinctively codify and exalt its creation. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about what happens to a person when they hear a song that they love, and what sense, if any, can be made of that strange, glorious melting. When I look at my own record collection, I see a desperate monument to my desire for that feeling—for some fleeting brush with the sublime. There are neurobiological processes to point to, and loads of social and cultural cues that help explain and unpack fandom, but the experience itself is such a hard thing to hold on the page. Never being able to fully explain it in a concise or useful way is a big part of why I first began writing about music, and why the work remains interesting to me. There’s a little bit of God in it.

But mystifying the creative process also allows for the genius myth to expand and endure. When nobody can say for sure why a certain melody is so satisfying, or so evocative, or so pleasurable—and this is criticism’s grandest prerogative, to somehow get close—we inevitably begin to imbue its creator with supernatural strengths. Ergo, people get away with things, for horrifyingly long stretches of time. It seems essential that critics remain vigilant about who is being granted leniency, and for what. But I also wonder if there’s a way for critical discourse to make more room for the receiver—to give more credit to our own consciousness, and the magic it makes of sound. That communion, after all—between player and listener, in which both parties create something extraordinary together—is just as sacred. Perhaps we can start to look for the genius in there instead.”

Yeah. There is a way, and it harkens back to the heady days of late-60s French deconstructionism. In 1967, Roland Barthes published an essay called “The Death of the Author.” I’ve referenced it a bunch through various iterations of this blog. (OM is fake sick of it, but he’s a pomo fiction geek, and a student of lit-crit, so whatever.) The wiki is actually p fly, but I’ll dig into the original text for pith.

Barthes writes that

“the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; … the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his ‘confidence.’ “

Man, not woman. Hmph.

Barthes’ essay is about literature, so it’s tricky to extrapolate it for a more performative (less interpretative) art form, like music. It’s also baseline difficult to decipher, and I’m not as smart as I used to be. (As I reread it, I tried to remember why I underlined certain passages when I was a grad student twenty-five years ago, and oof.) Essentially, Barthes wants to kill the Author by ending authority, by establishing that “utterance in its entirety is a void process, which functions perfectly without requiring to be filled by the person of the interlocutors: linguistically, the author is never anything more than the man who writes, just as I is no more than the man who says I: language knows a ‘subject,’ not a ‘person.’ ”

There’s a passage in the essay that suggests a de-personed hand (“his hand, detached from any voice, borne by pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin”) that goes a bit too far for me, but the idea is incontrovertible: “[T]he true locus of writing is reading.” And the true locus of songwriting is listening. I could riff on this, but I’ll get back to AP and her query.

The meaning/significance of any song or album belongs to us, not to the person who hummed it, demoed it, recorded it, and released it. If there’s wonder, it’s built into what we already do. And we can choose to direct that – that communion, that magic – toward artists who deserve it. The Auteur is dead. Long live rock.

More soon.

JF

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