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

I don't necessarily think Clark is in the right (def not with the sunglasses bit, but at the party? sure), just saying this level of animosity / aloofness / suspicion of journalists is par for the course, in my experience (as a writer & as an artist).

it's very simple: if she doesn't want to do the interview, she should tell her publicist she doesn't want to do it. she shouldn't treat another human being like shit. my 6-year-old knows that.

it often isn't very simple - artists have obligations to their labels & the people working for them. they don't care if you're averse to interviews, and you have a responsibility to uphold your promotional duties. and again, just from that note, the behavior described is hardly abhorrent.

OK, I just went back and read the piece again and you're right ... I probably overstated it when I said she seems awful. I think this part really jumped out at me the first time:

“Yes.” I wait for more, but instead she pulls her phone out of her pocket and starts typing. “Keep asking away.”

She sounds like she's just completely wiped out and over the touring/press cycle, which I get. And I think she gets it, too, as evidenced by her reaching out to the journalist the next day.

This still sounds worse than 99% of my interactions with artists, who generally seem to understand the mutually beneficial transaction, and know how to set aside their current annoyances and deal with another person in a reasonably pleasant way.

(Lastly: I know SV has lots of people wanting her to do press even if she doesn't want to. That excuse doesn't fly with me. She knew that was part of the deal when she signed a record contract or whatever. If she doesn't want to do press that bad, she should find a business partner that won't force her to do it.)

(To put that last point another way: You're right, flappy, it often isn't very simple. But SV's at a level where she could make it simple if she wanted to.)

it often isn't very simple - artists have obligations to their labels & the people working for them. they don't care if you're averse to interviews, and you have a responsibility to uphold your promotional duties. and again, just from that note, the behavior described is hardly abhorrent.

― flappy bird, Tuesday, January 29, 2019 9:54 PM (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No doubt you kill-filed me or w/e. But this still doesn't in any way excuse you from being nice, or even ok-ish, to someone.

tbh bc of like... the media ecosystem, and also instagram, i know this writer is married and lives in a beautiful loft, and when i read that last paragraph about never having to engage with people who dislike you, i thought "wow you sure are married and live in a beautiful loft"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 9:02 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:-(

Since almost everything StV does professionally is a pose (and therefore a choice) it seems normal to think that the decision to act like a dick was not also deliberate BUT there are a lot of circumstantial, relationship or mental health reasons that someone may be acting badly. Having said that this does seem bad in a very particularly rehearsed way.

this usually boils down, for me, to 'is the artist making good enough art to justify their interview antics'

with st vincent the answer is a massive resounding no, hence i am with the journalist 100%

I would never kill file you, LBI! I don't even know how to do that...

This all weird reasoning imo since the narrator here hasn’t shared anything that makes her sound anything other than maybe wiped out and a bit standoffish and I really don’t know how to take her “do you like doing this?” question, it does not come off on paper as an indicator of anything other than someone who may have just had some recent bad experiences with journalists or simply some shit going on in their life. I have no reason to trust this enough to make a judgement of SV as a person and the level at which one appreciates her art is no reason to judge her more harshly either, I mean come on.

(To put that last point another way: You're right, flappy, it often isn't very simple. But SV's at a level where she could make it simple if she wanted to.)

Is she? I genuinely don't know - she's an amphitheater act, not on a major label, not a household name... the way the music industry is, I don't think there are many artists that can forego interviews or a typical promotional cycle that would make someone like Clark weary w/o letting down their employers and their expectations.

yer right. also, fgti's story about the curveball question is horrifying. xp

there's also the aspect that the entire masseduction rollout (videos, etc.) was based on a sort of sardonic self-awareness of the press cycle, of which that question would be a natural part of

s Clark neared the end of recording, she turned some attention to the next phases—packaging, publicity, performance. She has observed that, when she makes the rounds to local media outlets or on cattle-call press junkets, she is repeatedly asked the same questions, many of them dumb ones. “You become a factory worker,” she said. “When you have to say something over and over, there’s a festering self-loathing. No better way to feel like a fraud.”

She’d made what she was calling an interview kit, a highly stylized short film, which consists of her answering typical questions. She sits in a chair with her legs crossed, in a short pink skirt and a semitransparent latex top before a Day-Glo green backdrop, with a camera and a sound crew of three female models in heels, dog collars, dominatrix hoods, and assless/chestless minidresses. A screen reads, “Insert light banter,” and then Clark reappears, saying, with a strained smile, “It’s good to see you again. Of course I remember you. Yah, good to see you. How’s—how’s your kid?”

There follows a series of questions and answers, with the former presented as text onscreen—generic placeholders:

Q. Insert question about the inspiration for this record.

A. I saw a woman alone in her car singing along to “Great Balls of Fire,” and I wanted to make a record that would prevent that from ever happening again.

Q. Insert question about how much of her work is autobiographical.

A. All of my work is autobiographical, both the factual elements of my life and the fictional ones.

Q. Insert question about being a woman in music.

A. What’s it like being a woman in music? . . . Very good question.

The camera cuts to her interlaced fingers. She wears paste-on fingernails, each with a letter. They spell out “F-U-C-K-O-F-F.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/st-vincents-cheeky-sexy-rock

(xp -- also s/"a natural part")

caveat: I have not participated in many interviews in my life, and I was probably a mediocre interviewee and not anyone doing interviews for publication. I've seen a lot of one-on-one and roundtable live interviews -- notably a different thing than one done for publication -- and generally there are two types: the light questioning with extended answers, and ones that are more "transactional"

it seems weird to me that this kind of drops in the middle of the note on how the interview went

Midway through Clark turned to me and asked, with audible hostility, "Do you like doing this?" (There's a long pause in the tape here.) I said something evasive and steered the conversation back to modular synths.

why be evasive? imo that's the basis of why interviews can be an inherently hostile enterprise, it's an unnatural conversation style with no reciprocity. even if you're going to fuck up the answer, reciprocate

yer right. also, fgti's story about the curveball question is horrifying. xp

The question was, "Who's a better kisser? Algernon Featherwilly, or Benjamin Powderbottom?"

Years later I am still traumatized

why be evasive?

Seriously. The obvious answer is "usually, yes." I mean, I've never - in 22 years - had an interview disintegrate into outright hostility (I have had one person hang up on me), but if she's putting it out there, grab it and see what happens.

w/r/t whether SV is at a level to make her music without doing press - or more precisely, doing press she wants to do, when she wants to do it - i mean, i really have no idea how much $ she makes, what kind of financial obligations she has, whether she gives a shit if people buy tickets or not, etc., etc., not to mention the various promotional pressures she feels.

but just generally speaking, i would imagine Annie could either (a) find partners to help her start her own label and release music that way, a la Wilco, or (b) tell labels straight away she wants to control the press stuff, and if they don't like it, they can go sign someone else. i'm quite sure there'd be labels that would love to work with her anyway.

until she does one of those things, she signs up for putting some control of press obligations in someone else's hands.

and she can handle that any way she wants, of course. but taking out her frustrations about it on someone who is just trying to do their job isn't a great look.

i thought "wow you sure are married and live in a beautiful loft"

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 2:02 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not my finest moment

― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Tuesday, January 29, 2019 2:02 PM (four hours ago

no this is a keeper

There's literally nothing keeping St. Vincent from saying "I'm just not gonna do press for this record"

Even if her records aren't doing Adele numbers, she's got producer gigs, festival appearances, gear deals, movie syncs in the fuckin Twilight movies ... she's prolly got racks

No, you always have to keep doing press, esp at that level, the artist is a business investment and you can't make decisions like that without having arguments with labels et al.

It's people like Will Oldham who have that luxury

I interviewed her around the summer of 2010 and I just have fond memories of our conversation, tbh.

so having just come from a concert by an artist who was extremely anxious and uncomfortable on stage, and having belatedly realized my wondering if it was some kind of "performance" was both a natural human instinct and ludicrously overanalytical, i'm possibly more inclined than typically towards the theory that ms. clark was having a shitty day and reacted to it by being an asshole.

Maybe so

What’s your excuse for the interviewer posting a weird tell-all on her Tumblr? Was she also just having a shitty day?

Maybe her first shitty day (as an adult!). That last paragraph is something else.

I was fired from my job at one of the major national music magazines because Ozzy didn't like the questions I was asking him and hung up on me. The questions were indeed obtrusive and insipid, which was the name of the game as far as my boss was concerned. To this day, it was the only remotely unsuccessful interview experience I ever had.

My girlfriend at the time was a music publicist, and she believed the situation should have been mitigated by the fact that, being that this was 2003, the entire world knew that Ozzy was an irritable dim bulb (and he surely was taxed by shit Sharon made him do at the time, which was unprecedented by the standards he had known previously). Frankly, my boss (well known in the music press environment for being impossible. over his head, and ignorant of the business he was in) and I hated each other and this was the pretext he needed to axe me. And I was overjoyed to get away from him.

But the bottom line is that it doesn't matter if the interview subject is uncooperative. If you are acting as a professional interviewer, your responsibility is to get the goods. I didn't, and faced the consequences. But Young did get the goods, based on a perfectly serviceable piece by GQ's standards. Yet she is offended that Clark was indifferent and is moved to complain in public.. Will Welch is the new editor at GQ, and he may be charged to keep pace with modern journalism, which Welch very well could believe involves tolerating freelancers complaining in public about a professional interaction that occurred on GQ's behalf—because everybody has to talk about everything in public constantly. It wouldn't have been enough to privately complain to Nasty Little Man, or to Will Welch, or to her spouse in the nice loft or her friends. But if I was Welch, I would not use Young again.

David Bowie and Rob Halford were both indeed incredibly pleasant, thoughtful, generous in conversation.

seems like she's taken the note down

What’s your excuse for the interviewer posting a weird tell-all on her Tumblr? Was she also just having a shitty day?

― fgti's romance (flamboyant goon tie included)

outside of professional music writers, nobody actually cares about the interviewer as far as i can tell

but i can be really out of the loop and i'm prepared to be wrong about this

my main question is "why is this interviewer still using tumblr"

i mean this seems like prime tweetstorm material

if it was a tweetstorm ppl on here would ask why it wasn't a blog post

I mean, when you interview artists for a living, someone asks you like once a month which one was the nicest and who was a real jerk. And the answers - ime, at least - are always boring and disappointing. She should've just saved her SV experience for that.

I quite enjoy it when a writer describes the anti-social behavior of a subject, but that's just me.

There are times where it kind of creates empathy for the anti-social subject-- I always felt kind of sad about Lou Reed's chronic frustration that nobody was interested in all the reading he'd done regarding signal deterioration and buffering re: his guitar tone

Did anybody archive the note? Apparently she's done this before with other profiles.