Sufjan Stevens: Adult Contemporary
 

So, someone made the comment/insult that Sufjan Steven is adult contemporary--I think it was Savage Clone?

I looked closer at my copy of "The Avalanche," and guess what?! There is a version of "Chicago" called "The Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version"!

So, I guess he really is! That's great. Are there any other contemporary adults on the forum? Any Baroque infants?

Sonic Youth is "difficult listening," right? You could earn a medal for getting through SYR5! As Coco Hailey Gordon Moore says, noise albums are only fun if you are the one making them. I'm glad they took her advice!

So I'm going to see Sufjan Stevens in September at the Paramount Theater in Austin, which was built in 1915...it should be a nice adult experience.

Let's all talk about how great Sufjan Stevens is!

Vindication!
Tongue-in-cheekness notwithstanding, that is pretty funny.

No way man! I cannot stand his bullshit fake-sophistace fop crap.

A CASE AGAINST SUFJAN STEVENS
by Strephen Thomas Erlewine

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.

 

 

Illinois topped many critics' lists — as evidenced by its top position on Metacritic's poll for Best Album of 2005 — and won the inaugural New Pantheon Music Prize. He had it all: critical adulation, awards, devoted fans. It seemed that if you like any kind of indie pop or folk — or modern music at all — you would like Sufjan Stevens and wonder at the scope and ambition of Illinois.

But for me, Illinois was a breaking point, the place where I could no longer take Stevens and his music seriously. True, he doesn't make my skin crawl the way that Conor Oberst does, but oddly that's part of the problem. Oberst's strained hyper-sincerity at least provokes a strong reaction, ranging from love to hate. Conor gives the impression that he really means it, man, which isn't something that is easy to say about Sufjan. Quite appropriately for an artist who is building his career on a schoolboy's conceit of writing albums about every one of the 50 states, there is a delicate artifice to Sufjan that doesn't inspire such a strong reaction. He's quiet and refined, aching with an earnest ambition and an overt pretension that can seem admirable when compared to his lackadaisical indie peers, or the endless parade of punk-pop jokers and relentlessly gloomy emo rockers.

In comparison to all of these, Sufjan does seem like a genuine artist, an impression that he courts via his long-winded lyrics and titles, as well as his fruity baroque arrangements. The novelty of his 50-state project paired up against the High Llamas-eseque arrangements helped him become a distinctive figure in the increasingly fractured world of indie, yet his miniaturized pop isn't a unifying force: it's emblematic of how pop, particularly in indie, has become a bunch of self-serving, self-congratulatory niches. And that's fine to a certain extent — great music doesn't certainly doesn't need to unite listeners. It's just that the universal acclaim granted Illinois gives the impression that it's a welcoming listen, when really it finds Sufjan Stevens closing a circle, creating a precious world that is insular and also alienating, since he does very little to draw listeners in. It's where his novelty loses all charm.

 

 

His charm started to show some cracks on Seven Swans, a quiet respite between states albums whose bare-bone nature had little of the flair of Michigan. Without this flair, Sufjan seemed like a pedestrian Elliott Smith, only without Smith's haunted grace or natural melodicism. It was a bit of a one-dimensional album, so Stevens' return to baroque on Illinois should have been a consolidation of strengths, which for many listeners it is. Many fans and critics find it a sophisticated display of wit and delicate composition, since there is often a tendency to label any album with woodwinds and brass as being sophisticated. But even if Sufjan can play oboe, even if the time signatures in his songs shift, his music doesn't play as sophisticated, because of the school-report nature of his 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 — and there's not much variety within the music itself. Most songs on Illinois and The Avalanche, this week's outtakes and demos collection assembled from the same sessions, all bear strikingly similar arrangements, all assembled from Stevens' by now familiar trick bag: wispy choruses, tempo changes, whistling woodwinds, cutesy harmonies. It's music that gives the impression of being sophisticated and complex, that never comes close to the sophistication of Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, Jimmy Webb, or what Illinois most closely resembles, Brian Wilson in his SMiLE guise.

 

 

The orchestrations and compositions on SMiLE are purposeful — on Illinois, they're clever-clever and showy, as the ornamentation of the production is there for its own sake, never there to illuminate or enhance Sufjan's musical or lyrical motifs. Because, apart from the conceit of writing songs about a particular state, there isn't much connection to the sound or feel of the state in question. Stevens never taps into the musical history of a state — never touching Chicago blues or jazz, or Michigan soul or rock. He simply uses the concept of songs about a state as a vehicle to deliver his baroque folk-pop. And since that baroque folk-pop isn't all that distinctive on its own merits — it certainly doesn't have the complexity or range of Sean O'Hagan's or Jim O'Rourke's work, to name two contemporary touchstones — he needed a hook like the states project to make himself stand out from the pack. And there's also a suspicion that without the 50 states project, Stevens just doesn't have that much to say; certainly the monotonous nature of Seven Swans and the cluttered Avalanche suggest as much. But by wrapping himself into this states project — and even if he abandons it, which I suspect he will, he'll never be separated from it — he has unwittingly emphasized the two traits that make his music no longer quite so charming: his pretension and childish preciousness. These are two qualities that seem to contradict each other, but as Illinois and The Avalanche prove, they feed off each other.

 

His pretension — his convoluted song titles, his cloying song about Saul Bellow, his adolescent fascination with John Wayne Gacy, Jr. — all comes across like a precocious high school student in his senior year, where he's smug enough to want to prove that he's smarter than the rest of the school. 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.

Of course, that's all according to my own ears, and there are plenty of people who disagree with me, whether they're other music scribes or trusted friends and colleagues. But, for me, this week's release of The Avalanche only offers further proof that Sufjan Stevens has been wildly overpraised for music that has deliberately limited appeal.

From his stupid name onwards it's a sea of tears.Music for soft lads.

Enjoy Your Rabbit was an awesome CD. Never heard his normal stuff.

His name is Islamic in origin....more Muslim hating from the SY forum?

I like Sufjan...I don't think he's pretentious or mediocre at all. He's a devout Christian man, which is always good when it's sincere and can show up in the music without being cliche...I don't think many people "get" that Sufjan is actually being sincere. I don't see the validity of the accusation that he is "saccharine" either. The songs make me feel genuinely. And lots of great things are soft...pillows, boobies, lads, etc.

Disliking a name now consists of being offensive to an entire religious faith?I don't think so.

"Sufjan" has been representative of the Christian faith since Christ's conception. I'm pretty sure Jesus even personally "gave props" to it.

Not a fan.

But I remember when folks (lots of people on this board) were going on and on about it. I don't even remember what it was I heard...

Coming up with a concept that will keep you making albums to the tune of 50 without having to actually come up with material out of thin air=total copout.
Just sayin'.

I wonder what kind of concept album you can make for Delaware?

Wayne Campbell: Or imagine being whisked away to... Delaware. "Hi, I'm in Delaware."

Ya. Picking a theme is the hardest part about making an album...He basically does nothing now, with that out of the way...

i like how he is making an album for each state in america, thats cute, but his music is very disposible!

sorry if im acting strange at all im very drunk right now........

What did you drink?

some beck's and some dark rum and coke, mmmmmmmmmmmm, yummy now im drunk and listening to Todd Rundren VERY LOUD

I shall be drunk later tonight.

good for you!!!, its already 20 past 11 here, im going to listen to the grateful dead and go to bed now.

nighty nighty people.

Wow. I didn't realize Sufjan had been around that long! Good to know that Jesus likes the music.

I think it's brilliant. It's like he's capturing the spirit of Walt Whitman.

Oh I see what he's doing.....I didn't know what you guys were talking about. Hasn't Ken Burns been working on a documentary about each state for years? When did this Sufjan guy come up with the idea?

Michigan came out in 2003, so Sufjan probably came up with the idea in between that album and making Illinois. I don't know when exactly. I think it's a great idea even if it never happens with all 50. The albums come with neat artwork and a little map...He's quite prolific, too....There are now two Illinois albums, and there was Seven Swans in between Michigan and Illinois (so it's not like he copped out, per the comment above--he's still writing non-state-related songs).

1982. He wasted no time.

Wow, so he came up with the idea when he was 7.

Yep. Actually, one of the reasons I like Enjoy Your Rabbit is because he's 12 years older than me and thus has the same zodiac thing, and that's what it's dedicated to. So he does have other themes.

Might just be my favorite year:p

Sufjan is good. Makes me feel like a pansy listening to it.

i'd like his music if he just didn't seem so damn pretentious.

Why does he seem pretentious? I like that cute little robin picture in the cover art for Michigan. It's so cute!

i don't know. he rubs me the wrong way. (oh god, insert rim-shot here.)

HE IS A PRETENTIOUS CUNT. I don't mind. My friend saw him and said he was the biggest dick he'd ever seen play. Sufjan just seems so... Stuck-up.

I guess I'll find out. Megan Slaboda is not pretentious at all and I loved her vocals on the Sufjan records. Did you get to visit with her or any of the other members of Danielson?

No. We left right after the show. They didn't seem pretentious though.

I love Sufjan, but I do think that he got a little pretentious after the success of Illinois because he's just been doing a bunch of concert hall performances since then, and maybe a festival here and there.

Yeah--the concert that I am going to be seeing is in an historic theater...but it's not as expensive as the last Belle and Sebastian tour was (which I skipped--I saw them on the Storytelling tour though).