So it goes with the so-called sociopathy of Stephin Merritt, the caustic frontman of The Magnetic Fields. I’ve been trying to convince my friend Z to go see the band at their next stop in New York (having myself just seen them twice at Harris Theater, possibly the nicest place to see a sit-down show in all of Chicago). Z told me that he finds their music sort of sterile and cold, which surprised me more than it should have—it’s a fair impression, before you get to know them.
What’s more surprising to me is that sentiment seems to be shared by people who should know better. In Pitchfork’s recent review of Realism, the band’s new album, Matt LeMay wrote:
“Those hoping to find anything even remotely autobiographical or directly emotive on Realism will be sorely disappointed.”
To which I say: um, DUH. I mean, who would expect that? I guess LeMay was warning people not to read too much into the “folk music” theme the album has been marketed under, but does he really imagine a fan would expect Stephin Merritt to suddenly start sounding like, say, Lou Barlow?
Even weirder, LeMay accused Merritt of “defiantly withhold[ing]” any “emotional gratification,” before declaring that “Realism is Merritt’s most cold and distant-sounding record to date.”
That last bit seems especially strange to me considering the album opens with what might be one of the band’s most expressive and beautiful songs, “You Must Be Out of Your Mind.”
Memo to Matt LeMay: You must be out of your mind, son.
Did that sound cold and distant to you?
The Pitchfork piece is just one example among many. I was really surprised to learn of the one-dimensional treatment the press has given Stephin Merritt. Even a cursory review of his Internet footprint will leave you with the impression he is (at best) super grumpy and/or (at worst) cruel for sport. Pretty much every published interview in the history of Merritt-dom at some point devolves into a solipsistic piece about how stupid the writer was made to feel over the course of the conversation. Evidently, he even made some poor lady at Time Out Chicago cry.
I mean, listen, I firmly believe that you shouldn’t make journalists cry. That’s just plain mean and unnecessary. That said, many (if not most) journalists are terrible, terrible interviewers. Interviewing and writing require very different skill sets, and believe me when I tell you that one must really fucking work at interviewing to get any good at it. Now that I’ve read a fair number of interviews with Stephin Merritt, I can report here that he has spoken with more than his fair share of lazy interviewers (and bad writers, for that matter).
In any case, the weird thing is that Stephin Merritt seemed mostly polite in many (though not all) of the interviews I read. He strikes me as a contrarian—so many intellectuals are—which can come across as being an asshole.
Anyway, in most of what I read, there was this overall tone of just not getting it. I think that Merritt is very committed to his grouchy persona, which seems to have confused a lot of people. So far as I can tell, he has scowled in every single portrait made of him post 69 Love Songs.
I mean, has it occurred to no one but me that this might be, to some degree, posturing? The whole thing makes more sense when you consider Merritt’s ‘tude in light of his friend and collaborator Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), who is celebrated for his playful, mock-gothic tone.
NB: This song is actually called "Don't Look Away." Lala mislabeled it.
Maybe Morrissey is an even better model. Consider this very astute analysis of Morrissey, which was offered by Colin Meloy in 2004 in an interview with The Believer:
“I think of his [Morrissey’s] literary allusions, the flaws of his characters, his self-referential tone, and how well he treats that. That’s one of his strongest traits and it’s also what he gets a lot of criticism for: his being this sort of egomaniacal character in songs when in fact there’s heaps and heaps of irony there—I’m talking strata upon strata. Like there is that egoism, but it’s defending a very, very sincere fragility, but also poking fun at that at the same time—poking fun at shyness and introvertedness.”
Similarly, people accuse Merritt for his total lack of sincerity, which is so weird to me. For heaven’s sake, this is a man who writes songs about unhappiness while sitting alone in gay bars. Since when do song lyrics have to be literal or strictly autobiographical to be considered sincere? I have written at length about The Sincerity Problem, which is my theory that true irony is at least a little bit emo; you have to be both vested and disgusted for it to really work. True irony is artifice, but it is also built around something real.
It seems like, in interviews, the sincerity question has been raised more often in light of the new “folk-concept” album. Says Merritt:
“I don't believe in sincerity in music. I don't understand what it would mean. It's the same as with cooking or any form of art really; sincerity has no meaning. Folk is a marketing category rather than a musical one.”
Here, I think, he’s being willfully obtuse. Anyone who has been to open mic night at a coffeehouse knows full well that sincerity exists. Probably a better word is “earnestness,” and I don’t just mean that in the pejorative sense. Maybe you could say it’s a spectrum of attitudes that ranges from the literal (say, Tori Amos turning her rape into a song) at one end to mutable (say, The Cure’s playful misery) on the other end.
But the concept of sincerity in music becomes more slippery when you’re talking about a band with an interest in artifice. Merritt’s songs are known for their famously fluid POV. (No doubt someone out there is writing a dissertation on sex and gender in The Magnetic Fields catalog.) People point to this as conscious artifice—as though Merritt has carved out the lyric “I” from his songs like a serial killer, totally erasing himself from the fictional world of a given song. I totally disagree. In fact, if anything, I’d say Merritt’s arbitrary narrators seem more honest than Morrissey singing as though he’d ever come within spitting distance of a vagina.
Across albums, you can pick out a certain voice I believe to be Merritt’s own: witty, wounded, and thoughtful, with an Englishman’s knack for self-deprecation. He’s right there, if you listen.
You know, I think even his facility with words is misinterpreted. People mistake his intellect for emotional distance and his cleverness for an intellectual exercise. His music has been described as stylized and literary, which seems wrong to me. When I think of stylized and literary, I think of The Decemberists and Belle & Sebastian, both bands who write 200-word songs that are better than most novels. The Magnetic Fields may be named after a Surrealist novel, but Merritt’s lyrics are very much rooted in the tropes of, like, cheesy music from the mid-twentieth century. He sings about love. He sings about the moon. His lyrics are often built around clichés, as in two of my very favorite songs, “All the Umbrellas in London” and “All My Little Words”:
In both songs, Merritt subverts clichés—all the umbrellas in London, all the tea in China—so they mean something again.
It just bugs me that this band, a national treasure, seems to be so misunderstood, even perhaps by the very people who like them. Whereas The Magnetic Fields are often admired, I think they should be loved. If I were king, I’d make Stephin Merritt follow me around with his ukulele. I’d probably be too nervous to talk to him, but we could just sit around and roll our eyes at each other.
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