Give it another listen
Or Why You Should Listen To Bleacher's TTSOOSN
There’s this video of Ethan Hawke on the TED talk YouTube channel where he gives a little seated monologue about creativity. At one point he describes how most people don’t really think much about poetry or music until something happens… Death, love, heartbreak, whatever… Eventually something happens, and you need to make sense of the world and that’s when you care. In Hawke’s word:
“There’s this thing that worries me about talking about creativity because it can have this feeling that it’s just nice. You know, or its warm and pleasant… It’s not, its vital. It’s how we heal each other.”
In July of 2021 Bleachers, better known as Jack Antonoff the man who has produced every pop song post 2015, released their third studio album “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night”. By all accounts the album did fine… As per-usual Antonoff’s solo work was largely overshadowed by his production on the music of artists much bigger than himself. I mean there was a pitchfork review and an Anthony Fantano video, and some other people talked about it too, but it didn’t stick around much. The consensus was… ehh, its fine. That’s how I felt as well when I first heard it.
But then of course, things changed. Somewhere in 2022 I went through a breakup, and as happens to everyone at some point or another, just making it out of bed in the morning felt like a Sisyphean task. As Hawke says in his talk, I began to ask “has anyone ever felt this bad before?” And the answer is of course they have. These are normal things to feel, to go through, and we all deal with them. But when you lock yourself in the dark of your apartment, or into the corners of your mind, its hard for any person to get that through to you. That’s when I rediscovered “Take the Sadness out of Saturday Night”.
The album is just thirty-four minutes of Antonoff telling you how much he wishes he could stop feeling so bad. Thirty-four straight minutes of music that felt like it was perfectly made for me in those moments. Tracks like Chinatown with Bruce Springsteen, Secret Life with Lana Del Rey, and the final song What’d I do With All of this Faith had a way of just cutting through the bullshit in my brain and giving me some comfort, some release, and some way to make sense of my feelings.
This is pretty standard for me. Anytime my life goes through some sort of shift, there’s some music artist or genre that I didn’t get before which just suddenly clicks into place. I feel like there’s a way in which music criticism misses the mark on this a lot of the time. I mean it’s hard to blame those critics, their job is to evaluate the music as it comes out and all they can use as a lens is their experience listening to it. But it still seems so strange to me because a lot of art isn’t meant to be consumed for consumption, but in a moment. In an experience.
Conversations on art in media often exist in sort of one of two states (I’m doing quite a lot of generalizing, but I think this is mostly accurate), you have the highly knowledgeable, high-brow, technical critic. They’re often eloquent, intelligent, and they usually see themselves as part of a larger conversation surrounding the art and while they know what they’re doing is subjective they see value in striving for some sort of evaluation and explanation of ‘good art’.
On the flip side you also have the sort of puff engagement pieces. The uncritical, often shilling type of engagement. Encouraged to not include nuance because their readers “don’t like it” (a thing I have literally been told by editors before). All art is good, unless it feels morally wrong then its bad, consume – consume - consume.
This is slowly changing. There’s a host of great YouTube video-essayists breaking from those two camps (as well as a sea of them who fall exactly into one of the two), there’s a number of fantastic music journalists, or non-traditional Critics. I think Todd in The Shadows has always been a hair ahead of his time, and I think Nathan Zed in recent years has been really capturing this elusive third approach. But I still think there’s a large gap, between how most critics/music writers engage with music and the actual way it serves people’s life.
Look, “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night” feels to me like a tightly produced (even if at times a bit muddy sounding), heart wrenching, half-hour of catchy alt-pop tear jerkers to comfort you when you realize “it’s over”. “It” can be a lot of things, for me it was a relationship, but just anyone in the process of letting go will feel this album. If that’s you, then you should give it a listen, but that’s not really the recommendation I hope you heed coming away from today’s piece.
Ethan Hawke in the aforementioned video was speaking to the artist, I want to speak the audience here. Art is how we make sense of a chaotic world. Its how we snap ourselves out of the dark corners of our brain back to a reality where we all know what its like. When we pass something up as not for us, we throw away a potential escape exit from our own minds.
My thoughts on art-criticism aside (I’ll save those for a day where I’m a bit more articulate) my recommendation this week is to just give some song, or artist, or album another try. Find something that was recommended to you once by someone you care about or even by an algorithm, that just didn’t click and give it another try with fresh ears and fresh experiences. Maybe it’ll hit, maybe it won’t, but if you find the right song while you’re in the right headspace, it might just help you take the sadness out of your Saturday night.