Is Pop Music Commodifying Vulnerability?
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Boygenius’ new EP opens and closes with a Julien Baker led track. Her earnest tone carries the listeners into a space of contemplation and closure from this era of the group’s collaboration. The four track EP retraces old steps as it pulls subjects explored in the group’s coolly-named album The Record into a different focus. The opening track, “Black Hole” tentatively considers a newly discovered supermassive black hole which creates new stars instead of obliterating old ones ('“you can see the stars, the ones / the headlines said this morning / were being spat out by what we thought / was just destroying everything for good”). This sentiment of subverted expectation is a running thread throughout this EP.
The supergroup (made up of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Baker) have had a successful year with the release of their debut album springboarding them into a worldwide tour which included a supporting slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. The three artists, first pushed together by a shared sound and their precise, confessional lyricism, have cultivated a true friendship and working partnership since their debut EP in 2018.
Endorsement by Taylor Swift is the rite of passage for music artists working in and around the pop genre. Swift is the patron saint of confessional songwriting and of giving exact details in her releases, right down to names and dates. Her fans interact with these specifics as amateur detectives, collecting clues to piece together their own conclusions of the mysteries of the artist’s life and relationships. With such an industry giant setting this as the standard for artists - from boygenius to TikTok singer songwriters - a wider question must be asked: in art, when does the self-expression end and commodification of these experiences begin?
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What is said in art has real life repercussions. British singer songwriter Maisie Peters recently came face to face with this in an interview when she was asked about her song “Cate’s Brother”. The track, which depicts a story of Peters pursuing and dating the older brother of her friend Cate, was written as an inside joke between the friends and is a work of fiction. “When I wrote that song, I had never met that man,” Peters explained to the interviewer. Later, she duetted a TikTok clip of the interview with the caption “me realising my actions have consequences and people actually think I dated Cate’s brother just because I wrote a song where I sing “and now I date Cate’s brother”.
There are a few things at play here. Firstly, over the past few years, Peter has positioned herself as an autobiographical songwriter. She is anecdotal rather than proverbial in her lyricism and when she releases a song, there is an expectation of realism from her audience. Whilst fans ‘in the know’ understand Peters’ intended satirical tone in Cate’s Brother, casual listeners and those who do not follow her online are likely to miss this memo. However, more visibly constructed artists such as Chappell Roan do not experience the same type of speculation. Fictional retellings are more easily digested, if not expected from Roan, even in her ballads. After all, her performance persona is a drag queen. She uses theatrics and campy spoken word mantras to explore ideas and stories which she admits are often the exaggerated hyperbole of real life events. We are not looking to Roan for the most raw, honest reaction to the things that have happened to her - an anomaly in the current music landscape.
Seeking authenticity in those who perform for a living is a strange paradox and as audiences we bring a lot of projection to our interpretation of performers. When we see an artist with pared back aesthetics we might automatically prescribe them with labels such as ‘honest’ or ‘vulnerable’, whilst we are more readily able to accept artifice from artists who present with more spectacle. This binary interpretation is reinforced by the music industry, which wants to market artists as products to their consuming audiences.
This simplistic strategy draws attention away from the fact that both types of performers fill the same role. A core value of ‘camp’ is finding truth through exaggeration and subversion. There are theatrics in vulnerable artists just as there is vulnerability in ostentatious artists. When a performer is presenting something created for consumption, whether that is in their songwriting or in their social media posts, it is always at best a curation and at worst a fabrication, regardless of appearances.
It all relates more to the public’s relationship to artists rather than the art itself. With the decentralisation of media, promotion of artists’ work is no longer only delegated to PR companies. In order for a creative project to be successful, artists must present themselves as palatable to a specific audience, selling themselves and all their life experiences along with (and, at times, instead of) their art. It is here where the real commodification of vulnerability lies. Emerging artists who are trying to garner a career via their online presence are pushed into replicating this model. The art they create about a very real relationship, idea or feeling must be translated into SEO friendly buzzwords before we can see it on our feeds. Even if an artist is promoted successfully, there is no way of controlling how this plays out in real time. Musician Declan McKenna recently shared frustration that his fans had made his years old cover of ABBA’s “Slipping Through My Fingers” go viral instead of a new album he had spent the same years creating.
“Seeking authenticity in those who perform for a living is a strange paradox and as audiences we bring a lot of projection to our interpretation of performers.”
In a 1969 interview on NBC, the philosopher Susan Sontag spoke about an early iteration of art as an area of wider public interest. She said “I think publicity in general is a very destructive thing, for any artist. It always is a problem. Because even if it’s good, the extent to which you get all this attention is an extra thing for you to take account of. You start thinking about your work as an outsider.” In the digital age, this isolation is amplified further. Trapped within structures that allow us only to buy or sell, the forced interpretation and consumption of self is a byproduct to making and engaging with art.
As an artist, being self-aware about the intention of a piece of work and where it is going is particularly important. For, behind the mirrored hallway of marketing and media platforms, the art can still stand alone. Boygenius gently eschewed responsibility for parasocial relationships with their audience in the first track of their 2018 EP. Their song “Bite the Hand” outlines the distance between performer and audience, ending with a repeated refrain which acts as both an apology and a declaration ‘I can’t love you / how you want me to’. In boygenius’ recent interview with Zane Lowe, the trio discussed this as a mission statement for the boundaries they had set as artists. “Sometimes I see fans and am, like, we probably would be friends, but we’re not going to be,” Dacus said, “the circumstances don’t allow it”.
With this intention firmly in place, boygenius use their music as a transcendental tool to explore thoughts and ideas without the need to be fully understood by their listeners. Dacus pointedly surmised, “It’s not enough to be honest, you also have to be careful,” noting that when there is an audience, leaving things unsaid is sometimes the best policy in songwriting.
While boygenius and its constituent parts are some of the founding mothers of ‘sad girl music’, when we listen closer and beyond this prescriptive cataloguing we can find joy, anger, humour and campiness in the artistic outputs of the trio. Just like Chappell Roan, there is a performed theatric to boygenius’ vulnerability which they openly point to. We do a disservice to their music and music of that specific, overtly emotional genre by taking it at face value.
Words: Hannah Gibson