dammmnnn!
Esquire [has] published a strong early contender for the year’s most appalling foray into music criticism. Ostensibly reviewing the debut album by Lana Del Rey, Tom Junod’s piece soon wanders away from that to discuss the Nature of Woman and Song Today. A dismissive reference to “our wives” and their listening habits suggests that he is not feeling it. Junod’s awkwardly vain prose style galls on its own – “mechanistic melismata,” “drizzly samizdat,” and “wan wastrels” all appear in a single sentence – but the greater offense is his exegetic condescension towards female musicians, and how many male critics get away with the same hustle.
Anyone who attempts to explain “the state of the female singer” will probably feel dissatisfied with whatever they imagine it to be. “Once it seemed that every great girl singer was capable of generating her own style and fomenting her own revolution,” Junod laments. Now they all sound like “precocious 12-year-olds keeping secrets” or “machines.” After seguing to Florence and the Machine via limp wordplay, he specifies the devices that pop stars remind him of: sex toys. “Beyoncé and Gaga, Rihanna and Ke$ha: They share little but an ability to impart an awareness that whatever their music pretends to be about, it’s really about becoming Beyoncé, Gaga, Rihanna, and Ke$ha—about living up to their porn or (in Stephani Germanotta’s case) their drag names.”
Beyoncé inherited her Creole mother’s maiden name as a tribute. “Rihanna” dates back to both Old English and ancient Arabic; it’s her middle name, but then pop already had a Robyn. And aside from the vertical stroke, “Ke$ha” is what appears on that woman’s birth certificate. Sorry, Beyoncé! You may have erroneously thought that your music is “about” hard-won female independence, or the joys of creative fidelity, or making people dance, or, as Daphne Brooks once wrote, “what it means to lose, and to have, and to possess.” But you’re a silly girl with a trashy name. The real theme of those albums was demonstrating your fuckability for Tom Junod.
- “The State of the Male Magazine Writer” Chris Randle for Toronto Standard
