boygenius: Baker Bridgers Dacus LLC

I had a very similar feeling seeing them in Vancouver with trans kiddo.

with my trans kiddo, I mean.

Thinking about the (now locked) phoebe bridgers haters thread, and while I don't intend to relitigate the issue here, it struck me as odd to think about how bridgers frequently attracts those kinds of responses but baker and dacus largely do not. Part of that it just profile level and the fact that bridgers feels more celebrity-adjacent (dating paul mescal etc), but it's more interesting to imagine that it's also partly reflective of their diverging songwriting personas.

Of the three, bridgers' songwriting feels most obviously "gen z" to me (scare quotes intended) - that mix of deadpan and archness, both numb and emotionally needy. Like, I can imagine her letting a friend know she had just had serious surgery by writing "in the hospital, nearly met my grandma again lol", whereas baker if she sent a message at all would be like "you need to pick me up", and dacus would probably be giving her friends advice from her hospital bed without mentioning where she was. To be clear, this is not what I actually think these people would do in these circumstances, but rather what the narrator-characters of their songs imply to me.

Like that line in "cool about it" where bridgers sings "Once I took your medication to know what it was like" - which is presented as evidence for how deeply attuned to the other person and their reality she is, even though it's also a totally fucked up thing to do, and of course she knows that. Like, if the song generally is about the difficulty of walking back intimacy after a relationship ends, then bridgers' verse adds another layer: "there is no document of intimacy which is not at the same time a document of narcissism".

I got into this band the way I get into most music these days: a song on a playlist or a Discover Weekly, a tickle that becomes an itch and so on. I knew Julien from her associations with Frightened Rabbit and knew of her confessional style; I had a vague sense of Phoebe Bridgers and no knowledge of Dacus at all. I very rarely look for live stuff or interviews so had no visual sense of the band at all. It wasn't until my daughter got into them and they became this intense lockdown thing, that I filled in the character backstories and what they meant to the fans.

Since then I've developed a vicarious appreciation of the closeness of things, most of which operates outside of the music yet seems utterly inseparable from it: the characters to each other, the 'characters' to the 'real' people involved, the relationship to the fans. Your second paragraph speaks to this: how porous the boundaries seem, how the band seem to blur the line between drama and 'real life'. Seeing them live cemented all of this and I wasn't really prepared for the emotional wallop of it and what it meant for me and the people there. The trio appeared on stage very briefly, at the end of Muna's set and it was like 30,000 people spontaneously burst into tears. It was extraordinary but also contributed to an ongoing feeling that this simply isn't sustainable; that they're playing that is so combustible it's bound to explode at some point. Julien is too damaged. Phoebe is just a chaos engine. Lucy will tire of being the third who walks beside them. Etc etc. I know it's all part of the mythos they've built but there it is.

Now, I am well aware this may be entirely personal and a shit ton of projection because of my relationship with my kid but I can't decide if this is just new to me and it's a 'welcome to true fandom, where the hell have you been?!' or a novel situation worthy of thinking about some more. Your post emboldened the latter reading but I may well be talking complete bollocks so forgive me if so.

tl;dr - a daft old man is worried about the boys.

It was extraordinary but also contributed to an ongoing feeling that this simply isn't sustainable; that they're playing that is so combustible it's bound to explode at some point. Julien is too damaged. Phoebe is just a chaos engine. Lucy will tire of being the third who walks beside them. Etc etc. I know it's all part of the mythos they've built but there it is.

wow, amazing

in the hospital, nearly met my grandma again lol

lol

great post Tim F

They killed on SNL tonight.

Here's "Satanist"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hniH8I8c-m0

No one has ever done less holding a BC Rich

I enjoyed both songs. Old man me was also won over to them in part awhile back hearing Bridgers talk about music and her family and such on her Sirius XM radio show.

I just watched SNL and I really wanted David Letterman to walk out after they performed so I could get a handle on the relative heights of the band

wait I thought he was in the band..?