On the vibe-oriented practice of Taylor Swift, LDR, and Lorde producer Jack Antonoff
Considering the banal sublime, the producer-as-creative director, and pop music in the 2020s.
The figure of the star producer recurs throughout the history of popular music. Phil Spector, Dr. Dre, Max Martin… Metro Boomin, Brian Eno, Quincy Jones… Etcetera. These figures are known for honing unique, individual styles in a field designed to maintain a comforting degree of homogeneity. Style here can be defined by signature recurring tropes – Dre’s machine funk kinetics, Spector’s “wall of sound” echo-zone – or by adaptability across historical periods and singer-collaborators, as in the case of Max Martin.
In our current era of pop music, one of the foremost star producers is Jack Antonoff. He is very highly regarded by the mainstream music press. Overuse of superlatives to the point of actual disinformation is more or less the standard for the (former) blue check arts writer mercenary-class, but it’s still notable that the BBC, for example, claims that Antonoff “redefined” pop music. Meanwhile, he is not highly regarded in what can very loosely be described as the “underground” or “experimental” music scenes; I have never read or heard somebody speaking highly of his work. This is not because these scenes aren’t interested in pop music – that might be less true than ever, due to both aesthetic and economic factors – but for other reasons: jealousy, certainly, to some degree, but also a simple lack of interest in his practice. Before Taylor Swift’s new album Midnights it had never occurred to me to do a deep dive on Antonoff’s ouevre, but I’ve been listening to the lead single “Anti-Hero” a lot, as well as “Karma” and “Bejeweled,” and it made me curious what his deal was exactly.
It took about a week to make my way through Antonoff’s production discography. Although the quality of his work varies tremendously, some of it, specifically Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell, is terrific. He makes the most of the transcendent elements of her sound and creates a rich, psychedelic clearness; this is remarkable because it is achieved in part with the use of heavy, almost shoegazey use of reverb, which typically serves a different, more obfuscating or texturally monistic purpose. Antonoff’s contributions to Lorde’s Solar Power are also very good: the record uses space artfully and with restraint, producing a kind of placid luminescence almost evocative of Benny Maupin’s The Jewel in the Lotus. The LP is seemingly a paean to a strange sun-deity, and Solar Power luxuriates in thoughtful treatments which bring out the depth of Lorde’s performances. Antonoff tries applying Solar Power’s combo of ECM-core, filigreed negative space + Second Life-cathedral-reverb to LDR’s Chemtrails over the Country Club, but it is to slightly less impressive effect, although there are some very good songs on that album. At times its sound is genuinely compelling, like a shimmering heat mirage drawing the listener ever-further into an endless desert at 3AM, but it’s not coherent across the record. LDR does most of the heavy lifting.
Antonoff also produced Lorde’s previous hit record Melodrama, and a couple songs there are very good, but I don’t have to hear about half of that record ever again. It is so loud, and this becomes grating in conversation with the record’s, uh, melodramatic tenor, despite the impressiveness of Lorde’s performances and narrative ambition. Continuing my trek through Antonoff’s discography, I tried listening to his solo project Bleachers and enjoyed a maximum of two songs. He develops forms there – involving the application of rudimentary sampling techniques to Bruce Sprinsteen-style pop songs, supergluing it together with affect-drained trap beats – which are re-used to much stronger effect later, in collaboration with Taylor Swift. I tried listening to his band Fun, a group which predates both his tenure as a producer and as Bleachers, known best for their demonic hit “We Are Young,” but I couldn’t handle it. I also tried listening to the album he produced for Clairo and found it unlistenable. It was trying to sound like early Harry Nilsson or Randy Newman or something, playing on the California baroque pop thing, but it did not succeed. I then listened to an album he did with St. Vincent, titled Daddy’s Home. I truly did not like it, found it remarkably distasteful, not sure what else to say. I also listened to a record Antonoff did for the Chicks (fka the Dixie Chicks) that didn't do much for me either. Antonoff is extremely busy – he also produced the new album by the 1975, Being Funny in a Foreign Language. That band has some great songs, but there are no particularly good songs on this album. It’s just bland millennial adult contemporary, which is odd because Antonoff and the 1975 are both at their best when they’re writing Main Stage Music Festival anthems, but there are none to be found.
In addition to producing a number of songs for Taylor Swift over the years, Antonoff also produced the entirety of two of her most recent albums, Lover and Midnights. This work is exemplary of Antonoff’s greatest strengths as a producer. Unlike some of the other star producers I mentioned at the beginning of the piece, Antonoff has never used the studio to iterate on the shape of music at the formal level of the song. In other words, he cannot claim to have really invented anything tangible, musically. Rather, Antonoff’s gifts are closest to those of a creative director or even a curator, a little like Drake. The two artists’ most palpable value-adds take place in the context of a song much more so than on the level of the song itself. Their expertise lies in composing the end-user experience of a piece of music: how it will sound as one component among many when streamed in the midst of a cross-platform, distracted, multimedia experience of contemporary life as a whole. Nobody is going to argue that Drake is an incredibly skilled rapper or songwriter, but it is undeniable that he has led the creation of a tremendous amount of powerful music. He knows how to make something stick; this requires a profound feel for the psychosocial mechanics of the world, how a song could thrive in countless, widely varying contexts. In this way, he and Antonoff are similar. They are both vibe technicians. They know how to break the fourth wall and intensively overdetermine the intangibles of a song – mood, emotion, feeling, whatever you want to call it; real post-Fordist, experience economy shit – so as to command maximum attention.
The song that you like a lot in an intimate, personal way is not necessarily the same song which you decide to share with your friends – thereby increasing its listenership, doing unpaid PR; both Antonoff and Drake know this well. In other words they know how to make something go viral, they’re like network-conductors, or McKinsey consultants, trend forecasters: they clearly begin with the abstract compositional form of the Powerpoint presentation or moodboard when strategizing their creative practice.
In 2014, Antonoff described his sound thus: “I wanted to bridge the gap between Disclosure and Arcade Fire—something both streamlined and organic ... The production and songwriting is extremely over-the-top, extremely epic, and unapologetic.” I’m not going to add anything to this, he more or less provides us the key to the instrumental palette of both Lover and Midnights: Coachella-core. The sound is highly effective! It certainly helps that Swift has mastered the ability to write an earworm; there’s also a remarkable density of compositional elements on these records which reach out and draw you in, urging you to get caught in the sound-world. The chorus in this context is as much a dazzling commodity as a riptide. It initiates an attempt at forced recognition between the song and the listener: this music tries to look you directly in the eye, meet you, and find you relatable. It’s me… Hi… I’m the problem, it’s me…
In the midst of my research, I asked my friend Kento how he’d describe Antonoff’s sound. “It feels like a movie from the POV of the main character that you get to be for three minutes,” he said, before adding: “It conjures places and movement, as if you’re sweeping through castles and orchards, like a drone.” I agree with the first comment, but the follow-up captures the essence of what Antonoff does even better. As he producer he crafts a lifelike sense of experiences which cannot be experienced directly, elaborating fantasies of the transcendence of embodiment, mortal life, empirical experience: sprawling, desirous landscapes painted with the infinite technical palate of replicant affects. Consider the chorus-bridge-chorus section toward the end of Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” Humans need artificial prostheses to fly through the air like a bird, and we can only ever experience the drone’s inhuman vision while trapped on the ground, hunched over a screen, squinting for details, at a total remove from the machinic bird’s eye view experience. For Antonoff, a song is what it does, and that action is only ever an expression of painstaking vibe-attunement.
Plodding through Antonoff’s discography, one can’t help but notice the total lack of dissonance in the recordings he produces. Everything fits together. If something unforeseen takes place in a song’s lyrical narrative, the sound inevitably rescues us from indecision and the threat of psychic disassembly; it has planned for all eventualities, foreclosing the possibility of oblivion. Everything is neatly under control: the sense of gestalt is flawless, smoother than smooth. All of this is to say: the sound is deeply inhuman, much more profoundly so than a great deal of algorithmically-generated experimental music which specifically seeks to achieve that very thing.
It would be easy to scoff at this accomplishment but I will not. It’s no small feat to have perfected the banal sublime… To take what should exceed our faculties and reformat it for casual everyday use, thereby containing the uncontainable, representing the unrepresentable: this ought to be sacrilegious, right? And yet, people love it, I get why it’s popular. In some sense this accomplishment has never been more possible than now, at this peculiar stage of the artwork’s imbrication as an endlessly fungible commodity form, free from the auratic constraints of scarcity. The banal sublime is what we hear on the other side of de facto limitlessness; as my friend Will Fraser put it, “context ceases to exist when it is absolutely everywhere.” I’m the problem. It’s me.
And those few WHO take everyone out of context...POP!