St. Vincent - MASSEDUCTION (5th album, October 13 2017)

had me wtf'ing for a minute but I see it's "just" a remix

she def gave it a st vincent feel

https://i.imgur.com/QG5OgcD.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/oxbiVeY.jpg

MassEducation:

01 Slow Disco
02 Savior
03 Masseduction
04 Sugarboy
05 Fear the Future
06 Smoking Section
07 Los Ageless
08 New York
09 Young Lover
10 Happy Birthday, Johnny
11 Pills
12 Hang on Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yLmAwGpPV8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqNvRMAKj-c

Out next week.

Sweet! Glad she followed thru and released it. Been waiting for this ever since she mentioned it during promo last year.

lol at people wondering why she re-arranged the tracklisting - I mean hang on me was such a massive downer of an opening track that it appearing last totally makes sense somehow to me here. Additionally, restructuring the order is a good way of making this sound even more fresh than just a simple re-tooling. excited

based on those two tracks, wondering if this is gonna be a spared-back collection like her tiny desk acoustic set? i mean that might be kind of cool but i hope it's not just that uniform

It's all piano. Doveman's piano playing is remarkable. Works on pretty much every track.

This is such a treat if you liked Masseduction

Great live performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdmSRfbjQlY

given that i will not hear this for some time, can anyone give me more idea what it sounds like

i take it there is pedal steel and piano on every song (as mentioned) but how different are the songs to the originals, tempo wise, arrangement wise etc

finally listening to the piano version, EXCELLENT! 💯

this is a nice little video, the joke around 0:41 sure to please an ilxor or two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VW3TWNCnWE

http://molly-young.com/stvincent.html

"I walked home thinking about how unusual it is to experience
sustained dislike as an adult. When you're a kid and you have no control
over your time, you're constantly forced to be with people (kids, mainly)
who find you lame and annoying, which is painful. The primary perk of
being an adult is that you have the agency to avoid these situations.
Until you don't."

Surely Molly Young must see the metonymy of writing something like this, both the sentence in particular and the sum post.

Clark's job description: learn guitar, learn to sing. Write songs, research gear, stay on top of current trends. Perform excellent shows and record excellent albums. Produce work for self and for others.

Clark's actual job description: look excellent at all times. Navigate public social and romantic relationships. Navigate inquiry regarding sexuality and private life. Be amenable and gracious in the face of intrusion, either by consumers of your work, or by interviewers who believe they are entitled to feeling "not disliked" upon first/second meeting.

It always amazes me when arts journalists, either by turning author (and subjecting their own work to the critical gaze), or by incidents such as this, suddenly experience what content-creators have to experience every second of every day

I'm not a journalist, so I don't know how typical this experience is or what expectations they go in with. But the way I see it, they are doing a job that is meant to be mutually beneficial for the artist and publication. Having a base level of courtesy towards someone who is helping to facilitate this service to promote your music isn't a lot to ask for.

2 years ago there was a piece in the New Yorker (similar scenario, journo tags along while SV does summat else) so the writer here must have been wise to what the score was. She's a bit of a wind up merchant is about the size of it as far as i can tell. Also she's not above apologising if she thinks she got something wrong;

'The next morning, my phone buzzes. Clark’s messaged me on Twitter. “Dude!” she says, “I’m sorry I was a cock.” She explains that she was exhausted, “which is not an excuse”, but that she’d felt especially defensive because she’d been getting negative tweets about the show all day, and had thought my comments were an attempt to go for the jugular. “I really misread the interaction,” she says, “and have been feeling horribly guilty ever since. I thought you were just there to tell me my show sucked and I got real defensive and yeah, it went downhill from there.”'

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/music-theatre/2017/11/it-s-cool-some-people-hate-my-show-st-vincent-fan-backlash-and-chinese

fgti otm

I have no idea why any writer would admit to this

right

St. Vincent Has a Cold (Shoulder)

There are plenty enough Annie Clark-hates-interviews stories going around that at this point any halfway competent writer should know that going in.

these are both right:

they are doing a job that is meant to be mutually beneficial for the artist and publication. Having a base level of courtesy towards someone who is helping to facilitate this service to promote your music isn't a lot to ask for.

I have no idea why any writer would admit to this

that said, Annie sounds *awful* in that link piscesx posted. :(

awful? really? seems like typical aloof rock star behavior - exactly what one would expect profiling celebrities.

awful? really? seems like typical aloof rock star behavior - exactly what one would expect profiling celebrities.

I take it you've never actually done it, then. Most musicians are very nice and polite and welcoming in an interview context. They understand that it's a transaction, and they make it as pleasant as possible. Ones who've had decades-long careers are particularly so - I've never interviewed him myself, but I've heard that, for example, Robert Plant is a fantastic person to talk to. I always heard the same thing about David Bowie. Rob Halford of Judas Priest is one of the nicest people you could ever spend an hour with - he listens, thinks about your questions, and answers in paragraphs. Even people whose art is sometimes off-putting or alienating are great in interviews - I had a fucking blast talking to Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten.

Clark, on the other hand, comes off like someone who really dislikes doing interviews and therefor comes up with ways to short-circuit or "subvert" the process that she probably thinks are really smart and cool, and which I'm sure amuse her greatly, but just wind up making the writer (who's getting paid very little money to be there, and may even be taking time away from a day job to do it) feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. It's a shitty approach to something that is in her job description (if you want to make art for public consumption, you're going to have to talk about that art with journalists), and the fact that she gets such fawning press despite this spoiled-child stuff is baffling to me.

Booming post unperson.

I can see fgti's post which makes a lot of sense, but ultimately this isn't about artists having to jump through hoops. I keep coming back to the bit saying 'St. Vincent doesn't need to be in GQ, why did she agree to this in the first place?' Regardless of whether that is because of people surrounding her, it's never a good idea to be unkind to people imo.

I have done it. Some people are nice, some are fucking assholes. Comes with the territory.

there's really so little evidence to suggest Clark is awful there imo, and i mean who knows what's going on with anyone at any given moment. i know that there's an understanding about the give and take with being a public figure and being interviewed, and i understand that a lot of artists are great with interviews and some are definitely not, but i'm not sure it's really an effective way to measure their quality as a human being. it's such an outlier type of experience.

i guess the great part of being an anonymous person like myself is i can meet someone somewhere and have a mildly awkward or lame interaction and they're not going to write about me online. unless i worked at a restaurant and they were a yelper, idk.

(who's getting paid very little money to be there, and may even be taking time away from a day job to do it)

break out the violins

Of course it comes with the territory. But that doesn't mean shitty behaviour* can't be called out as such. Especially if the person involved agreed to be profiled for GQ. xp

(if said shitty behavior indeed happened, as Omar points out)

xp wow shitty reply, flappy

i've only been interviewed about my art once but i can easily imagine having deep contempt for the entire experience despite it being "part of my job"

wearing sunglasses and giving monosyllabic answers and brushing her off at a party is not "awful." the last thing a journalist should be concerned with is whether or not their subjects or their friends like them, it's not part of the job.

btw giving monosyllabic 3-4 word answers is a great way of not getting misquoted

yeah, exactly. artists have every reason to be suspicious of and aloof towards journalists

when i interview artists i work very hard on my questions and, when the interview happens, try to remain as in the moment as possible so the interview can progress less like a q&a session and more like a conversation. if the conversation feeling never arrives, i at least have my questions to lean on. this is pretty much all there is to it; it has almost nothing to do with whether the artist in question is an asshole or not bc who gives a shit, we're both doing a job

the writer trying to shoehorn themselves into conversations that the musician is having with an artist at a gallery? as an artist i'd be like "who set this incredibly awkward situation up, maybe i should fire my press person" and as a writer i'd probably really focus on the phrase "observe quietly"

I'd be paranoid about being The Duke in his Domain'd

i'd still eat the interviewer's apple pie, though

brad otm, if you're going to be awkward or aggressive just own it and make hay. that note is just so pathetic and stupid insofar as their career is concerned

honestly this account was more baffling to me than anything, because the idea of "(experiencing) sustained dislike as an adult" is more or less the ambient oxygen of my daily life, and the idea of this being a life-jolting occurrence is completely alien to my life -- the same way that I can accept that some people have synesthesia where, like, the number 6 is blue, but I cannot personally feel it. like, does she not have coworkers? roommates? Twitter?

i've only been interviewed about my art once but i can easily imagine having deep contempt for the entire experience despite it being "part of my job"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 8:18 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Then don't do the interview! It can be a deeply disappointing experience for all involved (I'm an editor in chief tbh). Again, St. Vincent agreed to this interview. So she had three choices: 1) cancel the interview, 2) do it but be "weird", so that your "weirdness" is noted and mentioned (success), or 3) do it and be nice. Being nice shouldn't be very hard, even though all of those three are legitimate options imo.

maybe this interviewer is awkward and uncool! the pass-agg note suggests it's a possibility...

it has almost nothing to do with whether the artist in question is an asshole or not bc who gives a shit, we're both doing a job

and i'd like to add that sometimes you have to pick up the slack if the person you're working with does a shitty job, and wouldn't merit documenting it in a mini-essay if it were happening in say an office building

by that i mean giving off bad vibes, idk. that note is such a weird thing to publicly post. is she trying to get fired?

xxp -- also, apologizing to an interview the day later for how one came off is something that I would guess is not that common. even if it's damage control and not genuine worry, from what I have heard it doesn't seem like an all that common form of damage control

she's a freelancer xp

right of course...it's weird self-sabotage either way

(if you want to make art for public consumption, you're going to have to talk about that art with journalists)

This hasn't been true for a few years now at least

if you're writing features for a major magazine you have probably earned more online candor than the average person

like, a lot of writers have mentioned similar experiences with st. vincent, all of whom are still writers, and whose careers are if anything going even better

I agree that the note is very strange, drawing way more attention to a fairly typical write-around celebrity profile than it would otherwise get (it's fucking GQ, the photos of Clark in $5000 coats are the point, not the text) and making the writer the story when she shouldn't be. But this is part of a pattern of behavior for Clark, as various interviews from her last few press cycles - not to mention those Instagram videos - have revealed.

the last graf of the note is baffling, especially this:

When you're a kid and you have no control over your time, you're constantly forced to be with people (kids, mainly) who find you lame and annoying, which is painful. The primary perk of being an adult is that you have the agency to avoid these situations. Until you don't.

like when you... become a journalist