Tag: Stuff I Don’t Like

I Wish This New Sleater-Kinney Song Wasn’t Crappy

The act of reuniting your band is inherently sort of pathetic. Even if it’s done for reasons other than shameless cash-grabbing, it’s often an attempt by the members to recapture their glory years, like a popular kid returning to high school years later. Maybe the saddest part of some reunions is that one often gets the sense that the artists involved could be doing something new and cool, but instead they’re stuck acting as old versions of themselves, playing the same songs because they felt a need to give in to fans who always want more.

I know all of this, but when Sleater-Kinney reunited, I convinced myself this would be different. I ignored some of the obvious warning signs, like Carrie Brownstein’s burgeoning career of making hipster jokes on Portlandia and appearing in American Express commercials. When their reunion album dropped, I wanted it to be great more than anything, but after a couple listens I knew it wasn’t. I figured it was their first album back and maybe they just needed to get back in the swing of things.

Now they have a new album coming out produced by Annie Clark, which would have been my dream about ten years ago, but now feels like a worst case scenario for all people involved. The latest song, “The Future is Here,” confirmed all of my worst suspicions about this project: it’s a trainwreck that I’ll use as exhibit A when I argue for making band reunions illegal in front of the Supreme Court.

About the only positive thing I can say about this track is that the band tried something different rather than rehashing their old music, and I think it came from a place of wanting to push themselves artistically. But what they’ve done is take everything that made Sleater-Kinney cool and unique and replaced it with boring, generic sounds. This isn’t Bob Dylan going electric; this is like if Kevin Shields followed up Loveless with an album of acoustic Imagine Dragons covers.

The twin guitars and harmonies of Corin Tucker and Brownstein are absent here, replaced by some stale synths that make the song sound like a mid-2000s Yeah Yeah Yeahs album track. The other vital element of Sleater-Kinney’s music has always been Janet Weiss’ drumming — the urgency and intensity of the band’s sound came through in her aggressive style, which conveyed a sense of passion, like the song you were listening to really mattered. On this song, she’s marginalized to just playing a simple, lifeless drum beat, which renders the entire song limp and purposeless. The lyrics don’t exactly help either — it’s not like S-K were ever masters of subtlety, but the “actually, iPhones are bad” theme doesn’t inspire a lot of deep thought, which might be why half the song is spent on “na na na”s.

I’m trying to mentally picture what happened in this recording session. Clearly the band wanted to push themselves in new directions and Annie Clark was happy to oblige. I was critical of Clark’s last album, which I thought pursued a generic, soulless pop vision that prioritized superficial gimmickry over real artistry. Now it appears S-K has been caught in her vortex of making corny, instantly dated pop. The album cover has the image of Brownstein with her backwards butt exposed, which is an image that feels inspired by Clark’s recent propensity towards contrived, phony “weirdness.” My best guess is the band and Clark were shooting for some poppy-but-deep artsy thing, but they really did not succeed on any level. It’s enough to make me lose faith in everyone involved, all of whom were at one point among my favorite artists in the world.

It had been awhile since I’d really listened to Sleater-Kinney, so I decided to throw on The Woods on my drive to work to see if maybe I had just outgrown the band. That would have been sad in its own way, but preferable to the reality this song presents. It turns out The Woods still kicks ass. Just listen to “The Fox” and compare it to this song. That album was the ultimate farewell, a band going out in a blaze of glory by unleashing every emotion they had left and leaving on top of their game. Instead, it’s become another cautionary example for future bands and their fans: sometimes its better to quit when you’re ahead.

Burger King Wants to Be Your Friend

If you have the good fortune of following my often hilarious and always insightful Twitter account, you know of my deep distaste for advertising, specifically this recent trend of “cool” ads where brands try to ingratiate themselves with customers by tweeting like 16 year-olds and speaking about progressive issues. Out of all the dystopian aspects of the internet, this way we have let corporations hang out with us in our communication spaces is maybe the most unsettling. Instead of being on billboards or TV, ads are now basically sitting in our living room, commenting on news, replying to things we say, and trying to make funny quips to make us laugh. Yesterday, Burger King reached a new nadir of this form of advertising.

I’m going to link to the video, but I feel it requires a warning, in the same way you tell someone they might not want to view footage of an athlete gruesomely breaking his ankle or watch a murder. What I mean is, this video will reveal to anyone who views it a darkness in humanity and society that they previously did not know existed. And once that darkness has been revealed, it will always be with you. It will become a part of your soul and haunt you until the day you die. With that out of the way, let’s take a gander at this ad.

I’m going to put in a filler paragraph here just to give you some time to catch up and process what you just witnessed. If you’re like me, you may need to watch the video a second time and rub your eyes, just to make sure it’s real.

When I intensely hate something like this, I do think it is important to put myself in the shoes of someone who likes it. This ad seems widely loathed, but I’m sure some people sincerely appreciated the positive mental health message from a company like Burger King that has no obligation to “speak out” and spread awareness of such topics. But to me, that’s precisely why this ad is so uniquely evil and cynical: it’s using a deeply important societal message as a means to make you feel good about the brand, to buy their product, and to become loyal to Burger King.

I will tell you the one thing Burger King cares about: making money. That’s the only reason why companies make these ads. If the profitable ad strategy was to instead have a guy stare at the camera and say “all of you losers and weirdos are pathetic and have no hope in life, so you might as well eat our shitty burgers at Burger King,” that is what we would be seeing instead. And not only would that be more entertaining, but it would also be more admirable, because it would at least be coming from a place of honesty. But it’s obvious based on recent trends that companies are putting a lot of stock in appearing woke and progressive, presumably as a way to appeal to young people, especially on liberal-skewing platforms like Twitter.

I suspect they do this because it not only can create positive feelings, but because it inoculates the brand from criticism. Anyone ripping on this ad can be written off as someone who is opposed to the message of the ad itself. And who would want to listen to some asshole who doesn’t care about mental health issues? It is often hard to criticize stuff that is really corny and lame, but ultimately coming from a good place with fine intentions. I think it is important to differentiate this malicious ad from that type of media. This commercial is designed to manipulate and fool people.

There are numerous substantive things Burger King could do to make the world a better place. For starters, they could pay their employees more and treat them better. They could serve healthier food that doesn’t contribute to obesity and make people feel like they’re about to die after eating it. They could like, stop existing as a company and just give all of their profits over to mental health charities, if they really cared as much as this video indicates. But instead they want to have it both ways: to appear virtuous and caring while also being a ruthless money-making corporation.

Luckily, I think people did see through this BK ad because it was so poorly conceived. For one thing, I can’t imagine people are interested in approaching a counter or drive through window and saying the sentence “yes, I’ll have one DGAF meal please” out loud to another human. They really sat there in the board room fantasizing about all the clap emojis people would tweet because the burger joint now has something called a “yaaasss meal” (the actual content of these meals, as far as I know, is a mystery). And they thought the best way to make a difference when it comes to mental health was to serve their food in different-colored bags.

To actually think these things, and to believe this would be an effective ad, requires an incredibly low view of humanity, which is really what is at the core of this entire strategy of marketing. It reveals a certain insecurity that the brand doesn’t feel like they can just say “we have good burgers,” but instead has to try to capitalize on people’s emotional weaknesses — in this case, the justified anxiety and stress many have on earth in 2019. And doing it under the pretense that they’re like your friend and care about you is capitalism at its most absurd and distasteful. No matter how positive their message may seem on the surface, these brands deserve nothing but contempt.

Look What You Made Me Do

Last week I decided to drive to work downtown instead of taking the light rail because it was a Friday night on a long weekend and I figured there would be light traffic at most. Minutes later, I’m waiting in a line of cars just to get into downtown and I realize something horrible is happening. I look out the window and see an endless line of semi trucks outside of U.S. Bank Stadium emblazoned with Taylor Swift’s face. She’s staring at me, judging me, while she makes me late for work.

It is a fitting incident because Swift is the one pop star I can’t seem to get away from. While I am generally like a 90-year-old man when it comes to being up on current pop music because I just don’t care, Swift sticks in my mind more than I’d like to admit. I have an entire list of grievances towards her: she was born a day before me so I always hear about her birthday on the eve of mine, my college roommate played one of her albums non-stop, and I absolutely despise her music in an active way despite knowing I shouldn’t have an opinion on it. I hate her, in a weird way I kind of admire her, but more than anything, I fear her.

As I type this, I am terrified of Taylor Swift. Because I know that if any massive pop artist were to ever find a random blog post like this and sue me for slander, set her fans on me, or possibly pay to have me killed, it would be her. Nobody in the music industry is more cutthroat and ruthless than Taylor Swift. I believe her life ambition is to make every single person on earth a fan of hers, and she’ll squash anyone who stands in her way like a bug. She once put her music back on Spotify just to get people to listen to her instead of Katy Perry’s new album. Cursory research indicates that she and Perry have “mended their friendship,” but it’s likely just a prelude to Swift’s final unexacted revenge.

Much has been made of Swift’s penchant for writing vengeful songs at various exes and the general sense of neediness that comes out in her lyrics. I view it all as an extension of her weird pathology that requires everyone to love her. While most pop stars have no interest in me listening to their music, Swift badly wants me on her side. Even in the face of massive popularity, she remains obsessed with her “haters” and she writes lyrics about boyfriends who like “indie records that are much cooler than mine.” No success she achieves will ever be enough to satisfy her ambition and ego. A more warmhearted person than I could probably have sympathy for Swift and her inability to be satisfied with anything, but I find everything she does too grating to have any sense of compassion.

The Swift empire isn’t built on any kind of musical ability, but on a carefully curated brand image and the presentation of the character Taylor Swift to the public. Her business acumen is far more interesting than her music, which I find to be dull even by pop music standards. It gets overlooked because Swift is a cute young woman, so people underestimate her and make the sexist assumption that a bunch of men are probably controlling her career. But I think much of Swift’s success is due to her own knowledge of how to play the pop music game and her ability to take advantage of people who underestimate her. She is always in control of her own narrative, and every move she makes is calculated.

The moment that always sticks out is at that one Video Music Awards, when Kanye West stomped all over Taylor Swift’s moment, setting forth the narrative that Kanye is an egotistical dick and Swift was the put-upon and maligned girl next door. You’ll never convince me that this wasn’t a scripted plan, executed like a professional wrestling angle, and it influenced the way people perceived both celebrities. Swift has spent the rest of her career playing off that image of the nice girl who always gets mistreated, partly because it blandly appeals to the most people possible.

It’s fitting that one of Swift’s most famous songs is “Blank Space,” because that’s kind of what she is as a musician. Her music is apolitical, it doesn’t inspire the imagination, and it doesn’t really show any kind of prodigious musical skill. It’s just a series of sounds that exist to advance Swift’s image and narratives about herself. It’s an approach that I find utterly loathsome and antithetical to everything that makes me love music, but I have some begrudging respect for how Swift doesn’t even pretend that her music is about anything but making money. If the concept of capitalism became human and pursued a career in music, it would take all the same steps that Swift has.

Swift’s ability to become one of the most popular musicians on earth while possessing little to no musical talent is a testament to her true genius as a marketer and businesswoman. Maybe this is a misanthropic viewpoint, but I don’t think the actual music really matters anymore when it comes to being a pop star. It’s all about marketing yourself, having an image, and probably paying certain people to do certain things. Once you’ve established a fanbase, you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want in today’s era of creepy, cult-like fandoms, and through years of shrewd machinations, Swift has built an army of people who will defend anything she does, even if it’s “borrowing” a hook from Right Said Fred.

Swift understands all of this because she’s smart, and she’s figured out that success in today’s climate isn’t about music. The songs I heard from her last album were so half-assed that for a moment I almost thought it was some kind of Lou Reed anti-art thing. But it’s more Swift realizing that all she needs to do is get the internet buzzing for her, positively or negatively, and that means having some vaguely controversial lyrics and tinkering with her image/persona, not having actual good songs. All of her detractors, including me, got their zingers about those songs in on social media, but as always, it was Swift who had the last laugh: Reputation was the best-selling album of 2017, she sold out both of those shows at U.S. Bank Stadium, and she made me late for work.