Much discussed on the socials, a piece by Mitch Therieau for The Drift that fingers Jack Antonoff - not so much an uber-producer as a ubi-producer, as in ubiquitous - as "pop music's blandest prophet".
People are picking away at it, as they will do, but I thought it was persuasive and full of great lines and sharp sonic analysis of Antonoff's twin modes of cinematic maximalism and quasi-intimate whispery minimalism
"It is like Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love on a histrionic sugar high — or like cutting into what you thought was Tunnel of Love, expecting to find a substantive work of pop craftsmanship and introspection, only to find cake. Unlike the Fun. records, Strange Desire deals in a strangely hollow maximalism. You might call it, as many critics have, “cinematic” pop. In other words: pop made to serve as a soundtrack. And at the center of the swirl of sound that often doesn’t register as music so much as undifferentiated yearning, there is an empty space for you, the main character. Appropriately enough, Antonoff’s fans often describe his music as a kind of catharsis machine; a soundtrack to which you can, in the words of one YouTube commenter, “drive and cry and vent and go trough every emotion humanly possible.” It is as if Antonoff discovered that the only way to keep pop-rock viable in conditions increasingly hostile to its survival was to reduce it down to a mechanism for delivering a concentrated shot of big feelings.....
"... a distinctive yet elusive sound whose hallmarks are less musical than emotional. Verses ratchet up sweatily to choruses rather than building organically or shading into them. Choruses are strenuous; the unbearable longing they often convey registers as nothing other than the indomitable drive to become a hit....
"... nearly collapsing under the sticky surplus of emotion.... "
On producers notorious for hostile and abusive work environments:
"... treating women artists in particular as interchangeable and disposable bearers of their hit-children"
Spinning off discussion of "Out of the Woods" (a Jack + Taylor song whose appeal and resonance beyond its author I find particularly mystifying):
"A Jack song always seems to take place in a sort of ambiently traumatic limbo where reconciliation is right around the corner, if not just out of reach..."
^^^^^^^^^^^
I suppose the bit where the argument loses me a little is the idea that Antonoff's career has something to do with the diffusion of indie-pop aesthetics into the mainstream.
See, I can't really hear the indie-ness. At least it doesn't correspond to what I think of as "indie" (I know, there's multiple strands; it's evolved over time; indie in 2023 is different from indie in 2003 is different from indie in 1993 is different from 1983 etc etc). But if I think of indie from the perspective of one who saw it emerge - who can remember a rock world before indie even existed - indeed one who wrote about it during its emergence.... one of the defining things about indie is that it's not melodramatic. I associate it with the laconic, the low-key, the understated... small voices and non-singers... a sense of the ordinary transfigured
(I suppose there are exceptions... that line from Band of Holy Joy through to Tindersticks and Jack... Pulp too. The Scott Walker loving thread. Nick Cave, also, with his love of "entertainment music, though some might call it corn" . But are any of them really "indie"?)
For the most part indie = constitutively anti-theatrical, naturalistic, mumblecore.
