A Case Against Sufjan Stevens
07-11-06, 12:20 PM
#1
DVD Talk Legend
Thread Starter
A Case Against Sufjan Stevens
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=61::67KP
Like most recovering record collectors, indie rock snobs, and pop culture junkies, my first encounter with Sufjan Stevens was entirely pleasant. Wandering around downtown on a lazy Saturday, I went into a local record shop where the proprietor was playing Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, enthusing that it was like Stereolab meets Beck. While there isn't that great of a gap between those two extremes, I understood what he was getting at — this was a singer/songwriter who had some electronica underpinnings, plus had a fondness for lush pop arrangements. It sounded perfectly nice as background music for record shopping and it wound up coming home with me.
Over the next month or so, I listened to it a few times, finding it modestly charming. It was an enjoyable, whimsical oddity, the kind of record you listen to several times and marvel at its ambition, scale, and quirk, yet one that rarely finds its way off the shelf (or accessed from the hard drive, if that's your poison of choice). It seemed destined to be the kind of record that few would ever know, so it would be an album that music geeks use to impress each other, since it was so unusual: in short, it seemed to be a Neon Philharmonic for the new millennium. But where Tupper Saussy remained on the fringe even after scoring a Top 20 single — by definition, any songwriter who goes into the underground as a vocal tax evader is indeed on the fringe — that, of course, did not become the fate of Sufjan Stevens. Instead, this Michigan native became an "important artist," turning into an indie cause célèbre last year with the release of his fifth album, Illinois, or in its full title, Sufjan Stevens Invites You to Come on Feel the Illinoise...
Like most recovering record collectors, indie rock snobs, and pop culture junkies, my first encounter with Sufjan Stevens was entirely pleasant. Wandering around downtown on a lazy Saturday, I went into a local record shop where the proprietor was playing Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, enthusing that it was like Stereolab meets Beck. While there isn't that great of a gap between those two extremes, I understood what he was getting at — this was a singer/songwriter who had some electronica underpinnings, plus had a fondness for lush pop arrangements. It sounded perfectly nice as background music for record shopping and it wound up coming home with me.
Over the next month or so, I listened to it a few times, finding it modestly charming. It was an enjoyable, whimsical oddity, the kind of record you listen to several times and marvel at its ambition, scale, and quirk, yet one that rarely finds its way off the shelf (or accessed from the hard drive, if that's your poison of choice). It seemed destined to be the kind of record that few would ever know, so it would be an album that music geeks use to impress each other, since it was so unusual: in short, it seemed to be a Neon Philharmonic for the new millennium. But where Tupper Saussy remained on the fringe even after scoring a Top 20 single — by definition, any songwriter who goes into the underground as a vocal tax evader is indeed on the fringe — that, of course, did not become the fate of Sufjan Stevens. Instead, this Michigan native became an "important artist," turning into an indie cause célèbre last year with the release of his fifth album, Illinois, or in its full title, Sufjan Stevens Invites You to Come on Feel the Illinoise...
07-11-06, 12:57 PM
#2
Senior Member
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Royal Oak, MI
Posts: 722
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
So the upshot is that it would have been okay if Stevens had never become "popular." Okay. You could ask a million critics to write this type of article about a million different bands they thought were undeservedly popular, and it all amounts to the same thing: Who cares? The people who like Stevens won't care about this, and those that hate him will be glad someone else agrees. You can't argue taste. If he wants to condemn the critical reaction, fine, but again, what does it prove? People have been bandwagon followers forever. Like the indie world should be any different?
07-12-06, 05:41 PM
#4
DVD Talk Limited Edition
I like Sufjan, but I do have to be in the right mood for him... If I'm not, I sometimes find him unsufferably twee and self-consciously "fragile." But when I'm in the right mood, he's a brittle beauty I think.
