fiona apple - fetch the bolt cutters (2020)

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

Someone just let me know how many more days i can enjoy this album guilt-free before the backlash fully kicks in.

sorry, I forgot to add the 4,285th reiteration that I like this album, I assumed I could get away with 4,284

that was aimed at you specifically katherine, just at the general shift in the weather.

I know, it's just inextricably part of the phenomenon above that any dissenting opinion is absorbed into "the backlash"

not talking about anyone in this thread or that article’s writing but: it’s really exhausting how much negative criticism is just complete nonsense, like I feel like there’s a simpsons Viking element where some people just can’t deal with “not liking” something for basic reasons such as “I don’t like this person’s voice” and they have to come up with some bullshit theoretical framework to make their opinion “objective” or something. shots fired

I know what you mean. I think part of it is just a function of music writing as a genre, with its own set of assumptions and expectations.

The thing I don't get about the backlash to Soraya Roberts' article (now that I've read the whole thing) is that her framing device of her personal distaste highlights a bunch of what makes the album work for people who aren't her. The piece is more about her alienation and self-described neuroses than it is about the album being bad; it certainly doesn't read like she's trying to take the album down a peg or decry it as overrated or anything. The entire point of the piece is "it frustrates me that I can't get into this piece of work that has been embraced by a wide swath of my peers," not "why are people falling for this obvious shit", so unless you are just de facto against writers being up front about their viewpoint when offering opinions and analyzing things, I don't see why this piece would be objectionable.

The thing I don't get about the backlash to Soraya Roberts' article (now that I've read the whole thing) is that her framing device of her personal distaste highlights a bunch of what makes the album work for people who aren't her. The piece is more about her alienation and self-described neuroses than it is about the album being bad; it certainly doesn't read like she's trying to take the album down a peg or decry it as overrated or anything. The entire point of the piece is "it frustrates me that I can't get into this piece of work that has been embraced by a wide swath of my peers," not "why are people falling for this obvious shit", so unless you are just de facto against writers being up front about their viewpoint when offering opinions and analyzing things, I don't see why this piece would be objectionable.

― DJP, Tuesday, May 5, 2020 3:18 PM (thirty-four seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

otfm; also, someone who is lazily dismissing an album wouldn't email a music critic asking why people like it, unless that email consists of "wow you suck loser"

And I would also say that it is the highlighting of what makes the album work in the face of what she can't cosign that makes the piece interesting and a good read.

That’s the generous reading, yes.

There was already backlash from the moment FTBC was released as a consequence of how instantly and loudly it was celebrated. Pitchfork may have hurt initial perception of the record by posting their 10 before most people had the chance to hear it. They should have waited until the following Monday or something. It totally makes sense that instant loud praise gives people an idea that they should anticipate a true unifying moment, and it's disappointing and frustrating when you don't feel it right away.

I will admit that my initial reaction before hearing the album was "this is going to be like listening to that fucking Lana Del Rey album again"

hope is a dangerous thing!

it really bums me out, to be honest, that I read one of, in my opinion, the best pieces of music writing this year and everyone is dunking on it because it is not by a Designated Writer(tm) and doesn't close ranks around the Correct Opinion(tm) to have

Don't personally care if someone is pro or con this album, and it is admirable that she puts so much work into interrogating her own biases, but it is also jarring to see someone tasked with music writing admit to those biases.

this isn't running on a music site, though, nor is it a music review; it is an essay that happens to be about music, running on a general-purpose site

^^^

it really bums me out, to be honest, that I read one of, in my opinion, the best pieces of music writing this year and everyone is dunking on it because it is not by a Designated Writer(tm) and doesn't close ranks around the Correct Opinion(tm) to have

― like, I’m eating an elephant head (katherine),

Katherine, this is not the case. Many of us have endorsed it.

everyone is dunking on it because it is not by a Designated Writer(tm) and doesn't close ranks around the Correct Opinion(tm) to have

Who is "everyone" in this sentence? Because you are radically misrepresenting what I, for one, didn't like about the piece.

it seems that virtually everyone I've seen, with the exceptions of one or two people, has been dunking on it, primarily because "lol she isn't a music writer how dare she open her mouth" and "lol she doesn't like this kind of music how dare she open her mouth"

essentially, most (or "many," or whichever word is fitting) people seem to be treating it like it's the my husband's record collection blog, and it's like we read two entirely different things

This article is the flip side of the hyperbolic 10/10 reviews that breathlessly tell us that no one has ever made music like this before. Robert's is instead saying she found it incomprehensible and unpleasant, but in doing so lends credence to the line of thinking that mystifies this album in the first place.

The reality is, it's an above average collection of highly personal songs with some truly extraordinary vocal performances. Fiona Apple didn't reinvent the wheel, she just made a really good album that plays up her personal idiosyncrasies to great effect. What grates is that a passing familiarity with music would bear this out, and would allow people to engage with it materially as part of a musical tradition, rather than as some unknowable, alien object.

Fiona Apple didn't reinvent the wheel, she just made a really good album that plays up her personal idiosyncrasies to great effect. What grates is that a passing familiarity with music would bear this out

...no...? as someone who loves fiona apple, I can still conceive of someone who has "a passing familiarity with music," or even a deep familiarity with music, and yet does not think it's a really good album, or recognizes that it's a really good album that they don't personally get (which is where the piece seems to end up).

Sorry, to be clear, by bear this out, I mean that Apple didn't reinvent the wheel. I don't mean to imply that it is an undeniably great record. I'm totally happy with people not liking it or not relating to it. I'm less happy with the notion that it is somehow unprecedented.

If you haven't experience the precedent, you don't have a reference point. And I think it's fair to say that many of the sonic reference points are a little bit outside of the standard modern "singer-songwriter" wheelhouse (if there is such a thing). This is not that outlandish an angle for a non-music-critic to come to this album from

Look at all the Fiona bros

Love this record, but while "Ladies" doesn't sound just like it, it does give me some strong "Fooled Around and Fell in Love" vibes. Maybe it's the chords.

We're Fionabrahs, D.

fetch the bro cutters

katherine fwiw my first introduction to this article's existence was a chorus of people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds telling the author to "save it for her journal", so

Me I thought it was good

what I really want to read -- it may exist, there have been over 20 years for it to -- is someone really digging into and tracing the cabaret/vaudeville influence, because I know enough (and have read enough interviews) to know there is one, but not enough beyond that