St. Vincent - a.k.a. Annie Clark;

(also just learned the author uses they/them, apologizes)

Absolute shitshow on Twitter

but its giving me an excuse to make fun of tool again

xps I got to play a remake of the Coral electric sitar once and it’s pretty great IIRC.

I bet that Tool has played electric sitars.

My guitar teacher learned to play sitar for something, he says it's really hard. Like, physically, it hurts the hell out of your hands.

Now everyone here wants a Vincent Bell electric sitar? Well well well looks like the sneaky little marketing campaign is going swimmingly.

xp guitar hurts the hell out of your hands when you first learn to play

evan you're my favorite poster of all time.

xpost Given that he plays guitar extremely well and has for decades, I trust him when he says the sitar is a different sort of discomfort.

i'm sure it is. but playing guitar was a different sort of discomfort as well. new instrument, new muscles. people who play the sitar don't appear to be in pain.

https://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20110923&t=2&i=505834748&w=780&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=2011-09-23T193841Z_01_BTRE78M1IKT00_RTROPTP_0_US-RAVISHANKAR

"Ow, my fingers!"

looks like he's measuring out a violin to play for your guitar teacher

did you maybe hint that you were considering switching to sitar lessons with Greg at the shop before he said this stuff about the sitar literally murdering everyone who plays it?

"i knew I shouldn't have taught him to play 'Do It Again'. they all threaten to leave for Greg after they learn 'Do It Again'"

That interview is dull. This whole thing is dull. I don’t understand.

Absolute shitshow on Twitter

― bruce spr!ngisH3r3 (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, April 26, 2021 12:17 PM

lol like that isn't just the natural state of twitter

Absolute shitshow is the lowest limit of the Twitter shit scale, a state at which the enthalpy and entropy of a tweet reaches their minimum value, taken as zero shits given.

that is some super solid forensic twitter analysis. your analyses deserve a better subject than twitter, honestly.

If actually reflects the Twitter shit paradox, which is that as a twitter thread approaches absolute shitshow, it becomes inversely proportional to the actual number of people that give a shit. Scientists have been trying to wrap their brains around it for years.

https://themuse.jezebel.com/you-dont-have-to-give-interviews-st-vincent-1846764691

The funny thing is, Clark has been unusually hostile to the press before.. After GQ published a profile of Clark in 2019, the writer Molly Young posted a now-deleted addendum to the piece on her own website describing how much Clark seemed to hate the entire process. She reportedly barely looked at Young, gave extremely short answers to her questions, and at one point asked her with “audible hostility” if she “liked doing this.” “Why had she agreed to this story?” Young wrote. “St. Vincent does not need to be in GQ. This is an elective activity.”

Women artists, especially in music, are often penalized for being aloof and cold. Historically, women performers have been expected to entertain audiences, while men get to go off and be sullen geniuses who destroy recording studios and make great art. So I can see Clark delighting in a posture that is unwilling to be forthcoming or cheery. Unfortunately, there is a fine line between being performatively difficult or caustic to make a dramatic point and being, well, an asshole.

In an email to Jezebel, Madden writes: “It was not my wish for it to be taken down. Ultimately, it was a pretty innocuous interview, and the fact it doesn’t exist on the internet tonight goes to show that the law and corporations reinforce one another and the law unfailingly permits corporations to win. I am dismayed that truth, even at its most inane, is beholden to these structures of power, but I am more determined than ever to try and rebalance our industry and to get my silly blogpost back on the web.”

In an email to Jezebel, Madden writes: “It was not my wish for it to be taken down. Ultimately, it was a pretty innocuous interview, and the fact it doesn’t exist on the internet tonight goes to show that the law and corporations reinforce one another and the law unfailingly permits corporations to win. I am dismayed that truth, even at its most inane, is beholden to these structures of power, but I am more determined than ever to try and rebalance our industry and to get my silly blogpost back on the web.”

I agree with this point sure but comparing Annie Clark to a corporation is really weird

xp

If that’s what she’s saying then comparing “taking a blog post down” to “the law” is also really weird

https://memegenerator.net/img/images/72429049.jpg

Is the idea that St. Vincent's people filed a DMCA complaint or something? The article doesn't say anything about the post being taken down other than calling it "now-deleted."

Sounds like she's saying Clark's label (Loma Vista Recordings, part of Concord Music Group, which is distributed by Universal) filed a takedown notice against her blog host, which then yanked her post.

Having worked at a major label that had a whole department devoted to filing takedown notices, this is not in any way shocking to me. Asshole-ish, but entirely in keeping with major label record company practice.

If DMCAs have now or ever applied to interviews that’s news to me

If that’s true then this is a much bigger story!

I mean, they shouldn't. Unless the "unnamed publication" somehow claims to own copyright in the interview (and they're the ones who filed the notice).

I would guess she got paid by the original publication that spiked it and they claimed ownership?

that's the only possibility. a label can't file a DMCA over something they don't own (an interview)

I guess that would make sense but what corporation-level publication has a legal team that would A) waste time with this and B) combat a piece of bad PR with ... another piece of bad PR!

i mean, she prob got notified that the outlet would pursue legal action and took it down voluntarily

Think this album might be her ‘Rudebox’.

Sensible take

for the past decade, just about every conflict between a journalist and a famous musician has been the same: the celebrity feels that any kind of scrutiny or interpretation is a violation, so they take it out on a relatively powerless, underpaid person who can't hurt them

— Judy Berman (@judyberman) April 26, 2021

Absolute dogshit take.

St Vincent didn't do a single fucking thing to the writer!

St. Vincent took it out on the *editor*. The writer's beef should be with the *editor* that let St. Vincent steamroll her work and (presumably) cut her rate in half for a kill fee

i think it is fair for the writer to be mad at both st vincent and the editor

Absolute dogshit take.

This is not a rational way to respond to Judy Berman.

Did you read her other tweets?

Jezebel has also reached out to Clark’s publicity company MBC for comment and will update this story if they respond.

Even if you don’t agree with Whiney, why didn’t Jezebel reach out to the publication for comment? Or even name the publication? They definitely seem to be letting it slip out of the causality chain here.

xpost, yeah it does make more sense with the other tweets

Think this album might be her ‘Rudebox’.

https://i.imgur.com/dfzbMN1.jpeg

I am sympathetic to the writer of the piece because I know what it's like to prepare for an interview and have an idea how it will go but then find out that the artist isn't on the same page as I am. Then you throw in the extra bit about how she had a very small amount of time (and constant reminders of this) which makes it hard to gracefully shift gears when the conversation screeches to a halt.

Also, I don't understand why St. Vincent and/or her handlers would be "terrified" about that interview. There were a couple of interesting quotes and none were particularly incriminating or could be made out to make St. Vincent look bad. If I looked at a transcription like that after an interview in my writing days, I would sigh and realize I really have to use more of my word count on my own observations than artist quotes. And then I would do that. But I don't see a reason those observations would be accusatorial or mean.

All that said, posting it on a blog was terrible form. Nothing good can come of it other than to point out how mean/terrible St. Vincent and/or her handlers are, but as we see above just as many people think it's all the writer's fault in the first place. Meanwhile she shot herself in the foot and might have even dragged the publication down with her (my guess is the author took it at the bequest of the publication, maybe she just thought better of it when she got negative feedback; I doubt "the man" could have forced that).

Also, maura is pretty wise and if she says the writer is not trustworthy, she has a good reason for saying it. Ultimately the writer winds up looking worse here which is sucks because I am generally on Team Writer in these cases.

it's also possible she just said "sitar" as shorthand instead of saying the full phrase "electric sitar," like how nobody says the full phrase "electric guitar" anymore

Fwiw, this is definitely possible but I don't think these two things are equivalent - an electric guitar is a guitar, just an amplified one; an 'electric sitar' is not an amplified sitar.

I don't think her terminology or identification skills are that important, though, as much as I think it would have been more interesting for her to follow up on it - still, we've done a p good job of it here so it's all good in the end.

From Jezebel: “editors and publications like the one Madden said she was writing for”

This sounds like they couldn’t even confirm she was actually writing for who she said she was.

Maybe this is all just a layered PR blitz for the new album that somehow plays into her new character.

The whole thing is just weird and no one really walks away from this looking good. If anything, the interviewer came across sounding underprepared or at least not ready for Clark's standoffishness in interviews, but nothing I saw that was worthy of a PR team freak out.

Well, I haven't read the interview and have little interest in St Vincent and yet I still looked at this thread.

*"Don't ask questions about _____" policy.*

This reminded me of the time I telephone interviewed a band who were promoting some live shows for a brewery. I was asked not to talk about getting drunk/messy on alcohol. Obviously, I did. This was when I discovered that PRs listen in. I was a naive journalist.

If you cant get the personal basis for this request for exception, i dunno. Not that i think it’s unforgiveable, just cmon, that’s a maelstrom for her—

I used to really like this artist when they weren't famous for bullshit