fiona apple - fetch the bolt cutters (2020)

oh my god no

There are a lot of sentences in there that are very strange coming from a purported music critic.

But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit.

Wut kind of music does this person usually listen to(?)

xp She's not a music critic, unless you mean Carl.

I thought the essay was an honest examination of Roberts's own reaction to the album within the inescapable context of other people's reactions. It's not meant to be a review.

I mean, there's all kind of stuff that's popular on this very board that I just shrug off unless I'm feeling particularly spicy that day, at which point I'll toss off a dismissive zing. I've never once felt the urge to construct a piece of this size to ostensibly sort out why and still not try very hard in the end.

The thesis of the piece looks like "this should be a message board post, not an article" but I was pleasantly surprised at how fine it was, though I was biased bc of all the positive stuff about Carl

"Bolt Cutters" is mixed and mastered really loud which also did well for MBDTF's reception but not so great for my own listening tastes, especially considering how dynamic "Idler Wheel" was but ah well

i have a separate complaint, they call that a long read???? kids these days

as someone who likes this album, the piece is in fact really good, reminds me of when longform music writing was more of a thing

I like it too, mainly because I’ve always felt kind of the same way about Beyoncé (and Lemonade in particular).

yeah it was a good piece!

I understand the "why don't I like this thing that all my putative peers like?" feeling. I've certainly talked myself into buying enough critically praised bullshit over the years. But "I don't like this thing that all my putative peers like" is not an inherently interesting statement. I'd almost always rather read someone telling me about a thing they do like. (I suspect that in this case, I would not like the things Roberts likes - the phrase "I am intimidated by the blues and by jazz and reject them because of how stupid they make me feel" was a giant clanging alarm bell.)

also weird that referencing Reich, Meredith Monk, and Yoko is apparently "critical flexing." sure, to the average man on the street two of those names are very obscure, but I think just about anyone who's reading Pitchfork would already have pretty decent familiarity with what's being described there.

I wish FTBC were as forbidding and avant-garde as she makes it out to be.

A number of sharp comments swathed in self-reflexivity.

xp Yeah, I mean, it's not difficult music (which is totally fine, it is what it is, but the what is this shit? reaction does not track).

‘Weird shit’, to boot. I don’t even like the album all that much but there’s a hyper-normative, anti-intellectualist streak to her argument that I find off-putting, despite how deftly she reframes it.

pom, the choral works from the 60s classical polls (partic. the berio and babbitt) helped prime me for the chaotic vocals on this album, so thanks for that.

also made me give a serious side-eye to that "no music has ever sounded like this" pitchfork logline.

Hah, my pleasure! Fwiw The Idler Wheel is my fave of her albums.

xp

mine too, i think, but i like this one a hell of a lot.

if you seriously can't see how the vocalizations on the album might be offputting to many people -- even if you happen to be OK with them -- then you need to be extricated from your bubble

Which Babbitt?

I can see how people in *a different bubble from mine* might find Apple's vocalizations offputting...I just don't care very much what people like that think. Ooh, you've discovered that non-pop music exists, have you? And now you'd like to share your thoughts about this "weird" "new" music? Let me pull up a chair so you can tell me all about it.

I like this album a lot, think the rapturous critical response is silly and super overblown, think the dismissals of Soraya Roberts' piece are unconvincing even though I don't think I particularly agree with it, and am wholly unsurprised that no one is commenting on or even noticing the magic Negro extravaganza permeating "Shameika"

in general there is a phenomenon I fucking hate, in which a writer -- almost always a woman, for some reason, can't imagine why -- dares to write that she committed the cardinal sin of being unsuccessful at liking (critically acclaimed piece of media, or sometimes not even critically acclaimed, just rehabilitated by The Discourse), and immediately there is a mob pile-on that is functionally identical to "LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS" except for things that aren't Marvel

xp -- I have seen one or two people comment on that about "Shameika" but yeah, only one or two (fwiw I also noticed it but didn't say anything because I knew for a fact it would be turned into "how could you sjws POSSIBLY think Lorde is talking about hip-hop?????")

Which Babbitt?

― Feel a million filaments (Sund4r), Tuesday, May 5, 2020 12:34 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

im not saying the album sounds like philomel (the only piece of babbitt's i've heard), but that listening to avant-garde choral pieces like that one primed me a bit for the more chaotic moments in bolt cutters

This is terrific:

The whole thing just struck me as too insular for how sweepingly it was being lauded. And despite the claims at raw unprocessed sound, those dog barks on the title song are so strategically placed I was more tickled by the actual dogs barking behind the fence I passed while listening to it. But then you can’t deny the added texture Apple’s voice has acquired with age and her own liberation from her old song strictures. The song I momentarily hated the most on the album, for the opening repetition of its title (“Ladies,” sixteen times!), is also the one I liked the most. Despite the clunky lyrics — “ruminations on the looming effect and the parallax view” — some subterranean motor seems to power this track through the history of music, from folk to rap to whatever, sailing between genres like there’s nothing to it.

if you seriously can't see how the vocalizations on the album might be offputting to many people -- even if you happen to be OK with them -- then you need to be extricated from your bubble

This isn't about the vocals:

But the second I heard whatever that sound is, I don’t know, a keyboard and cymbals chucka-chucka-chucka-ing, I thought, “Fuck, no.” I am not listening to that experimental shit.

Cool, VC. I still haven't heard this album but your post made me curious.

the percussion, to which the same applies to maybe a lesser extent

For those unfamiliar with Soraya Roberts, last year she wrote a an essay about attending Toronto International Film Festival that's worth your time.

A leitmotif in her work is how paeans to communal experiences often omit who's left out of the party.

I have long had in mind some questions about her vocalisations and inspired by DJP's reservations I'm going to give them an airing; I'm probably about to look extremely stupid, but here goes: is showy jazz-singing by a rich white person not...a little bit...idk...fetishistic? wrong word maybe. embarrassing? certainly very irritating (to me at least)

do they have to be rich

am wholly unsurprised that no one is commenting on or even noticing the magic Negro extravaganza permeating "Shameika"

― DJP, Tuesday, May 5, 2020 10:35 AM (twenty-four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm completely ignorant of this and would like to know more

Jfc imago with all the fancy pants shit you listen to

idk what showy jazz singing is, but i also don't think that's what she's doing here

i'm completely ignorant of this and would like to know more

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson),

A POC gives her blessing to future white artist, fades away.

that does not seem like a summary of the song

Anyway, musical unadventurousness is just about the most normative and reactionary aesthetic stance there is and I don’t think it needs a vocal apologist at a rare moment when a ‘difficult’ album by a brilliant woman artist lands smack dab in the mainstream’s middle. Like I said, I’ve got my own misgivings about FTBC but the fact that so many people are talking about it is frankly awesome.

but i also have no argument here so i'll just drop it xp

I wasn't providing a synopsis, though? xpost

there’s a hyper-normative, anti-intellectualist streak to her argument that I find off-putting, despite how deftly she reframes it.

the 'critical flexing' bit deploys that weird circular logic i see ppl defensively use on twitter a lot: "i know these references, but people who use these references are clearly poseurs trying to seem smart"

It's very weird to me that this album is considered "difficult"

"shameika" just seems like another song where she's mourning her disconnection from other women, while attaching all of this to how she has been perceived by other people through time. "you have potential" doesn't really function as a blessing to me, it feels deployed more ambivalently, or rather apple still doesn't know how to receive it even as it was a port in a storm of middle school bullies. admittedly i am a white person who did not see the magic negro thing at all until djp brought it up

of course now that i understand it i am trying to reexamine my own assumptions

also doesn't seem to enable lj's "is it embarrassing for rich white women to use jazz inflections" thought experiment at all

Shameika wasn't gentle and she wasn't my friend
But she got through to me and I'll never see her again

it's possible to read this interview by her on the song as patronizing, or at the very least shocked and amazed that certain assumptions she had weren't true. (it's possible, also, to not read it that way, but there at least seems to be an undercurrent) https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/fiona-apple-fetch-the-bolt-cutters-songs.html