ARGH. disagree. I think Best Coast can write whatever she wants, its how she feels and what she wants to express. Men write songs about being dependent on women all the time. Why does it have to be over generalized that all credible women are not allowed to feel a certain way. I think artists that express feelings as these can be stronger for it rather than pretending to be 100% strong and confident and dominating ect all the time. Well written article and good points but I don’t feel it makes Best Coast less credible.
so i’ve been listening to Treats since i got it this morning before work, the guitars make like the shrieking weeeeeeeeee sound of bombs dropping and then the drums are the bombs exploding!! sleigh bells guitars/vocals alone are maybe closer sonically to asobi seksu but reminds me overall more of best coast because they’re both twentysomething american hip girls singing about twentysomething american hip girls concerns but there’s a crucial difference:
you know how much i love best coast if you read this a lot, but listening to Treats this morning has made me realize i can’t think of a credible female artist who takes a more chauvinistic, backwards, 50’s-informed approach to her own relationships than best coast, a woman who is so openly dependent on men, on male attention and approbation, so eager to have you come over and smoke her weed and sleep with her and then leave, and then she’ll cry about it and then she’ll get over it (or not) and write a catalogue of songs about it. best coast is a slave 4 u, displaying a repeated unwillingness (unless all the victimization she colors her lyrics with stem from the same instance of a dude mistreating her — unlikely). some sample lyrics (which i have been informed are a cover and if yr concerned about that look at the comments):
when i’m with my guy
and he watches the pretty girls go by
well it hurts so bad deep inside
i wish that i could die
but not a word do i say
i just look the other way
BECAUSE THAT’S THE WAY BOYS ARE
no dude, that’s the way women in Mad Men and women who live in burka-oriented societies think boys are and are forced to allow boys to be. although it’s tempting to write her antiquated gender views off as a reference to her influences who happen to be from a time of greater gender backwardness (see spector, phil) this is HER GENUINE SENTIMENT, and it runs through all of her work in the last few months.
her songs are relative love songs, chronicles of irritatingly consistent heartbreak and powerlessness (“you say that you never want me to leave / so i stick around / and now you’re gone” (yet another man who has wronged her), “you say that you don’t have time for me / so i move along” — think of the choice of diction here, she says she “i move along” connoting a lack of agency, like she’s choosing to be brushed aside (compare it to “you say that you don’t have time for me / SO I LEFT YOU” but she would never say that).
and then there’s her constant obsession with boys who haven’t even gotten around to wronging her yet (“i thought of you / i thought of youuuu / i thought of youuuuu / i thought of youuuuu” is her account of being high on a sunny day) — her debut record is fucking called Where The Boys Are. she writes in agreeance with “he hit me and it felt like a kiss” which might be a tough pill to swallow for any feminists who’ve been loving best coast and not listening that hard. unless best coast heralds a dinesh d’souza-oriented next wave of feminism characterized by a proud return to the kitchen and the bedroom?
sleigh bells is the opposite, taking male-dominated genre influences like soaring anthemic cock rock guitars and subverting them with a girly female voice and fucking OWNING THEM, like a skinny kid with long hair from seattle famously took stadium rock’s meathead guitars and repurposed them for his own sensitive weenie progressive angst. but more importantly than the guitar’s antecedent is the antecedent of the DRUMS: pitchfork astutely notes sleigh bells’ drum sound is CRUNK, meaning they reappropriate a dead subgenre whose best known lines are these:
til the sweat drip down my balls
To all these bitches: CRAWL!!
To all SKEET SKEET motherfucker
he’s commanding bitches to crawl! can you think of anything more demeaning? and to crawl in the club, in public, presumably to get them into the best position for him to ejaculate on them although i’m not sure of exactly the procedure! BUT SLEIGH BELLS WON’T CRAWL!!! perhaps best coast could learn from this?
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