The critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine has penned “A Case Against Sufjan Stevens” at the All Music Guide website. It’s a glib, egotistical, clueless piece of writing, the sort of stuff that gives music critics a bad name.
Before I continue, I’ll disclose that I wrote reviews for AMG for about three years, until late 2002, when Erlewine let me go, citing budget cuts.
As many will tell you, Sufjan Stevens is a marvelous singer-songwriter. But let me be clear — I’m not suggesting that Erlewine is obligated to join the chorus of praise for Stevens. Music and art appreciation is highly subjective, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. (I happen to agree with Erlewine about the “strained hyper-sincerity” of Conor Oberst.)
I don’t know that I can explain why Stevens’s Illinois album, particularly the songs “Jacksonville,” “Chicago” and “Casimir Pulaski Day,” have had such an effect on me. So I’m not going to bother with a point-by-point rebuttal of Erlewine’s tone-deaf, flat-footed piece. I’ll limit my comments to one risible passage.
As you may know, Stevens has taken on the task of writing an album about every state in the union. (Michigan preceded Illinois.) Erlewine dismisses this as “a schoolboy’s conceit,” lamenting, among other things, that
Stevens never taps into the musical history of a state — never touching Chicago blues or jazz, or Michigan soul or rock.
Stop right there and think about the cornball literalism that Erlewine is proposing. Stevens, of course, is not a blues or jazz musician — and there is no sound more ghastly than a non-jazz musician trying to play jazz. But Erlewine would have Stevens engage in some half-baked, hollow mimicry of Chicago styles, in a misconceived nod to “musical history.” Thankfully, Stevens has avoided this approach, putting his own idiosyncratic and personal voice front and center. Just imagine if he followed Erlewine’s advice: Bob Wills-style Western swing for the Texas album; zydeco and dixieland for Louisiana; psychedelic hippie rock for California; maybe some Hopi or Navajo chants for Arizona. What patronizing stupidity this would be.
Erlewine also ridicules “the school-report nature of [Stevens’s] subjects — each song is thoroughly researched, spit-shined, and presented for the class, as if he’s reciting all that he learned during his time in the library….”
Really? Sure, if you went to the library you might learn about Casimir Pulaski Day, an official holiday in Illinois as of 1977. But would you respond with lyrics like these?
I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse
In the morning at the top of the stairs
When your father found out what we did that night
And you told me you were scared
Oh the glory when you ran outside
With your shirt tucked in and your shoes untied
And you told me not to follow you
What’s “thoroughly researched” about that?
Again, if Stevens’s music doesn’t grab Erlewine, fine. But it’s hard to stomach his self-serving, disrespectful tone, his affected contrarian pose, and his fundamental lack of understanding of the artistic process.
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