The Case for Sufjan Stevens

Over the past two months I've been doing lots of things: moving, reading, going to Coney Island, and working fairly hard on the Paupered Chef, a daily task that takes a good amount of energy every single night. So this little blog which no one reads has kind of fallen by the wayside unless I get motivated to do something, like talk politics for no apparent reason, or something along those lines. So, this should be this writing should signify something rather important. That reason is Sufjan.

It's open season for Sufjan as he releases an album acknowledged as okay and gets a searing indictment on Allmusic by resident critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, whose long but hastily written piece about Sufjan is the basis for this piece.

I don't take issue with his feelings about Sufjan, or with Bright Eyes -he panned I'm Wide Awake It's Morning- but with the way he tried to rationalize something he couldn't quite articulate, mainly his feeling that Sufjan is grossly overrated.

He calls Sufjan pleasant and says he is considered an important artist because he uses woodwinds. He also believes Sufjan's focus on other people's lives creates a disconnect between artist and subject, that because Sufjan did not go through these events he sounds less like a songwriter and more like a story teller: "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".
This kind of smear the queer, intellectual aping, rock-is-only-for-the-cool-kids is ridiculous. In fact, Erlewine can't quite get past the idea that Sufjan is uncool:

Appropriately, his lyrics often read like the work of a gifted but sheltered high schooler, and his music sounds like a drama student's idea of a pop opera and it's all wrapped up on albums with stylized childish artwork, hand-drawn pictures that inadvertently wind up enforcing the impression that Stevens is an overgrown teenager.

I take most issue with this last comment, both because of its a deliberately grating language, and because it basically discounts 50 years of pop music which has been almost exclusively made for, and sometimes made by, teenagers. In fact, Sufjan's lyrics deal with situations that are outside normal pop music conventions, and therefore can be seen as a growth of subject matter over what is mostly out there.

His comparison of Illinois and SMiLE is misguided and soley intended to discredit an album he obviously dislikes. Illinois is a collection of story songs meant as a hodgepodge, not a complete portrait. SMiLE was a uniform work, perfectly executed, and is ambiguous in its language and varied in its instrumentation. Sufjan's not there, nor is he really trying to, because while SMiLE contains some of the greatest pop songs recorded to date, it also contains many fragments that only work in context of the album. Illinois is a purely song based album, and that's where the comparison talk should end. In fact, while Erlewine believes Sufjan is guilty of too much teenager showoffness, SMiLE is essentially dedicated to being a child.

I believe that most people's unease with Illinois stems from two factors, only one of which really matters. The first is the near universal acclaim for the album, which in the plethora of music sites increasing music snobbering, turns violent fast (Just look what happened to poor Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for that one). The second factor is more understandable. Illinois is much less personal than Sufjan's previous two albums, and in that way, is much less tangible. Names of places are dropped randomly, and the whole exercise can feel a little academic after awhile. He's not dealing with his confused upbringing (Michigan) or with his religious convictions (Seven Swans).

I began feeling the same disconnect shortly after we published our list of the top albums of 2005. I felt like I had slighted an album like Bright Eyes's I'm Wide Awake It's Morning, which emotionally moved me far more than Illinois. And then comes an album like The Avalanche, a long meandering album with a few good songs, some pleasant, and some rather boring. This post has nothing to do with trying to qualify the album as only being a b-side album, or state its interesting correlation with Illinois, which is all perfectly fine as a concept but bares no meaning as a pop album. I'm not that terribly interested in the album (it doesn't sound like Sufjan is either), not because I think the songs are horrible, or that it proves that Sufjan is a narrowly focused artist who can't develop past his simple chord progression and flutes galore formula, but because he has already released b-sides over the past year that are far more engaging and offer a better view of what Sufjan can do.

The "Lord God Bird" is a song he wrote specifically for NPR that is supposed to chronicle ivory-billed woodpecker. It's simple, affecting, and a nice break from the cacophony of the Illinois recordings. It shows Sufjan's craft at injecting inhuman topics with a sense of purpose through his prose.

Better is "Opie's Funernal Song", which matches Seven Swans' intense performance with something in the way of actual romantic interaction. It's not exactly a new high, but a completely beautiful song that exists nowhere and has no purpose in pushing Sufjan's image. The perfect b-side.

It seems like Sufjan's not going back to the same sound the made Michigan and Illinois so similar, and so the affronts on monodimensial sounds will hopefully end when he stops tooting those horns. But what will remain is his songwriting talents, and those can't be questioned.

To criticize someone for injecting humor and warmth into objects and attitudes completely out of mainstream consciousness, for making something move which previously did not, is hard to take. And I think that's why I keep heading back to Illinois, to feel the highways stretch, and the Midwest buckle, to hear life in the things I once thought inactive.