Charles just sent me this link which contains the following commercial, over which he and I have been scratching our heads for the past week or so:
After watching it a few more times, I’m convinced: that’s Stephen fucking Merritt (dammit).
The fascinating thing about this ad is that it’s almost exactly as good as any Magnetic Fields song. And I don’t mean that as a compliment. Stephen Merritt gets a lot of disgustingly adulatory press. I think there are three reasons for this:
- He always sounds bored, which is widely regarded as a sign of sophistication.
- His love songs are about dudes, which is considered to be even more sophisticated.
- He spends a lot of time talking about how smart he is, which for a variety of reasons is not something that a given music press interviewer is in a position to challenge.
But I don’t buy it. To me his songs have always seemed long on wit and short on genuine emotion, full of calculated revelations of self-loathing but devoid of actual vulnerability. They’re beautiful, cold constructions. They’re satirical poems from the Victorian Era, they’re the chess column in the paper hummed aloud, they’re New Yorker cartoons adapted for Broadway. They might as well be about gum.
I agree maybe 85%, and I don’t really mind “beautiful, cold constructions” sometimes â but come on, “Papa Was a Rodeo”? That song’s lovely.
He’s a repeat offender:
http://www.en-dash.com/blog/2007/02/23/i-think-were-going-to-need-a-new-term-for-this-one/
Are you sure that your real problem with Merritt isn’t the second bulleted item?
Yeah. Quite sure. I won’t bore you with a lame “some of my best friends are gay musicians” laundry list, but suffice it to say that my ipod’s contents would look substantially different if I had a problem with gay artists. But that doesn’t mean that I have to appreciate the subtle “breeder=lame” disdain that can lead to straight love songs getting dismissed more quickly than queer ones for no good reason.