Inhumanity

It came via Snail Mail...

from W Magazine

It's been a year since Lindsey Jordan found herself in the unique position of hiring a PR team during her senior year of high school, but the 19-year-old still hasn't gotten used to the seemingly endless adoration and attention given to her band Snail Mail. One recent afternoon, she camped out in the sleek offices of her label, Matador Records, for a nonstop day of interviews. "There was some European festival we were playing and I didn’t even know about it—I saw the flyer on Instagram," she recalled. "I was like, Why does no one tell me anything!"

When you've gone from having Mom drive you in from the suburbs to see your favorite bands play in Baltimore to regularly sharing the stage with those exact same bands within just a few years, a little disorientation is probably natural. Her newfound status as teen rock star will be further cemented on June 8, when Matador releases Snail Mail's debut album, Lush, which includes the single “Let’s Find an Out,” released on Wednesday.

Jordan first showcased her preternatural ability to the industry in 2016, when Snail Mail released their EP Habit—a “really over-the-top, melodramatic explosion of emotion,” as Jordan now sums up the angst of suburban adolescence captured in a guitar-heavy nutshell. Still, even in the thick of it all, Jordan showed self-awareness, peppering her lyrics with lines like “When I’m 30, I’ll laugh about how dumb it felt.” Indeed, the six songs, which made up just 28 minutes of music in total, managed to be strong enough to not only put the band on a rollercoaster of fame, but also sustain it for nearly three years. (“It’s been, like, chill,” Jordan said of the ratio of their comparatively teeny musical output to the nonstop press.)

Snail Mail's success is especially remarkable given that the band never intended to last: The group formed after Jordan—who’s been playing guitar since age five, and listening to bands like Beach Fossils and Future Islands since age 11, thanks to her early fascination with record stores—posted a four-song EP on Bandcamp, which she worked on in between roller skating through the halls of her high school and partaking in its “Feminist Club.” She only convinced two of her friends to form a band in order to see the group Sheer Mag for free, by playing with them—and just two weeks after their first-ever practice session.

“We were planning on parting ways after that,” Jordan recalled. But to their surprise, the band stuck: First came merch—T-shirts with the band’s name emblazoned across a hot dog—and then, much more seriously, Sister Polygon Records’ release of Habit, which included the standout single “Thinning.”

Predictably enough, by Jordan’s junior year, things were starting to get out of hand: She was spending more and more time in the principal’s office pleading for a few weeks off in order to, say, make Snail Mail’s debut at South by Southwest. Sure, Jordan got thrown out of her own show for drinking, which has become something of a tradition for the band—”They always let us back in to play, but then they make us get out before or after,” she said with a laugh—but it was also most definitely a business endeavor. They’d created such a profitable stir that the band had to hire “a whole bunch of people” because Jordan simply couldn’t keep up with her e-mail anymore.

Finally, a couple of months later, in May 2017, after missing “a crazy, f**ed-up amount of school days, like 50 or something in just my senior year,” Jordan somehow graduated—an accomplishment that pales in comparison to the rest of that year, which saw Snail Mail release their first-ever music video; gain the approval of Pitchfork, which declared Jordan “the wisest teenage indie rocker we know”; tour with acts as big as Girlpool, Waxahatchee, and Beach Fossils; book a Tiny Desk concert with NPR; lead The New York Times’ package “proving” that women are making the best rock music today; and, finally, sign with Matador Records, which “went into the abyss and back” with Jordan to make sure Snail Mail's upcoming album would be “completely perfect.”

Lush is also quite personal, but in a different way. Habit was originally “100 percent just not intended for anyone to hear,” and so much like “just writing in a diary” that Jordan found herself thinking, “Wow, if this ever got out, I’d be f**ed.” Essentially, she did it for herself, which is why she considers the EP to be “a personal milestone in pretty much every aspect”—fittingly enough for a prequel to Lush, which she considers to be “another real marker of maturity.” That’s true not just in terms of its focus on guitar work, but also through processing all of the pressure and “really weird situations” that writing Habit has led her to, including figuring out how to “separate all the weird hype and press from the person I am when I’m just alone in my room, writing, reflecting, by myself, with a guitar.”

It hasn’t escaped Jordan that she could have been more prolific in order to capitalize on the hype; she simply hasn’t wanted to. “I just want to make sure everything is as real and genuine for me as possible,” she said, pointing out that Lush is “definitely more gay” than Habit, which she wrote before she was out. “I didn’t really intend to make it a message or anything, but it’s nice to be able to write about someone and say ‘her’ or ‘she’ and not be worried about what my friends or family would think,” she continued. (For the record, everyone has always been “chill” about her sexuality; the only people she felt she officially had to come out to were her parents: On Christmas one year, her mom asked her why she wouldn’t marry her bandmate, Alex. “I was like, Uh, ‘cause I’m gay, and she was like, Oh, sorry,” Jordan recalled with a laugh.)

“Sorry”—albeit a sarcastic one—was also Jordan’s response when Pitchfork published a video of the band earlier this year, prompting many to angrily ask, “Why is she so young?” Still, Jordan would take astonished “She’s 12, and she’s a girl!” over “Teenage boys being like, You’re hot” any day—the type of reactions she knows will stick around even as the band grows more established and into the spotlight. She also has no illusions about how doing so will pretty much automatically disqualify Snail Mail from the DIY punk scene that its members grew up in, even though each of them still personally upholds its political, accepting values.

“We definitely aren’t a punk band,” Jordan sighed. She added, “I wish we were." (To be fair, she said, she isn’t writing punk songs—though she may do so “one day.”) As for the more immediate future, the album’s release will bring along a two-month-long tour with bands like Belle and Sebastian, which will end with Jordan finally moving out of her parents’ house—and presumably staying as far away as she can from “nasty-a**, roach-infested New York,” which, being claustrophobic, she didn’t take too kindly to while finalizing the record. Instead, she’s thinking about moving to Asheville, in North Carolina, or maybe even to Durham. I asked her if there was even a music scene there, which prompted her to laugh and admit, “I don’t think so.” Maybe now there will be one.

Statuesque Brides

More Hips - ‘This Is America’ Is The Epitome Of Preachy PC Art

I argued a while back that the increasingly dominant character of the art championed by our cultural elites is didacticism: “an absence of substantial or profound artistic content, compensated for by loud, didactic political messaging. We know what we’re supposed to feel, whether or not the work of art actually makes us feel it.”

By contrast, “Good art does not have to avoid philosophical and political themes. It can certainly convey the artist’s perspective, but it does so by showing us the world as seen from that perspective. It starts by showing us characters and events that are interesting on their own terms, not merely as illustrations to accompany a treatise. The wider intellectual themes should emerge from the details, not be imposed on them. Good art shows before it tells.” But nowadays we cannot merely be entertained by a good story. We must be lectured.

Now along comes an example of this that is so extravagant, I could not have invented it. An actor named Donald Glover, who raps under the lame pseudonym Childish Gambino, released a video that went viral, getting 50 million views in just a few days and being extravagantly praised by various elite or semi–elite cultural publications. By now you should know to click on it at your own risk, but also be warned that there is a certain amount of gratuitous violence.

For those who prefer not to bother, let me sum it up for you. The music itself, if you can call it that—and I would prefer you didn’t—is of no interest at all. I would probably say this about most of today’s popular music, particularly anything in the genres known as “rap” or “hip-hop.” But friends who take this kind of music more seriously generally agree that the piece is unexceptional even by contemporary standards. Moreover, the mumbled lyrics are mostly gibberish, except for the repeated, spoken refrain, “This is America.”

It is spoken, not with pride, but as an indictment, and that gets to the real content of the video: a series of images that are supposed to be biting social commentary on racism and violence. But an ordinary viewer would easily miss at least half of it. This also is widely acknowledged, because numerous people have put out guides to the video (like this one) purporting to explain the social and political significance of everything in it.

The symbols seem either too subtle or too ham-handed. On the one hand, were we really supposed to recognize that the initial pose of Glover’s weird twitching dance style is supposed to be borrowed from the “Jim Crow” caricature of a nineteenth-entury minstrel show performer? On the other hand, when Glover shoots a group of gospel singers with a machine gun—the wrong gun, albeit—it seems to be ticking off the “mass shooting” box a little too obviously. Certainly, many of the explanations seem strained—the warehouse in which the video is shot has white columns, symbolizing the fact that white supremacy is America’s foundation! They seem like attempts to read in a social message that is not plausibly there.

But the important thing is that people believe the message to be there, and they believe this hidden, symbolic content is what gives the video value and makes it great.

References, allusions, and what are now called “Easter Eggs” have long been a part of art and literature. But you can see a Shakespeare play and still get the story if you don’t know Hyperion from a satyr. The references enhance the story for those in the know, but there is more to the story than a pastiche of references, and the allusions merely serve the communication of the artist’s own unique message.

What is the message of “This is America”? That racism exists? It reminds me of the comment about Aziz Ansari’s shtick that inspired my earlier observation about our didactic culture.

Dev learns a lesson. The lesson is that sexism exists. Presumably viewers are to learn this also. It is difficult, though, to imagine a viewer likely to be simultaneously surprised by and receptive to such lessons. This is not a blow to the patriarchy; this is ‘Sesame Street.’

All the earnest guides to the hidden symbolism of “This Is America” remind me of what Tom Wolfe said in The Painted Word. Modern art galleries have it all wrong. They put the Jackson Pollock painting up on the wall at full size, with a little block of text explaining it off to the side. To really capture the spirit of Modernism, Wolfe argued, they should reproduce the painting in a little box off to the side, as a mere illustration, and put the words of the critics and theorists up on the wall.

In this case, the only appropriate way to watch Glover’s video is in one of those tiny boxes off to the side of a webpage, while you read all of the notes pontificating about its historical references and hidden messages—because they are the real point, not the video.

If you object that this is just a music video—well, this is what I thought, until a bunch of people started telling me how important it was. But I suppose that’s where the logic of Beyoncé thinkpieces takes us: we have a culture that is both lowbrow and pompously didactic at the same time.

Then again, you might object that I am not the target audience for this video and that it was made to speak to a narrower audience that would get the references. But didn’t we all decide a while back that being trapped in our own cultural “bubble” was a bad thing? We already have too many people talking to their own in-group in an esoteric code accepted by each other but unconvincing to anyone else. We already have too much of that on important issues, and far too much of it on the topic of race.

Didacticism is the art of balkanization and tribalism. That’s because it shouts the same message over and over again, it appeals only to those who already want to hear it and repels those who don’t. You will see exactly the same thing with “This Is America.” Those who are inclined to write off America as inherently racist will watch it over and over again. Those who are not will merely find it irritating and ignore it. It will serve as yet another signifier of tribal identity, rather than a story that is capable of reaching across entrenched lines.

- Robert Tracinski is a senior writer for The Federalist. His work can also be found at The Tracinski Letter.

More Lips