[Rob Instigator]

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.