Jump to content
Hamer Fan Club Message Center

Pheobe "Smash!" Bridgers


diablo175

Recommended Posts

On 2/15/2021 at 6:46 PM, veatch said:

I think I'm more bothered by the use of a capo.  On a baritone guitar, no less...

This was going to be my snark. Too slow...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 57
  • Created
  • Last Reply
17 hours ago, robbie said:

Not to enrage anyone, but I saw this quote on Time Magazine's Twitter account...  

 

“Whether it’s enraging milquetoast reply guys by smashing a guitar on live TV or carving out a space as a furious, ethereal prophet, she’s as good as she is singular” 

🤪

Pretty accurate, since she's not all that singular.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame said:

Pretty accurate, since she's not all that singular.

I just hate these false dichotomies that every story gets spun into.  You either think she's a "furious, ethereal prophet"  or you're a "milquetoast reply guy."

That is the real grift and man behind the curtain in all news media today.  All they have left in a dying business model is to create these falsely dichotomous frames in order to reduce everything into two ideologically opposing camps and keep them at one another's throat.   You're not allowed to find the performance a bit of hamfisted artifice which could have only ever worked as satire, which it cleary wasn't, and thus found it cringe inducing.  You certainly aren't allowed to find these particular songs by Bridgers pretty much more of the same indie pop that has been floating around since the mid-00s.   And you definitely cannot come away from this feeling like you just watched the equivalent of Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse try to prove their rock 'n' roller bonafides by bizarrely attempting a premeditated Pete Townshending, subsequently losing any interest in the artist whatsoever either way.  

No, no, no.  You respect this fierce performance, or you are a "reply guy,"  a term picked very much for the greater context in which that phrase is used.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys/

That is link is offered as nothing beyond an explanation of that phrase's meaning. 

To dumb it back out of academese, I didn't see anything here that wasn't the same indie pop I've heard and personally hated my entire life going all the way back to R.E.M., plus it had that atrocious guitar smashing gimmick at the end that just kind of made it all absurd, and not in a fun Dalí kind of way.   It just felt like the usual corporate pop music with indie window dressing, and as far as I'm concerned, that stuff can go get fucked. 

And the thing is, maybe the writer of that Tweet article truly believed she is speaking truth to power, but Time picking it up had nothing to do with that. They're just cashing in on the culture war that the news media in general has intensely stoked for profit for decades now - but really to all new levels since 2016 - despite it clearly ripping the country apart, so Time can go get fucked too.  

And if I want to watch a fantastic, female indie rocker dabble in things loud, everything Emma Ruth Rundle has done with Thou in the past five years shits all over that SNL performance from a vast and glorious height.  I wouldn't personally use the "chicks that rock" frame, as I think it's pretty lame, but since that is where Time  thought the discussion should go, if I gave a fuck about having that box to check, other musicians do it better, IMO. 
 


Finishing up and focusing just on the message of the tweet and not the larger reasons media companies indulge in this dichotomous framing device, the irony of accusing someone of gaslighting, a charge part and parcel involved in calling someone a "reply guy," for simply having the temerity to say that they found this SNL performance to be laughable should be obvious, particularly when you buy a lot of loud music made by female artists - even more so when you buy a lot of loud music made by female artists for no other reason than you really enjoy it, not to check the gender diversity box on your record collection.

You can find all of that lame as hell and not be a misogynist, surprising as it may be to some.  

/rant

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, LucSulla said:

I just hate these false dichotomies that every story gets spun into.  You either think she's a "furious, ethereal prophet"  or you're a "milquetoast reply guy."

That is the real grift and man behind the curtain in all news media today.  All they have left in a dying business model is to create these falsely dichotomous frames in order to reduce everything into two ideologically opposing camps and keep them at one another's throat.   You're not allowed to find the performance a bit of hamfisted artifice which could have only ever worked as satire, which it cleary wasn't, and thus found it cringe inducing.  You certainly aren't allowed to find these particular songs by Bridgers pretty much more of the same indie pop that has been floating around since the mid-00s.   And you definitely cannot come away from this feeling like you just watched the equivalent of Neutral Milk Hotel or Modest Mouse try to prove their rock 'n' roller bonafides by bizarrely attempting a premeditated Pete Townshending, subsequently losing any interest in the artist whatsoever either way.  

No, no, no.  You respect this fierce performance, or you are a "reply guy,"  a term picked very much for the greater context in which that phrase is used.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-reply-guys/

That is link is offered as nothing beyond an explanation of that phrase's meaning. 

To dumb it back out of academese, I didn't see anything here that wasn't the same indie pop I've heard and personally hated my entire life going all the way back to R.E.M., plus it had that atrocious guitar smashing gimmick at the end that just kind of made it all absurd, and not in a fun Dalí kind of way.   It just felt like the usual corporate pop music with indie window dressing, and as far as I'm concerned, that stuff can go get fucked. 

And the things is, maybe the writer of that Tweet article truly believed she is speaking truth to power, but Time picking it up had nothing to do with that. They're just cashing in on the culture war that the news media in general has intensely stoked for profit for decades now,  but really to all new levels since 2016, despite it clearly ripping the country apart, so Time can go get fucked too.  

And if I want to watch a fantastic, female indie rocker dabble in things loud, everything Emma Ruth Rundle has done with Thou in the past five years shits all over that SNL performance from a vast and glorious height.  I wouldn't personally use the "chicks that rock" frame, as I think it's pretty lame, but since that is where Time  thought the discussion should go, if I gave a fuck about having that box to check, other musicians do it better, IMO. 
 


Finishing up and focusing just on the message of the tweet and not the larger reasons media companies indulge in this dichotomous framing device, the irony of accusing someone of gaslighting, a charge part and parcel involved in calling someone a "reply guy," for simply having the temerity to say that they found this SNL performance to be laughable should be obvious, particularly when you buy a lot of loud music made by female artists - even more so when you buy a lot of loud music made by female artists for no other reason than you really enjoy it, not to check the gender diversity box on your record collection.

You can find all of that lame as hell and not be a misogynist, surprising as it may be to some.  

/rant

 

One of the problems in our current society is you simply aren't allowed to disagree. If you disagree, it must be for some bad faith reason: racism, sexism, some other -ism.

And so we have competing camps of Virtue Signalers and Moral Superiors who claim that only their view is correct, so anyone who disagrees can be ignored (at best) or punished and cancelled (at worst) simply for not accepting the moral framing of someone else's opinions.

And so it is here.

You have to accept her performance as fierce, and groundbreaking, and equal to past rock icons, or else you are a snob (at best) or misogynistic (at worst).

We can't just discuss anything anymore and agree to disagree.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That being said, I can get what they were going for here.

 

I didn't really listen to the lyrics, but the title is "I know it's the end". So it's dark, moody, increasingly angry, and everyone is dressed in skeleton clothes. So it's about death (cue the xtranormal youtube video about the girl who wants to get her PhD because she has interesting thoughts about death), and so of course you'd smash your instrument once it is all completely over.

It didn't work for most (any?) of us, but I can see what the strategy was.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame said:

One of the problems in our current society is you simply aren't allowed to disagree. If you disagree, it must be for some bad faith reason: racism, sexism, some other -ism.

And so we have competing camps of Virtue Signalers and Moral Superiors who claim that only their view is correct, so anyone who disagrees can be ignored (at best) or punished and cancelled (at worst) simply for not accepting the moral framing of someone else's opinions.

And so it is here.

You have to accept her performance as fierce, and groundbreaking, and equal to past rock icons, or else you are a snob (at best) or misogynistic (at worst).

We can't just discuss anything anymore and agree to disagree.

 

I would argue that it is far more cynical than that.  The thing is that none of this happened for ideological reasons per se.  Mass media is my field, and it's not hard to show the link between the disruption in journalism caused by the internet in the late 90s and the subsequent increase in news media promoting decided positions on social and political issues.   You can do it quantitatively, but even easier, you can just ask people who worked at these places in the last 20 years. There are plenty of reporters and editors out there who will lay this all out, but *shock* they don't get called by CNN, Fox, the NYT, and so on to speak on this very often.

What people miss is that while some of the news readers, reporters, and other journo-types may be true believers, overall it has nothing to do with that.  Fear and anger are high arousal emotions, and eliciting those makes an audience watch, click, share, and generally engage.  

That's the game, to get the audience to participate in a two sided culture war that actually may not exist, at least not to the level it is portrayed.  If one really wants to upset the apple cart, don't take the bait.   If the vast majority of people couldn't agree to disagree, Chick-Fil-A wouldn't turn a profit in a blue state, and Hollywood wouldn't sell a movie ticket in a red state.  People may grumble, but a helluvalot of them still buy the chicken sandwich and go see whatever bullshit Marvel has to sell each summer.

I make my grad students do a content analysis paper using Twitter as the source, but I remind them repeatedly that, at best, they will find out what Twitter thinks.  Whether or not what Twitter thinks is a particularly useful tool in predicting what the general public thinks is a completely different matter.   That's part of the assignment - learn how to do the research but also walk away asking how much anything posted there actually has anything to do with the offline world.

Trying to make the real world reflect Twitter is what I ultimately cannot stand about what Time did there.  It's not being labelled a snob or misogynist as much as it is making faux divisiveness real in pursuit of profit despite it, in my opinion, choking to death any kind of useful dialectic in our society.  I can handle being called an asshole - hell, I probably am - but I have some real concerns about a future where there are only two camps on everything and everyone is in one or the other.

Most people have no idea what a Phoebe Bridgers is or that this ever happened.  Of those that do, most don't really give a damn either way.   A few people do give varying levels of damn.  This is the objective reality of this whole story. However, you can get a lot of the first and second group to fall into the third group and rage tweet, click, and share away if you can convince them that the third group is actually bigger than it really is and that we all have a stake in having an opinion about an SNL performance because it's just sooooo important that we do.   

It's either cancel culture at it again or toxic masculinity at it again, depending on your inclinations, and by God, we will die on this hill...  this hill composed of a pop artist and her contrived guitar smashing that in reality is apropos of nothing.   And tomorrow, we'll find another equally irrelevant hill to die on all over again.  

Me, I'm just out here trying to ask people,  "Hey, you know there is a perfectly good road around this hill that I'm pretty sure most all of us actually prefer, and why are there people who seem so concerned that we end up on this hill everyday in the first place?  Do they have something to gain out of this and perhaps are manipulating ALL of us to that end?"

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Nice points.

I'd add that another problem was that when the internet started taking huge chunks of revenue from newspapers, newspapers had to cut costs. And one easy way to do that was get rid of multiple layers of editors, the people who ensured things stayed factual and less emotional. They replaced them with young journalists who were cheap and hadn't had decades of commitment to unbiased reporting of facts...and now there weren't the mentors to teach them and raise the bullshit flag and correct when they drifted into sensationalism.

And then, yeah, on top of that, they were *rewarded* for anything they produced that got clicks/eyeballs.

Entropy on a career field scale.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Nathan of Brainfertilizer Fame said:

 They replaced them with young journalists who were cheap and hadn't had decades of commitment to unbiased reporting of facts...and now there weren't the mentors to teach them and raise the bullshit flag and correct when they drifted into sensationalism.

 


You're assuming that there is anyone in ownership or management who wants them to raise the bullshit flag.  There isn't.  As long as it's not going to bring a lawsuit, there is no one at any of these outlets bending over backward to support hard hitting, objective, investigative journalism.  You see what happened at Fox, OAN, and Newsmax when they finally did start getting hit with some lawsuits that might prove actual malice - they back tracked REAL quickly, but short of that...

I've taught journalism at three different universities (I never have been or wanted to be a journalist, long story there), two of which were flagship universities, and one of which has a great journalism program in an excellent college of communications.  This is not a bottom up issue as far as having the fresh talent to produce what you would like to see.  However, it is very much a bottom up issue as far as demand. From the NYT to OAN, management does not want to make what you propose because it has no value in the marketplace. 

I had former students who were managing editors at large media outlets by the time they were in their late 20s, and I've asked them why they have eroded the public's understanding of straight news vs commentary.  I was told plainly that they know they are destroying the longterm credibility of journalism in the United States but that the only alternative is going bankrupt.  They know they are robbing Peter to pay Paul, but there seems no alternative.  We can argue deontology vs. utilitarianism, but it's easy to say they should do the right thing for the right reasons when we aren't the ones who are going to be firing people when the ad revenue dries up.

It's true that a stratified media landscape where the audience has a myriad of options has ratings and so on harder to come by and sites like Craigslist gutted the classifieds.  It's also true that the lack of income has basically eviscerated investigative journalism because it's so expensive to do, particularly to do well.  However, it isn't true in my experience that there is just no one left who knows how to do good journalism.  There are plenty of people still coming out of journalism schools who know how to do hard news and investigative reporting.  It's really not all that hard to learn that if you go to a protest, you need to get quotes that represent everyone there and then try to present what happened neutrally.  Likewise, there are plenty of experienced journalists out there who would love to actually do some real news again. Sure, there are some quirks with agenda setting and gatekeeping, but it's hard to worry about that when the "news" itself is increasingly just commentary. 

However, the fact is that good journalism doesn't have much of an audience, so management demands content that will.  If you want a job at Fox or the NYT, you give them the stories they want.   It wouldn't matter if the ghosts of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite were around to personally walk every new journalist through his or her first two years as reporters.  If they didn't get with the program, the lot of them would be out on their incorporeal asses, be it Joseph Kahn or Suzanne Scott doing the firing. 

"News" is an information product just like any other - music, movies, books, etc.   We've known since the 90s at least that when surveyed, people will mostly say they want hard news, but when you look at their media diet, most of them were watching Entertainment Tonight rather than the local or national news in the same time slot.  We've known since the 70s that people mostly bought newspapers for the comics, sports page, and coupons, and it's why today many papers, like the Clarion Ledger in Jackson, have sports departments bigger than the rest of the paper combined.  We were already well on our way to shifting news content to better suit these tastes, I think for the worse, before the world wide web. 

The internet only exacerbated consumer habits that were already there.   It's no different than the death of the album.  Most consumers never wanted the whole album.  They just wanted a few songs, but to get those songs, they had to buy an album.  As such, the entire recording industry was built on a model where selling albums was the heart of what they did.  Digital distribution belied the notion that all music consumers were album consumers, and so the model collapsed only to be replaced by a model that works well for record labels at the moment but is fucking artists to the point that being a band is almost unsustainable.  There simply aren't enough people left who want to pay for recorded music, especially beyond $10 a month for access to all of it on demand, to make recording it and selling those recordings particularly worthwhile.  

Likewise, there aren't enough people who want factual, dispassionate reporting to make it worthwhile to produce on a grand scale.  I honestly wish you were right and it was just a lack of professionalism.  That's an easy fix, but that isn't the main problem.  The economics of selling that particular information product are not viable in the marketplace.   It worries the shit out of me daily because I think it is a very serious problem when you have 300+ million people all in their own reality bubbles, but I have no idea of what to do.   It reminds me of McDonald's occasional aborted forays into health food.  You can make it available all day long, but if people are going to go for the Big Mac and fries anyway, there's no point in wasting money to continue to make salads.  You just go back to burgers and fries only.

Some efforts like those by Matt Taibbi with Substack give me an ember of hope, but ultimately, I don't know how you fix any of this as long as the end consumer wants reinforcement and, to a great extent, entertainment more than just the facts.

TL;DR - Field of Dreams lied.  You can build the shit out of it, but still no one may show up. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The "Education Reform Movement" has not helped this.  When kids are taught that information is the bit of info that answers a specific question rather than learning to think and analyze information is when the quick hit that matches what is wanted or needed is enough.

I know that my experience is not the be all end all but as an educator in Florida for the last 27 years, I have seen the damage from Jeb Bush's and Ronald Reagan's Education reform.  It has been taken up by Republicans and Democrats alike.  Not trying to make this political.

When you start making 3rd grader's understand that passing a test is the most important part of getting an education, then education becomes learning to pass a test rather than learning to think.  Now they plan to even move down to pre-school.

Learning becomes a passive experience rather than a interactive experience.  Someone get this man (child/student) an answer, Please!  So, the market for palatable answers has grown.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

As far as the song.  There seems to be some wit to the lyrics,  she has a nice voice.  She seems to be enjoying performing.  She is PLAYING GUITAR!  Everything is going in the right direction so, okay.  Not great but not so terrible.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, mathman said:

When you start making 3rd grader's understand that passing a test is the most important part of getting an education, then education becomes learning to pass a test rather than learning to think.

This has been a problem longer than standardized testing.  Nine years ago I was in a class where my professor (chair of the math dept) led with the revelation that math is about learning to think critically more than learning what x is.  Sadly, my critical thinking skills in my K-12 years (and even well into my 40s apparently) were poor enough that it never dawned on me learning the three r's was about anything deeper than the material itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

48 minutes ago, cynic said:

This has been a problem longer than standardized testing.  Nine years ago I was in a class where my professor (chair of the math dept) led with the revelation that math is about learning to think critically more than learning what x is.  Sadly, my critical thinking skills in my K-12 years (and even well into my 40s apparently) were poor enough that it never dawned on me learning the three r's was about anything deeper than the material itself.

I have so many thoughts on this, but I've already written tomes above.  

I'll leave it at this - I think most parents would be surprised to learn just how much a kid can sharpen his or her critical thinking skills by being told to get out of the house and not come back in until the streetlight comes on.   A lot of us here may have sharpened these skills in school, but I bet most of our education in being clever started and really developed outside of a school environment.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agreed, but had anyone (including my parents) explained the relevance of subjects/school instead of it just feeling like some random box that needed checking, I may have been less truant and more student.  I was an early adopter of WIFM. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Preview (of sorts): Last Friday I sent in another guest commentary for the consideration of the publishing group where I used to work; i.e. before I read the references to Time in this thread. Therein, I stated that "...Time magazine emphasized its ongoing lurch towards insignificance when it failed to name the dedicated medical researchers, physicians, nurses and first responders who have been dealing with the plague daily for almost a year as its 'Persons of the Year' for 2020."

If the publisher runs it, I'll pasted the entire commentary on this site, in a separate thread (per usual).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 2/21/2021 at 12:01 PM, crunchee said:

I was gonna post an Alfred E. Neuman "What, me enraged?" meme here, but I can't get it to work (What, me technologically challenged?  :rolleyes:).  I'll let somebody else have at it if they want.

4z1qf3.jpg

Regarding the dichotomy of opinion, I'd say thoughts of her occupy my mind equally as do I, her's. 

Works well for the both of us.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Ed Rechts said:

Your parents naming you "Cynic" sure couldn't have helped you much on your spiritual/intellectual journey

I can see it both ways.  A cynic could be lazy and just think the worst of people, or they could be educated and understand why they think the worst of people!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I went to visit my grandkids in FL a few years back. we all went to the park/playground... it's all padded... no dirt. I looked an my son and asked... wheres all the broken glass? 

somehow I feel this is part of the problem. I could be wrong

Link to comment
Share on other sites

WOW. I've kind of been away for a while but this post took on it's own life and went down a couple of side streets that I've never been on. I respect everyone's view point here and I was pleasantly surprised to read these intelligent, insightful comments; quite cerebral.

However, my mind is always in the gutter and my takeaways from that video are as follows:

  1. The song was pure pap.
  2. As the father of two grown daughters the rave where she was on her knees in front of the other guitar player was not something that I'm sure her father (or mother) are too proud of.
  3. I'll bet that guitar could be had for the HFC maximum of $Treefiddy.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

16 hours ago, rugby1970 said:
  1. As the father of two grown daughters the rave where she was on her knees in front of the other guitar player was not something that I'm sure her father (or mother) are too proud of.

That was a patented KISS stage move from the mid-1970s.  Nothing shocking to me!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The "on your knees" stage behavior was also "performed" in the '70s by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, and I attended a mid-'70s Wishbone Ash concert where Steve Upton charged out from behind his drum kit and went after Andy Powell's Flying V in the same, er, "pantomime."

Not to trivialize any other opinions about any inappropriateness, but it's a decades-old cliche. Rightfully deserves to be snarked at for its inclusion in the SNL performance for that reason if nothing else, so when it happened I considered it to be unoriginal/plagiarizing from the past...but I've got a daughter as well.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 minutes ago, Steve Haynie said:

Young people may not know just how many times older people have seen certain stage moves.  I remember seeing Kenny Wayne Shepherd do Hendrix when he was 20 - 23 or so.  A lot of people did Hendrix before him, so it was nothing new.  He did it well, though. 

This is a good point, and probably closer to where my opinion on all this is.  For one thing, as I've gotten older, I've realized how many things I thought were original were actually pastiche even back when my parent's generation thought they were original.  Additionally, anything that might make someone in high school or college start a band is a net win, even if it made me wince from the cringe.   I also get that even if my exact flavor of music became as big and as popular as Taylor Swift or Beyonce, I'm too old to be a part of any youth scene.  None of them are going to give a shit about how, "I was doing it back in the day."

I know that for sure because I didn't give a shit about the people my age now when I was 20 and they were telling me about, "Doing it back in the day."

"Cool... now scram, pops."

Of course, I get what a snotty punk I was in that respect now, but that's just being 20.  I'd bet good money most of y'all here had similar attitudes toward the dad rockers in your scenes when they'd start preaching which ever Gospel of Rock was spawned by the decade in which they were cutting their teeth.  Sometimes when I talk to younger cats around here, I can see that, "Scram," on their face as I prattle on, and it makes me laugh at how things never change, only roles in the play.

Then again, my assumption when I started to write this is that Saturday Night Live's audience is mostly Millennials and Gen X.   I just looked it up, and the plurality of viewers are from 30-55 (37.1%), though I was surprised to see that 18-24 does comprise 12%, at least as of 2018.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...