a grammar

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 how to frame a piece. (Do me a favor and read this primarily as a “funny story” / “joke.” Pretend I’m Cathy, from Cathy.)

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. 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.

It’s been really mortifying! Sadly, a lot of people read the article; it was discussed and responded to more than anything I’ve written all year. Most of the responses were from people who thought I was dead wrong or an asshole. They all took the same thing from the piece: I disliked this music and thought I was too cool for it.

Given that almost everyone who read the piece felt that way, I can’t exactly reassure myself that they’re all just misunderstanding me — clearly I did something terribly wrong while writing the thing. (One obvious guess is that the phrase “adult contemporary” is still perceived as an irrevocable insult, and the shrapnel from that grenade travels incredibly far. Either that or I blacked out and murdered a singer-songwriter between paragraphs.)

Still, something strange seemed to be happening. None of the people responding to the piece were taking issue with anything the sentences actually said; on a sentence-by-sentence level, most of them seemed to agree with it. What they disagreed with was how they imagined I felt about it. Some of them were so eager to assume I was insulting this music that they had to misread sentences to get there. Stephen Deusner, for instance, wrote a great response for Salon defending these acts — “all of which,” he says, “Abebe essentially lumps together and calls ‘NPR Muzak.’” Except this claim is totally a figment of Deusner’s imagination. This is the sentence he’s referring to:

The problem: For a while, countless descriptions of [Feist’s] music revolved around coffee shops and dinner parties or cast her as a maker of middlebrow background listening, of NPR Muzak.

It says that other people have stuck these tags to her, and that this presents a problem, right? (Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t even know anymore.)

Ah, well. Somehow, amazingly, I had written 1200 words for a magazine, and the only thing I’d managed to clearly convey was the exact thing I didn’t believe, and was making a point of not saying. I was working on forgetting about the whole deal this weekend, when, like normal, I put on the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast, and … was horrified to realize they had Jody Rosen on to discuss the article. Rosen heartened me for a second by saying he didn’t really disagree with the article’s main point — that these acts had taken up a role as a sort of tasteful adult listening. But then he said he disagreed with me, because he didn’t see why that was a problem. At this point, as you can imagine, I was literally clawing at my own face and making begging noises at my speakers. (Also making fajitas.) I didn’t think it was a problem, either! Why did everyone think I thought it was a problem? “He bashes Sting,” Rosen said — before going on to note that Sting has made some pretty good music. (I think so too!) Here is the horrible insult I leveled at Sting:

These acts, intentionally or not, have won; they’ve taken a lower-sales, lower-budget version of the type of trip Sting once took, from a post-punk upstart to an adult staple.

Sting will totally survive that neutral description of his career path, right? If he reads this, he will not come and try to fight me, will he? Oh man, my favorite podcast. A whole lot more mortification followed — the sound of four incredibly smart people rummaging fiercely through all the dumb things I’d have to believe to say what they figured I was saying. Eventually I was carted out of the apartment by men in white coats, crying softly and muttering “but I never said that but I never said that but I never said that.” (The fajitas turned out surprisingly good, considering.) Stephen Metcalfe even managed to quote me as using a word that does not appear anywhere in the piece. I don’t even blame him; something must have gone really wrong between my brain and the page.

So this has been my great bummer of the month: I got a whole bunch of people to talk about a piece that didn’t quite work, and dispute a bunch of value judgments I wasn’t even trying to make.

I don’t just mention all of this to be annoyed and defensive — though yes, obviously I am tearing my hair out on certain fronts. (Also: oh god how am I even employed as a writer when I apparently communicate to people very nearly the OPPOSITE of what I was attempting to say, etc. etc..) I mention it because I’m wondering if it can tell us anything about the way we read about music.

It seems to me that the common thread to many readings of this piece was a desire to figure out what I think, or what agenda I had. It’s assumed that a piece like this must exist as a performance of my tastes, motivations, and demands on other people. The most tender readings I got came from friends here on Tumblr, who put a lot of time and charity into figuring out what kind of opinion I was looking to advance. But it still kept coming down to things like this:

So, essentially, Abebe couched his language about his own tastes in the “sources say” method (if you’re familiar with political journalism.)

Here’s the question I’d like to put forth: Shouldn’t it be more possible — maybe even more common — for essays about music to be able to neutrally describe what “sources say,” or sources do, or sources listen to, without out trying to read behind that into what the author’s own tastes are? Amazingly enough, this isn’t something I’m suggesting out of defensiveness: I just think it’s incredibly important. There needs to be room for music writing that’s not just about the author performing taste and making value judgments. So much of the life of music — the ways we hear it, the things we want from it, and so on — exist in a huge, complicated context, and someone needs to describe that context. This is one of the things I’d hoped to be able to do at a magazine like New York: Explain to a general audience what’s going on among music listeners, and what the landscape is of their tastes, trends, knee-jerks, and politics of sound. I haven’t yet figured out how to actually do that, obviously — there’s a strong possibility it’s just not something I personally am bright enough to accomplish — but I have some gut belief that it’s a thing worth doing.

***

And all of this brings me to my latest column for Pitchfork, which sort of pivots off of this issue. One of the main things that got projected onto the article was this idea that sedate, sophisticated music is categorically weak and boring — or that I must think that’s the case. I don’t, so I wrote about that. But I also wrote a bit about the ways that sedate, sophisticated music can still be fresh and challenging and strange, and why that’s something we should probably ask for.