Joanna Newsom --- "Ys"

suspended said:

Imagine thinking men are this shallow. That me and HMTGov have spent hundreds of hours of our lives listening to this woman sing because every once and a while, we catch a glimpse of her profile and are entranced.

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suspended said:

Imagine thinking men are this shallow. That me and HMTGov have spent hundreds of hours of our lives listening to this woman sing because every once and a while, we catch a glimpse of her profile and are entranced.

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catalog said:

I don't think anyone on here uses airpods or similar do they? Surely not

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linebaugh said:

thats true. thats what happened

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linebaugh said:

thats true. thats what happened

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suspended said:

My main takeaway TBH is that nomadologist feels feminist gains are precarious, and so anyone who is not explicitly on the liberal-feminist critique bent, or who dabbles with past eras/aesthetics/stylings, is perceived as an immediate threat to womankind. It's sad, tbh—it's not nomad's fault, it's that she's been sold a crock of shit by the establishment about how every passing minute and second, women's rights could slip back to the Victorian era. Shoot every trad! Gun down the spinsters! Into the future! And it's all for nothing, because the entire point of politics, and civil liberties, is to fight for a world where women don't have to obsess over politics and civil liberties—can just.... be.

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suspended said:

My main takeaway TBH is that nomadologist feels feminist gains are precarious, and so anyone who is not explicitly on the liberal-feminist critique bent, or who dabbles with past eras/aesthetics/stylings, is perceived as an immediate threat to womankind. It's sad, tbh—it's not nomad's fault, it's that she's been sold a crock of shit by the establishment about how every passing minute and second, women's rights could slip back to the Victorian era. Shoot every trad! Gun down the spinsters! Into the future! And it's all for nothing, because the entire point of politics, and civil liberties, is to fight for a world where women don't have to obsess over politics and civil liberties—can just.... be.

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nomadologist said:

You know, I do concede that Ys is pretty in a pastoral nu-folk sort of way that does push the formal limitations of folk and its bastard children on the American indie front, but I think that is what stops the album just short of being this amazing prog curio. I don't think it's so out of left-field at all, especially considering the freak folk thing has been going strong for a while.

I was just talking to someone about this AGAIN tonight, and I guess I just got to the bottom of why it bugs me so much that Ys is so universally gushingly lauded (even by many typically electronic-eared people who in busier years for music and hype probably wouldn't given it the time of day). First, I think it's indie rock's final desperate bid at "relevance" sonically, since indie's been losing underground cache for so long, having become stagnate and reliant on threadbare "diary-entry" style idioms culled from the artistic/life experience of a now cliched "tortured babyboomer's son with his acoustic guitar at Wesleyan who got dumped once" demographic. I think the fact that Ys was written by a female has a lot to do with the concessions people make for its excesses. If the vocalist were male, would anyone like this album beyond the niche market of freakfolk fans you'd wholly expect to like it? I think the album's sort of self-consciously over-the-top arthagalicious approach has been latched onto by indie fans who hope that the whitebread flavor indie rock has been exuding has been spiced up by the presence of a female who takes huge artistic risks (at least, by indie standards, which I think are tame compared to my own). I think she's liked best by those who are desperately looking for an indie messiah.

Second, as a female, I think I may have a problem with just how self-indulgently out-of-touch the album is. While it plays to an obviously liberal folk-lover Bobo/yippie base, it is almost alarmingly silent about politics and seems defiantly irrelevant. Now, this is coming from someone who hates cheap token displays of liberalism in my music. But I do think that you can be mindful of the world and the political climate in aesthetically abstract, oblique, interesting, challenging ways without ever saying an explicit word about politics, and Ys seems to have been written in the same historio-political vacuum that Renaissance Fairs aim to take place in. Everyone's been dumped and heartbroken and coped. I don't think it's the most profound and artistically fecund of human experiences, personally.

When Kate Bush was so radically artsy--took on poets, themes, and used imagery instantly recognized as deliberately "feminine"--there was also an edge to her very traditional gender performances (a sonic one, a formal one in her dancing, and an overall edgy attitude) that lifted her above being just the former girlfriend of a Pink Floyd member writing pretty songs. She dove headfirst into her own experience of being female but with all its ugliness and raw energy--I just can't stop getting this vibe from Newsom that tells me people like her because she writes about having her heartbroken in an acceptable way, in a flighty, "irrational," overwrought, "hysterically" feminine way. No rage--like Liz PHair, who knew she was being fetishized by her male counterparts in the grunge scene, and hated it.

To me (and this is JUST MY OPINION), she comes across like a female artist loved by the predominantly male indie establishment for playing into all the condescending, limiting stereotypes men have of female artists--that they're self-indulgent, completely self-absorbed, out-of-touch with the big picture that is history, relegated entirely to domestic and loving it, hopelessly romantic, and above all, completely vulnerable and susceptible to male ("masculine") power. Like she's playing damsel in distress, but without songs like "Waking the Witch" to ensure she's a square peg that won't be pushed into the round hole. It's like she's making music for the "hearth" and wishes she could be saved by Prince Charming and wants to go back to sewing and being an earth goddess or whatever.

Reminds me of that Englishman's painting where the sailor is saving the woman from drowning. Only in the inverse...

(Wow this was quite the treatise. Thank god for you all that I'm insomniacing!)

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suspended said:

@linebaugh

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version said:

It's a bit weird you dissecting the posts of someone who isn't around anymore. I know people do it with Zhao, but he seems like a special case.

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version said:

It's a bit weird you dissecting the posts of someone who isn't around anymore. I know people do it with Zhao, but he seems like a special case.

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