A Case Against Sufjan Stephens by Stephen Thomas Erlewine (all music)

I couldn't agree more.

i know i spelled stevens wrong before someone jumps down my throat

Agreed in full.

"Deliberately limited appeal" is like a BAD thing, WTF?

Hey, I write for that database!

Exactly. If anything, this article made me want to give Sufjan Stevens' CDs another chance.

In other words Daddino OTM

I find the whole critical obsession over Sufjan to be waaayyy overdone, and I say that as someone who really loves bands like Stereolab and High Llamas. With Sufjan, I try to like his music, but I can't escape this feeling that he is just too nice, too plain, and too earnest. Where's the edge?

I'm very uncomfortable with the way he's been embraced by the NPR/Starbucks crowd. It's like he's created this music about big social issues and being the voice of the downtrodden or some such thing, and by listening to this music, it somehow makes you a better person. But let's face it, there is a disjunction between the subjects of the songs and the intended audience that makes the whole project rather unseemly. With that in mind, the "deliberately limited appeal" comment maybe makes more sense: he's using populist themes to make elitist music.

I like this line from today's review in Pitchfork.

This is inaccurate -- clever, but inacurrate.

Ned, however...

In terms of live annoyingness, the only thing I've heard that comes close is Xiu Xiu, and at least Jamie sometimes flips his shit and does ear damage for a few moments. Then again, alienation is part of what Xiu Xiu is-- Sufjan Stephens isn't trying, and that says something.

Ned, however...

I AM REVIEWBOT MY ARTICLE BACKLOG IS BIGGER THAN YOURS

Not entirely. As I muttered on another Sufjan thread, one time I walked into my fave local coffee place and asked what Stereolab B-side was playing. I was told it was Sufjan and nearly choked.

How much of this stuff is not because critics write about it, but because a lot of people just seem to have it?

The "deliberately" part seems terrifically wrong to me. I can't think of anything that's going on in Sufjan's music that seems calculated to limit his appeal; if anything, the music itself seems a bit unctuous, filled with exactly the sort of pleasantly complex folk moves that most people are kind of inherently okay with. A track like the Gacy song tracks back to most Americans' basic definition of what a song consists of, across pretty much the entire range of ages and genres. And lyrically, it's straightforward, traditionally "meaningful," earnest, etc. ("Charming" geek moves like the states project don't seem to actually infect the meaning of the songs much.) So I'm not sure what standard makes his appeal "deliberately" limited, unless all we're saying is that he's not the kind of musician who's aiming for the charts.

I mean, Erlewine seems to be saying the exact opposite here: the thing that limits the guy's appeal is that there's kind of nothing there, no big risky clump of personality that might draw people in. Calling that "deliberate" is weird: who here thinks that Sufjan's erased himself to this point of plain likeable competence in order to keep himself in a niche? That doesn't seem to be his intention at all.

His problem may actually be that he's just too much about the music, man -- this humble craftsman approach, this thing where he's interested in creating meaning rather than enacting it, gets him to a point where he's just kind of building something that can feel a bit impersonal. One of the things I've always liked about indie as a genre is that it often allows people to imagine and build something interesting, whether or not they can actually be that thing -- Sufjan feels like the problematic flip-side of that tendency, because what he's building isn't particularly imaginative. It's like he's putting a whole lot of skill into play-acting the role of a regular singer-songwriter, with just a few stylistic flourishes (the arrangements, the states) to make it supposedly "interesting."

I think this is right. I saw one of the Illinois shows, and thought he wasn't very enthusiastic about playing live (he even came out and apologized for their lack of energy near the end). But I read the play-acting with the indie role as part of a much more interesting struggle: that of someone trying to straddle two worlds in two different senses: a classical vs. pop straddling, and a Christian-secular straddling. The former is very common and we've remarked on it a lot elsewhere on ILM, but the latter isn't so much. Stevens seems (e.g. in the Pitchfork interview) to want to downplay the Christian-secular thing, and his motives for that are probably varied and interesting. But in the process, he's coming across as a bit bland personality-wise. But I know the culture he's coming out of (he's a Hope College grad), and that Christian-secular struggle is an enormous one. And with Stevens, here's a guy getting big NYC gigs with minimal token-Christian "affirmative action", as an indie guy. This struggle is really hard to write about without buying into too many presuppositions from within each culture, but Stevens seems to be trying to force us to. Take for instance "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades", a song on Illinois that's got striking similarities to the story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis, but by no means "in your face" about it. Or take "John Wayne Gacy", a song from the Reformed perspective on humanity's inherent sinfulness and the redeeming power of grace. One interesting thing about what Stevens is doing is that he's singing these songs from a perspective, mediated by the "50 states" conceit; like he's wearing a mask. It just reinforces the "not in your face" thing, and it's interesting to wonder what him deciding to wear a mask tells us about "us" (instead of focusing on what it tells us about "him").

Of course if you find the music tedious or whatever, you won't want to listen. Fine. This is meant not to be an apologetic for liking his music as it is trying to give shape to what might be under the surface of a lot of the backlash I've read about Stevens and his act, if not yet fully articulated.

I think this is right. I saw one of the Illinois shows, and thought he wasn't very enthusiastic about playing live (he even came out and apologized for their lack of energy near the end). But I read the play-acting with the indie role as part of a much more interesting struggle: that of someone trying to straddle two worlds in two different senses: a classical vs. pop straddling, and a Christian-secular straddling. The former is very common and we've remarked on it a lot elsewhere on ILM, but the latter isn't so much. Stevens seems (e.g. in the Pitchfork interview) to want to downplay the Christian-secular thing, and his motives for that are probably varied and interesting. But in the process, he's coming across as a bit bland personality-wise. But I know the culture he's coming out of (he's a Hope College grad), and that Christian-secular struggle is an enormous one. And with Stevens, here's a guy getting big NYC gigs with minimal token-Christian "affirmative action", as an indie guy. This struggle is really hard to write about without buying into too many presuppositions from within each culture, but Stevens seems to be trying to force us to. Take for instance "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades", a song on Illinois that's eventually parallels the story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis, but isn't "in your face" about it. Or take "John Wayne Gacy", a song from the Reformed perspective on humanity's inherent sinfulness and the redeeming power of grace. One interesting thing about what Stevens is doing is that he's singing these songs from a perspective, mediated by the "50 states" conceit. It's like he's wearing a mask. It's interesting to wonder what this mask-wearing tells us about "us" (instead of focusing on what it tells us about "him"), say, on the Christian-secular divide.

Of course if you find the music tedious or whatever, you won't want to listen. Fine. This is meant not to be an apologetic for liking his music as it is trying to say why I think the backlash against Stevens is really interesting.

Who should we be listening to at the moment?

Sufjan Stevens - and he's just astonishing. He's like some mad gay Christian American singer-songwriter who just writes the most amazing stuff.

I'd just like to take this opportunity to renew my strenuous objection to this song's essential narcissism, and also to player-hate on Sufjan a little, because he is getting crazy paid

I could list a lot of issues I have with Sufjan and the way he presents himself - that he's cagey about "what it all means," that he evokes national and cultural themes but doesn't always go all the way to say something about them, that the tour last year was silly (though the Lincoln Center show with orchestra was probably right on). I see why people react this way and that to his "fame." And Nitsuh's points are great, but I actually wish he would have less of a persona, or at least do far fewer of these self-depracating, "yeah, I dunno" interviews.

But at the end of the day? The guy has still written a bunch of really good songs.

And Sufjan's arrangements are really great.

That's part of what I meant about this being the end-point of a certain indie tendency -- and you can see the same thing operating with other acts serving this audience, like say the Decemberists. (Note that they also share a fixation on history and a tendency to dress up, though the Decemberists are staging storybooks while Sufjan's staging "America.") It comes down to the same differences we put between writers of fiction and musicians: we kind of expect musicians to perform their ideas, to be themselves, whereas its understood that writers don't have to be the thing, just arrange it on a page. Like I said, I always thought that was a terrific thing about indie, especially when it allows acts to imagine things people aren't likely to just naturally be.

But if we were to imagine Sufjan as a writer -- both in terms of lyrics and style -- he would still be a bit of a boring one; he'd just be like Myla Goldberg minus depth. So you can set that to the best arrangements in the universe, and the most competent and well-crafted songwriting, but for plenty of people it's going to feel like there's something missing. (I get the feeling Sufjan really wouldn't be so great of a writer of fiction, really, but with that we get back into my whole tag about "MFA rock." Meloy from Decemberists has an MFA, so I think we can all expect that in the next decade or so he'll have a novel to sell -- and just enough audience and notoriety to sell it pretty effectively.)

...
Anyway, I'm just being facetious. He's pretty OTM on this.

Which is a great quote, even if I disagree with its relevence to Sufjan. Because so much of the culture we (I) participate in is observatory, if the above quote is condemnation - so much becomes condemned. It is either a fault in the listener, who is engaging in a world (here: American 3rd world) in which he doesn't belong. Or it is the fault of the performer (here: Sufjan Stevens) who doesn't belong there as well, but leads us to believe he has authenticity. (The distinction of course being: a listener from the 3rd world who listens to Sufjan, or me listening to Bob Marley.)

I still don't think it applies here. I'm not going to reread all the lyrics to Illinoise, but I remember them as being basically middle-class America.

Also, "he'd just be like Myla Goldberg minus depth":
Do you mean Bea Season Myla? (Cute, overreaching, sometimes moving, sometimes tedious.) Or Wicket's Remedy Myla? (Historically boring, irrelevant, tedious). I feel like the second, like the allmusic review, is what makes his work so different from Oberst: You just don't care.

Which would make him -- holy shit -- the Garisson Keillor of the indie-rock set?

That seems like a pretty strong assessment (and might be misleading; IIRC Stevens wasn't raised as a Christian, but I could be wrong). If you replace it with

"a person who grew up in the Midwest and feels a strong conviction to a particular breed of Protestantism"

then you might be more on the money. But as to his audience I think you're right on the money. As far as calling his audience back to the Midwest and back to the type of Christianity he envisions: if you're right, then isn't he doing what you said above you liked about indie: that it's a place to imagine and build something interesting? Unless your view is that nothing Midwestern or Christian could ever be interesting, which I take it is a pretty common view.

just curious

But mainly why I like him is because Michigan sounds like Central New York, which I meant to write a whole thing about sometime.

I didn't like Illinois that much, but maybe he'll get me back on the next one.

Agreed. That's certainly one of the things that I find fascinating about Stevens and Meloy.

Not really: he doesn't need to "imagine" or "built" midwestern Protestantism. When I say I like that about indie, I'm thinking more of acts that seemed to imagine something that didn't so much exist.

i read this really really wrong the first time i glanced at it.

*actually does like the piece*

Maybe sufjan will write symphony for 100 oboes and 100 plucked violins called Old Fridges in Parking Lots Make Me Melancholic.

Sufjan is the Woody Allen of contemporary musc.

That's all.

-- M@tt He1geson, Rendolent Ding-Dong (matt@game

Where is Geir? This thread certainly could do with some hongroscopy.

I stick my wiener in a socket
it doesn't matter if you're Davey Crocket
I got a dick that's burnt to a crisp
Do you remember that cereal "Quisp?"
It was an alien, propeller-headed motherfucker
on a cereal box
It wasn't Frankenberry or Flintstones,
but it was all I gots
Fuck my mom was a cheap bitch!

I just laughed so hard for so long at that little piece of, um, poetry and its accompanying GIF image that I almost puked (really!). Now my cheeks are all sore. Thanks for the early morning roffle, duder.

Hey, hey, pitcher, better check that batter
make sure the candy's in the Original Wrapper
hey, pitcher, better check that batter
make sure the candy's in the Original Wrapper, hey, hey, hey

WAHT

...Without ever really justifying the "I don't like it" at all.

Of course, the problem is that taste is subjective and fundamentally unjustifiable. We like what we like. And everything that STE objects to another listener might enjoy.

I'll say now that I like "Come On Feel the Illinoise." I recognize that it's hermetic, self-satisfied and almost oppressively cutesy-pie. I recognize that it isn't particularly sophisticated for all it's signifiers of sophistication. I recognize the high-school report quality of the whole thing -- musically as well as lyrically.

But that's a big part of why I like it. I agree with SJE all the way through, but I happen to enjoy the things he hates. And none of it takes anything away from the record itself.

Okay then...

http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=61::68AP

It's like he stopped listening to mainstream rock in the late '90s and is still angry about it.

Then again, maybe I'm just a dourist who can't feel the "riotous call for free living no matter the consequences of the next day."

Long live rock.

But I realize that while gloom-n-doom styles have been ascendent since the grunge era, the pendulum is already starting to swing the other way. Jurek's piece is bemoaning the "death" of something that's actually experiencing a rebirth. Kids are gravitating towards the fun-fun party-party rawk. See The Darkness, Towers of London, Avenged Sevenfold, etc. Hell, that's what the whole retro-pop-punk thing was all about, anyway. And that's been going on for a decade, even losing steam at this point.

Shit, and while Jurek includes Prince and Michael Jackson in his summary of 80s hedonism, he reduces the total spectrum of 90s music to certain rock styles. What about hip-hop, teenpop and R&B? While Korn may have been gloomy as hell, Ludacris and *NSYNC sure weren't.

Plus it's so stodgy and curmudgeonly. Bleah.

I don't really see why he should be talking about Ludacris and *NSYNC any more than I would expect an article on the Second Viennese School to talk about Jimmie Lunceford or the Four Freshmen.

And he bemoans the gloomy pall that grunge and post-grunge rock cast (or reflected). But that ain't the only rock out there. Pop-punk went strong for quite a while, and gloom rock seems to be in decline -- debatably. Hedonistic pop-metal and hard rock styles certainly seem more popular over the last half-decade than in, say, the mid 90s. Don't see how the failure of the 2nd Darkness album really diminishes this.

The early century isn't as innocent or exuberant as the 80s. Given. But it isn't all piss and moan, either. It's kinda divided. Heart-wrenching indie-emo splits the bill with often upbeat dance rock and indie hip-hop. Gangsta rap settles into middle aged, nearly-blissful bougification. And grunge and nu-metal sag from the spotlight to be replaced by, what? Dunno, but it seems like less miserable forms are seeping in from all sides.

soooo. i think i've figured out why i don't like to listen to him. i feel it's fake. like there are all these sounds, motifs, directions -- but none of them are really committed. a tinge of this mood, that instrument -- for a product that's completely quirky and unique, but that doesn't really identify with any of its quirky elements.

it feels like when i cook, and i have no idea how to cook, so i throw 40 spices in one pot.

sufjan stevens is like "40 spices hummus." not right.

There's nothing inherently twee about 40 spices hummus.

dude that 40 spices hummus is fucking GOOOD tho.

I hate sufjan stevens fwiw.

haha i know, it's better than him