AUGUST 23, 2012 3:17PM
An NPR Music Critic's Egregious Crime
Ann Powers, just what are you trying to do? I'm a 41 year old man,
and you've reduced me to a trollish 16 year old "punk purist" with your
blog post which I'm reposting below in its entirety. It's preposterous!
I was in a nice little place in my music fandom, after all. One where I could comfortably find punk in ANYTHING, including Madonna. Ask me, c'mon! A place where I accepted, and happily, that The Ramones and the Sex Pistols were pop music as much as they were punk music. A place where I came to the realization that all punk really was at the outset was just a group of musicians around a scene doing different things with music - there was no uniform, no formula, no rigid conformity about how and what to do. A place where I finally stopped my highly immature posture of hating hippies and classic rock (okay, maybe I still twitch slightly at jam band adoration and the golf rock of Dave Matthews, but I keep it to myself and let others enjoy without issue).
A place where I could happily say, 'they're not my thing, but what right do I have to dogmatically declare that Green Day and Blink-182 aren't really punk? And wouldn't it be hypocritical of me to decry them and yet enjoy other examples of pop-punk, simply because they have slightly more legitimacy?'
I speak specifically of Blondie, whom I've rabidly defended to the death, when people say "they're not really punk, you know." Making disco, reggae and rap songs is an act of radical punk freedom, an abandonment of constricting dogma. People also ignore the fact that they actually made punk singles:
So here comes Ann Powers's blog post on NPR's The Record, which is titled "Taylor Swift: Princess of Punk".
Huh? I bit. I read through your article with the mindset I described above. 'Find the punk in anything' I repeated to myself.
But I'm baffled, Ann Powers, unless your goal was to generate deep internet outrage in, and trollish comments from, fans of NOFX, Social Distortion or Bad Religion. I'll grant you this: you name check Kelly Clarkson in your blog post and her principled stance against her record label earns her some punk points. But then you draw - and then withdraw - ridiculously unsupportable connections between feisty break-up songs and Riot Grrl. You can label the former feminist, sure. But I'm afraid that, and general gumption, is all you've got to connect Taylor Swift and punk or feminist punk. Specifically:
Siouxsie isn't worried about her boyfriend. She's worried about being a mysterious, elegant gothic oracle:
Poly Styrene, you say? What use does she have for a "sassy" break-up song when, leaps and bounds ahead of her time, she was warning us all about consumer culture? And she could do this because punk was unconcerned with selling records.
And really, why would I want Germany's Mother of Punk, Nina Hagen, to weep to me about man-problems when she has no shortage of awesome, gleeful, social satire and delirious yet artful insanity? (well, and also no shortage of religious mysticism - a future blog post, I promise):
And can Taylor Swift give us a rock and roll revolution in the form of driving a bus full of explosives into a wall of TV's? If she could do that, I'll crown her the Queen Goddess of Punk, I promise.
I dare say Kathleen Hanna's problem with male dominated society go beyond a cheating louse:
Or how about just plain balls-out ROCKING?
Yes, Joan has performed break-up and romance songs. I'm not cricizing Swift's song, or romance-pop. There has been an amazing body of very powerful art that comes from heartbreak and romance. I'm merely pointing out that sassy kiss-off tunes don't make you a Princess of Punk, and they can't really, on their own, connect you to the genre, not in this instance, not enough to come up with that eyebrow raising headline.
Here endeth my embarassing rant. Ann Powers, you probably do know what you're talking about. I hope you follow up and prove me wrong.
Clarkson's
rude gesture and the song that inspired it, the platinum-selling "Since
U Been Gone," helped solidify a way of expressing women's liberation
that's still dominant within mainstream pop. It's resurgent right now,
within Taylor Swift's new hit, "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" — the biggest debut single of that young superstar's career.
"We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" creates a mood of uplift — even joy — around emotions that are, in life, not pretty. The latest in the young post-country star's growing portfolio of breakup songs isn't earnest like "Dear John" or wistful like "Back To December" — nor is it explosive, like the revenge wails of Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert.
Instead, Swift's song spins sugar from spit. Its sneeringly derisive tone is rooted in its stomping four-on-the-floor beat and builds through Swift's clipped guitar strums and a vocal marked by Valley Girl-style vocal asides and a whistle-while-you-trash-him melodic hook. In other words, it's pop-punk, like a Blink-182 song. Or an Avril Lavigne song — which it could have been, had its co-writer Max Martin been working with another of the ingenues he's aided (say, Lavigne herself).
In this century, songs like "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" have taken that quaint 20th century form of rebellion called punk — specifically the feminist punk that took hold in the late 1970s and then was reborn through the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s — fully into the pop mainstream. Staring hard into the camera in their videos, today's megastars borrow vitriol from a strong lineage of cultural refusal. They've learned from punk how to make anger fun.
The key figure in this mainstreaming process has been Martin, the Swedish songwriter and producer who's as responsible as anyone for the genreless sound of the 21st century Top 40. Martin worked with Swift and another Swedish mogul, Shellback, on this particular hit, but he's trod the same ground many times. Its snappy sound embodies his conception of female defiance, formed in collaboration with many charismatic women, since he started exploring with Britney Spears circa 1998. Over the course of Martin's many co-writes, the mood and message have remained remarkably consistent, and they've allowed for a feminist tinge to fully infuse the pop charts even when actual feminist politics seem totally absent. Though he works with some male artists, sassy women are Martin's metier. He's helped shape the sound of most of today's top non-R&B ingenues, one that blends punk's gob-flinging sarcasm with the melodicism of ABBA and that danceable yet rockish beat. Besides Clarkson and Swift, Martin, often working with another producer, has applied his formula to collaborations with Spears, Lavigne, Katy PerryPink. The songs these partnerships have produced really all add up to one sustained head-tossing kiss-off: "Stronger," "What the Hell," "Part of Me," "U + Ur Hand," "So What." and
The women whom Martin has guided nearly all co-write their material, and they're clearly expressing a sense of self-determination that feels right to them. They have a sense of their place in history, too. These songs owe a debt to a long line of female performers whose voices have embodied more freedom than regular life sometimes offered. A playlist would have to go all the way back to vaudeville and include women's blues, Etta James, the tougher girl groups, Aretha Franklin, the queens of disco and country proto-feminists like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn.
It's also easy to follow this legacy into R&B, where self-defined independent women build upon the "no romance without finance" talk that's pretty much always been part of African-American music's ideal of feminine self-sufficiency. Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" could have been a Martin tune (and, indeed, a few Scandinavians were involved in its conception); its swagger is that biting. But Beyonce's grounding in hip-hop links her to forebears like Missy Elliott, whose use of nonsense rhymes was a brilliant way of talking back to patriarchal language, and no-nonsense '90s divas like En Vogue and TLC, who in turn were inspired by original back-talking rappers like Roxanne Shante. Nicki Minaj carries on this tradition, too.
Martin's template, however, specifically relies on the energy of punk. He and his female collaborators balance sentimentality and hypersexualization of the conventional female pop star's work (including other songs by these very same artists) by tapping into punk's historic refusal to play nice. The dialect Swift adopts in her new song is obviously modeled on Lavigne's perky smirk, which itself distills and dilutes a quarter-century's worth of unladylike singers: Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Deborah Harry, Poly Styrene, Exene Cervenka, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love.
Swift's new song is almost a parody of the punk-pop form. Its frame is tight and almost oppressively intimate. At its heart is a spoken passage that replicates a phone call, presumably between Swift and a female friend, in which the singer represents her lover's voice as if he were a Cro-Magnon. The chorus is another childlike outburst: "NEVER EVER EVER! Like, ever." It's about as believable as any teen's eternal vow, though the song leaves me rooting for Swift, hoping that she'll get out of this cycle of endless refusal and just forget about the whole romance.
Though "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" will certainly be sung in groups by Swift's mostly female fans, making it sound like an anthem, it's really the opposite. The song — and the Martin-led phase of punk-flavored pop — is about one person, one relationship, one attempt to go it alone. This distinction matters, because a focus on community is what makes punk both culturally radical and politically effective, and when it's lost, any meaningful connection to liberation becomes precarious. What's usually left is a focus on self-fulfillment that only goes so far in realizing real freedom from sexism's traps.
Pop fans often make bigger meanings from what the marketplace offers. Every time a new artist gives Martin's feminist-flavored formula a try, she adds something of her own that allows for those interpretations to flower. I find Pink's twist on the recipe particularly powerful, because of her big, warm voice, and the unusually strong body and mind that produces it. To my ears, Swift's take remains too callow and insular to really be substantial. However, I've already witnessed its salutary effect on several third-grade girls. The lessons music offers can still be effective, even when they're elementary.
In the same week that Swift has joined the ranks of Martin's sass brigade, undiluted feminist punk is experiencing its greatest resurgence since the 1990s through the example of Pussy Riot, whose unmistakably radical actions and ideas are having a powerful impact on activists and artists around the world. The complex and still unfolding story of the Russian collective can't be summarized in a short essay, much less a paragraph. But it's worth considering this counterpart when contemplating Swift's latest move, not only because it's so powerful, but because it demonstrates how consequential a serious act of talking back can be. Punk is a great flavor enhancer, and in small doses, it adds a kick to pop. Take it straight, however, and you could be utterly changed.
I was in a nice little place in my music fandom, after all. One where I could comfortably find punk in ANYTHING, including Madonna. Ask me, c'mon! A place where I accepted, and happily, that The Ramones and the Sex Pistols were pop music as much as they were punk music. A place where I came to the realization that all punk really was at the outset was just a group of musicians around a scene doing different things with music - there was no uniform, no formula, no rigid conformity about how and what to do. A place where I finally stopped my highly immature posture of hating hippies and classic rock (okay, maybe I still twitch slightly at jam band adoration and the golf rock of Dave Matthews, but I keep it to myself and let others enjoy without issue).
A place where I could happily say, 'they're not my thing, but what right do I have to dogmatically declare that Green Day and Blink-182 aren't really punk? And wouldn't it be hypocritical of me to decry them and yet enjoy other examples of pop-punk, simply because they have slightly more legitimacy?'
I speak specifically of Blondie, whom I've rabidly defended to the death, when people say "they're not really punk, you know." Making disco, reggae and rap songs is an act of radical punk freedom, an abandonment of constricting dogma. People also ignore the fact that they actually made punk singles:
Huh? I bit. I read through your article with the mindset I described above. 'Find the punk in anything' I repeated to myself.
But I'm baffled, Ann Powers, unless your goal was to generate deep internet outrage in, and trollish comments from, fans of NOFX, Social Distortion or Bad Religion. I'll grant you this: you name check Kelly Clarkson in your blog post and her principled stance against her record label earns her some punk points. But then you draw - and then withdraw - ridiculously unsupportable connections between feisty break-up songs and Riot Grrl. You can label the former feminist, sure. But I'm afraid that, and general gumption, is all you've got to connect Taylor Swift and punk or feminist punk. Specifically:
The dialect Swift adopts in her new song is
obviously modeled on Lavigne's perky smirk, which itself distills and
dilutes a quarter-century's worth of unladylike singers: Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Deborah Harry, Poly Styrene, Exene Cervenka, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love.
What I don't get is why no one writes about how punk gave female
artists freedom FROM the romance/heartbreak/breakup song? Which is not
to say that they haven't done those types of songs either. Patti Smith
has written beautiful love songs. But she's also a hurricane of
intense, mystic, fever dream poetry, not concerned with any pop
expectations:Siouxsie isn't worried about her boyfriend. She's worried about being a mysterious, elegant gothic oracle:
Poly Styrene, you say? What use does she have for a "sassy" break-up song when, leaps and bounds ahead of her time, she was warning us all about consumer culture? And she could do this because punk was unconcerned with selling records.
And really, why would I want Germany's Mother of Punk, Nina Hagen, to weep to me about man-problems when she has no shortage of awesome, gleeful, social satire and delirious yet artful insanity? (well, and also no shortage of religious mysticism - a future blog post, I promise):
And can Taylor Swift give us a rock and roll revolution in the form of driving a bus full of explosives into a wall of TV's? If she could do that, I'll crown her the Queen Goddess of Punk, I promise.
I dare say Kathleen Hanna's problem with male dominated society go beyond a cheating louse:
Yes, Joan has performed break-up and romance songs. I'm not cricizing Swift's song, or romance-pop. There has been an amazing body of very powerful art that comes from heartbreak and romance. I'm merely pointing out that sassy kiss-off tunes don't make you a Princess of Punk, and they can't really, on their own, connect you to the genre, not in this instance, not enough to come up with that eyebrow raising headline.
Here endeth my embarassing rant. Ann Powers, you probably do know what you're talking about. I hope you follow up and prove me wrong.
Taylor Swift, Princess Of Punk?
04:15 pm
August 21, 2012
August 21, 2012
by Ann Powers
In the middle of a video she made in 2004, Kelly Clarkson
gives a quick flick of her middle finger. She stares into the camera,
sexy but not at all inviting. She is showing a new generation of young
women not only how to step away from a bad love affair, but how to be
the kind of woman who owns herself and stands apart.
"We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" creates a mood of uplift — even joy — around emotions that are, in life, not pretty. The latest in the young post-country star's growing portfolio of breakup songs isn't earnest like "Dear John" or wistful like "Back To December" — nor is it explosive, like the revenge wails of Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert.
Instead, Swift's song spins sugar from spit. Its sneeringly derisive tone is rooted in its stomping four-on-the-floor beat and builds through Swift's clipped guitar strums and a vocal marked by Valley Girl-style vocal asides and a whistle-while-you-trash-him melodic hook. In other words, it's pop-punk, like a Blink-182 song. Or an Avril Lavigne song — which it could have been, had its co-writer Max Martin been working with another of the ingenues he's aided (say, Lavigne herself).
In this century, songs like "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" have taken that quaint 20th century form of rebellion called punk — specifically the feminist punk that took hold in the late 1970s and then was reborn through the Riot Grrrl movement in the 1990s — fully into the pop mainstream. Staring hard into the camera in their videos, today's megastars borrow vitriol from a strong lineage of cultural refusal. They've learned from punk how to make anger fun.
The key figure in this mainstreaming process has been Martin, the Swedish songwriter and producer who's as responsible as anyone for the genreless sound of the 21st century Top 40. Martin worked with Swift and another Swedish mogul, Shellback, on this particular hit, but he's trod the same ground many times. Its snappy sound embodies his conception of female defiance, formed in collaboration with many charismatic women, since he started exploring with Britney Spears circa 1998. Over the course of Martin's many co-writes, the mood and message have remained remarkably consistent, and they've allowed for a feminist tinge to fully infuse the pop charts even when actual feminist politics seem totally absent. Though he works with some male artists, sassy women are Martin's metier. He's helped shape the sound of most of today's top non-R&B ingenues, one that blends punk's gob-flinging sarcasm with the melodicism of ABBA and that danceable yet rockish beat. Besides Clarkson and Swift, Martin, often working with another producer, has applied his formula to collaborations with Spears, Lavigne, Katy PerryPink. The songs these partnerships have produced really all add up to one sustained head-tossing kiss-off: "Stronger," "What the Hell," "Part of Me," "U + Ur Hand," "So What." and
The women whom Martin has guided nearly all co-write their material, and they're clearly expressing a sense of self-determination that feels right to them. They have a sense of their place in history, too. These songs owe a debt to a long line of female performers whose voices have embodied more freedom than regular life sometimes offered. A playlist would have to go all the way back to vaudeville and include women's blues, Etta James, the tougher girl groups, Aretha Franklin, the queens of disco and country proto-feminists like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn.
It's also easy to follow this legacy into R&B, where self-defined independent women build upon the "no romance without finance" talk that's pretty much always been part of African-American music's ideal of feminine self-sufficiency. Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" could have been a Martin tune (and, indeed, a few Scandinavians were involved in its conception); its swagger is that biting. But Beyonce's grounding in hip-hop links her to forebears like Missy Elliott, whose use of nonsense rhymes was a brilliant way of talking back to patriarchal language, and no-nonsense '90s divas like En Vogue and TLC, who in turn were inspired by original back-talking rappers like Roxanne Shante. Nicki Minaj carries on this tradition, too.
Martin's template, however, specifically relies on the energy of punk. He and his female collaborators balance sentimentality and hypersexualization of the conventional female pop star's work (including other songs by these very same artists) by tapping into punk's historic refusal to play nice. The dialect Swift adopts in her new song is obviously modeled on Lavigne's perky smirk, which itself distills and dilutes a quarter-century's worth of unladylike singers: Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Deborah Harry, Poly Styrene, Exene Cervenka, Cyndi Lauper, Kathleen Hanna, Gwen Stefani, Courtney Love.
Swift's new song is almost a parody of the punk-pop form. Its frame is tight and almost oppressively intimate. At its heart is a spoken passage that replicates a phone call, presumably between Swift and a female friend, in which the singer represents her lover's voice as if he were a Cro-Magnon. The chorus is another childlike outburst: "NEVER EVER EVER! Like, ever." It's about as believable as any teen's eternal vow, though the song leaves me rooting for Swift, hoping that she'll get out of this cycle of endless refusal and just forget about the whole romance.
Though "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" will certainly be sung in groups by Swift's mostly female fans, making it sound like an anthem, it's really the opposite. The song — and the Martin-led phase of punk-flavored pop — is about one person, one relationship, one attempt to go it alone. This distinction matters, because a focus on community is what makes punk both culturally radical and politically effective, and when it's lost, any meaningful connection to liberation becomes precarious. What's usually left is a focus on self-fulfillment that only goes so far in realizing real freedom from sexism's traps.
Pop fans often make bigger meanings from what the marketplace offers. Every time a new artist gives Martin's feminist-flavored formula a try, she adds something of her own that allows for those interpretations to flower. I find Pink's twist on the recipe particularly powerful, because of her big, warm voice, and the unusually strong body and mind that produces it. To my ears, Swift's take remains too callow and insular to really be substantial. However, I've already witnessed its salutary effect on several third-grade girls. The lessons music offers can still be effective, even when they're elementary.
In the same week that Swift has joined the ranks of Martin's sass brigade, undiluted feminist punk is experiencing its greatest resurgence since the 1990s through the example of Pussy Riot, whose unmistakably radical actions and ideas are having a powerful impact on activists and artists around the world. The complex and still unfolding story of the Russian collective can't be summarized in a short essay, much less a paragraph. But it's worth considering this counterpart when contemplating Swift's latest move, not only because it's so powerful, but because it demonstrates how consequential a serious act of talking back can be. Punk is a great flavor enhancer, and in small doses, it adds a kick to pop. Take it straight, however, and you could be utterly changed.
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Comments
And so Revisionism hits
the music scene...What a disappointment that people keep changing terms
and history as part of the Spin Factory. No wonder fans keep drifting
away...Awesome post!
Maybe I'm reading it
differently, but she does say parody of pop-punk and that it all me, me,
me (paraphrasing here) rather than punk's community focus. All that
being said, I can't stand Taylor Swift and I'm never, ever ever, like
ever going to listen to Taylor Swift.
Great post.
Great post.
Great piece and I’m in
full agreement, particularly that punk at its outset was about “doing
different things with music - there was no uniform, no formula, no rigid
conformity about how and what to do” (and also empathize fully with the
hatred of the bloody Dave Matthews Band — I just have to read that name
and I throw up in my mouth).
I wouldn’t say I go looking for punk rock — or any other genre — in everything, but if Ann Powers (a writer I admire) has set her mind on trying to force this shaky link back to punk’s roots with Taylor Swift .... come on. It just ain’t working for me. When it comes to the Avrils and Pinks etc, I can see the point to a degree, but it’s all so manufactured and mannered that it neuters any claim back to punk.
Punk was the first rock movement that women truly played a significant, proactive role in, as creators with distinct visions and personalities that often broke sharply with the past. For me, the Swifts and Avrils and Pinks are pure marketing in the most cynical and unplayful, untransgressive senses. I’m sure as hell no purist but I resent these empty moppets gaining any residual hip-glow by wafting associations with what went down decades ago, largely to a then-genuinely hostile public. I know because I was there and lived it.
P.S. Don’t forget The Slits! And Canada has the distinction of being home to the first all-female punk rock group, The Curse (check out “Killer Bees”).
I wouldn’t say I go looking for punk rock — or any other genre — in everything, but if Ann Powers (a writer I admire) has set her mind on trying to force this shaky link back to punk’s roots with Taylor Swift .... come on. It just ain’t working for me. When it comes to the Avrils and Pinks etc, I can see the point to a degree, but it’s all so manufactured and mannered that it neuters any claim back to punk.
Punk was the first rock movement that women truly played a significant, proactive role in, as creators with distinct visions and personalities that often broke sharply with the past. For me, the Swifts and Avrils and Pinks are pure marketing in the most cynical and unplayful, untransgressive senses. I’m sure as hell no purist but I resent these empty moppets gaining any residual hip-glow by wafting associations with what went down decades ago, largely to a then-genuinely hostile public. I know because I was there and lived it.
P.S. Don’t forget The Slits! And Canada has the distinction of being home to the first all-female punk rock group, The Curse (check out “Killer Bees”).
KC - I don't think this will result in revisionism, but a good point to note nonetheless. Hope you're well!
Muse - yeah, it takes a careful read to see that it's a more nuanced piece, but still for people giving it only a casual once over, or not getting past the headline, it's still pretty baffling.
VA - ha! Thanks for that piece of music trivia. Did The Curse come out before The Runaways? In full agreement with your point about the moppets, though I will take slight exception with Pink. I think she's pretty talented and can be "punk rock" when she feels up to it (as in genuinely independent and edgy). I think she's always been on an uncomfortable line between "moppetization" and a more independent alt-rock (probably a better term for this discussion than "punk") route. She started out as a prefab Christina-Britney but soon wasn't having any of that, and yet always came back to that a little bit when she needed a radio hit.
Muse - yeah, it takes a careful read to see that it's a more nuanced piece, but still for people giving it only a casual once over, or not getting past the headline, it's still pretty baffling.
VA - ha! Thanks for that piece of music trivia. Did The Curse come out before The Runaways? In full agreement with your point about the moppets, though I will take slight exception with Pink. I think she's pretty talented and can be "punk rock" when she feels up to it (as in genuinely independent and edgy). I think she's always been on an uncomfortable line between "moppetization" and a more independent alt-rock (probably a better term for this discussion than "punk") route. She started out as a prefab Christina-Britney but soon wasn't having any of that, and yet always came back to that a little bit when she needed a radio hit.
The Runaways were
definitely around prior to the Curse, but I guess I never saw the
Runaways as a “punk rock” band per se, but more of a late-in-the-game
glam act that prefigured aspects of, and influenced, punk (see also: New
York Dolls, Stooges, Modern Lovers, etc.).
Taylor Swift reminds me
of a few sorority girls I knew: v slutty, but plays the part of being
too cutesy for her own good to be a real woman.
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