The Empty Bigness

July 15, 2023 12:13 AM

The producer is at bottom an allegorical figure. “Jack Antonoff” refers as much to a set of historical processes as it does to a bespectacled guy making beats in his Brooklyn apartment. Call it Antonoffication: the process of the dispersion of the aesthetics of indie rock out from a distinct subcultural enclave and into a general ether that suffuses and unites the major genres of today’s Top 40 pop music. Which is to say, the complex process of cultural mediation through which all pop music today has become a little bit indie rock. from Dream of Antonoffication by Mitch Therieau [The Drift; ungated]

Previously

posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

This is a small side note to the article, but I think Antonoff took a lot more than the yelping vocals from Modest Mouse. From their debut album onwards, they had these songs which seemed to exist on the border between an improvisational jam and a regular indie rock song. This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About is full of these songs, but Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset is reasonably representative. By their second, Lonesome Crowded West, Isaac Brock had developed in leaps and bounds as a songwriter, but the band still has those improvisational chops, which comes out in Truckers Atlas which apparently was partly improvised in the studio, with Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson doing weird production tricks onto the tape as they played. This strain in Modest Mouse’s music culminates in The Stars Are Projectors on The Moon and Antarctica, which I’d contend is the blueprint for songs like Venice Bitch.

I’m not saying that Antonoff simply bit Modest Mouse’s style, for better or worse almost every American indie band of the 2000s did, but Antonoff understood the potential of that kind of widescreen understatement which was developed by a trio of teens in a suburb of Seattle, attempting to evoke the feeling of traveling long distances. That moody, yet poppy, style of song construction fit the streaming era perfectly, as the article argues very convincingly.
posted by Kattullus at 6:47 AM on July 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

I left a crucial sub-clause out.

*attempting to evoke the feeling of traveling long distances in the North-American West.
posted by Kattullus at 7:00 AM on July 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm all for criticism, even harsh negative criticism, but there are only so many clever ways to say "this sucks" and the writer used up all of them.
posted by signal at 7:22 AM on July 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Jack Antonoff has been the producer on a lot of frankly bland records. But I'm not at all convinced that it's his fault. I say look no further than his production on both Massseduction and Daddy's Home by St. Vincent.

Whether you like Annie Clark's vibe or not, I fail to see how anyone could call those albums bland. Antonoff definitely tends to have a set of tricks that he pulls out..... when the artist doesn't seem to have much of a vision. But what producer is any different?

Look at Daniel Lanois's production on So by Peter Gabriel and Achtung Baby by U2..... and then look at All That You Can't Leave Behind ALSO by U2. I'm not sure Jack Antonoff is to blame for having to polish some musical turds and failing to elevate less inspired songs.
posted by tclark at 8:23 AM on July 15, 2023 [8 favorites]

What synchronicity - I was just listening to "It's Been a Minute" on NPR and the feature was focused on a discussion of the "song of the summer" and comparing Beyonce's debut single to todays' lack of a big summer hit. They covered all the stuff you would expect, streaming, AirPod culture and the general consolidation of content against the general fragmentation of audience.

They interviewed a critic from the NPR staff who at one point described Jack Antonoff's work as styleless and essentially bland background music. Which mirrors what the linked article's author Mitch Therieau notes: "Ask the average non-stan sixteen-year-old to name the artists behind the songs they listened to last week, and you are likely to be met with a shrug." I would extend that to include myself - if you put most any popular track from the last decade in front of me I would likely be unable to identify the artist.

The old adage is that most pop art was 90% rubbish, but I think that has devolved to be 99% musical mush. And the difference is that ratio just isn't worth the effort to sort. Listening to pop has went from getting a track I might adore every ten, and still enjoy twice that to now getting a decent **to my taste** track every hundred. That's like 5 hours of content for four minutes of enjoyment.

Of course the part of the NPR show that I felt, right in my bones, was when the host Brittany Luse remarked that she was 15 when Beyonce released Crazy in Love. And now she basically isn't interested in celebrating or even talking about music in the current milieu of inflation, uncertainty and covid. Luse was lamenting the lack of shared culture, the big concerts, and the "3d" immersive cultural moment.

The point of the show was essentially to mourn the lack of total infatuation with art that serves to represent not just the sound but the style and experience of a summer for kids today.

Me, I just hope the kids today have some music that they can dance to, and get naked and have adventures to. Because it's certainly not happening on the ClearChannel radio station or streaming on Peacock.
posted by zenon at 10:52 AM on July 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

I took a flight recently and the post-flight music was all Ed Sheeran-type-material and I could not believe that young people would make a steady diet of this kind of stuff. I was ready to yeet myself into the sun over the blandness, yet emotionally suffocating quality, of it all.
posted by praemunire at 11:21 AM on July 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

the lack of shared culture, the big concerts, and the "3d" immersive cultural moment.

Against this: one of the songs Theriau identifies as being "Antonoffied" into tasteless mush is Harry Styles's "As It Was." Three days ago I was in a stadium with more than 50,000 fans going absolutely berserk when Styles went into this song. So big concerts and massively felt visceral enthusiasm are real, and are attached to the very songs Theriau seems to think can only function as background music, or "content," or interchangeable mood widgets.
posted by escabeche at 1:09 PM on July 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Me, I just hope the kids today have some music that they can dance to, and get naked and have adventures to. Because it's certainly not happening on the ClearChannel radio station or streaming on Peacock.

I hear you in general but I don’t think there’s anything in today’s music that precludes dancing, nudity and adventures. The kids are going to kid, one way or another.
posted by wemayfreeze at 2:58 PM on July 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Unless you practice a monk-like indifference to the pop charts or have been stuck in a college radio station’s basement studio for the past decade and a half, you have heard Jack Antonoff’s music.

it me, I'm the monk
posted by egypturnash at 3:06 PM on July 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Harry Styles' song As It Was is such a perfect example of what the author is talking about: obviously engineered without any real depth or artistry (to me anyway), just a vapid pleasantness that it is almost offensive in its inoffensiveness (love the video though).
posted by blue shadows at 1:38 AM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Shit, I get it, not every summer has a breakout as big as Beyoncé. But you can listen to Twin Shadow every summer while you wait for the next one.

People were into Howard Jones when I was a kid. I went to his concert and thought No one Ever Is To Blame yeah yeaaaah YEEEAAAAAHHHHHH!

Now I don’t even know how I could approach that kid. What the fuck are you listening to?

Things can only get better.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 9:20 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Things can only get better.

You don't wanna be hip and cool?
You don't wanna play by the rules?
Not under the thumb of the cynical few
Or laden down by the doom crew?

(That was me standing next to you at that Howard Jones concert. I think those kids are alright, even still.)
posted by chavenet at 3:56 PM on July 17, 2023 [1 favorite]