St. Vincent's Daddy Issues
Why Annie Clark's failures leading up to and including Daddy's Home sting so bad.
by Rose
I loved St. Vincent’s work at some point. I have to preface this piece with my own qualifiers because I know that criticizing her at this place in her career is inevitably going to get some complaints from the stans or whoever the hell is still bothering to defend her nonsense, so naturally I have to explain why I care so much about this artist who is very clearly on a nasty creative backslide. I’ve enjoyed her music greatly for the last several years, finding some of her writing a great place of comfort for myself in the process of my own coming out, which only makes some of her behavior in this moment a bit more alarming to me, considering the mediocre art it’s in service of.
Looking back on the last few years of Annie Clark’s output, it’s not a complete disaster, but there are still significant signs of artistic decline. Masseduction, while not a complete failure of a record, is definitely her worst work up to that point, being bolstered mostly by a handful of very solid songs (“Sugarboy”, “Hang On Me”, “Smoking Section”). From there, her following career moves read as someone who clearly doesn’t have much inspiration left for new work, going on to revise her album and the songs within it not once but TWICE, through both her own slow piano rework MassEducation (what the hell does that title even mean?) and Nina Kraviz’s remix record. To date, there are at least six different versions of Masseduction’s lead single “New York”, wholly unnecessary for even a great song but absolutely laughable for a song as middling as that one. Beyond that, her only efforts in the meantime between albums seems to be a bizarre ego trip collaboration with Carrie Brownstein....and The Center Won’t Hold. (Perhaps being partially responsible for Sleater-Kinney losing one of its members isn’t that great on your resume!) Either way, it’s been a very dire 5 years for Annie Clark, but surely she could put that all behind her, make a solid record with a normal press rollout, and just call it a day here.
Of course she didn’t. Daddy’s Home is a dreadfully dull experience made only more embarrassing by her seemingly perpetual need to accompany her albums with public shit stirring for no good reason. I’ll start with the music itself, probably the most confusing angle of this to discuss. Even when Annie Clark wasn’t necessarily operating at her best level previously, she still managed to carve out an avenue for her own sound that felt unique to her as an artist. As painfully obvious as the lyrics to something like “Pills” were, it was a song that I wouldn’t mistake for anyone other than St. Vincent musically.
To counter that, the songs on Daddy’s Home feel practically anonymous in their attempts to synthesize the retro aesthetic they aim for. Annie Clark’s “sound of the 70s” mostly ends up feeling like the halfway point between “listened to Can’t Buy a Thrill once” and the flanged-up effect soup of modern alternative rock inspired by similar obsessives of vintage sounds, like Kevin Parker. (A producer similarly too buried in this devotion to period accuracy to just write a decent song!) The music of Daddy’s Home feels entirely uncalculated, merely aiming to suit a “vibe” rather than focusing on tight songwriting, a problem only made worse by the album’s alarming insistence on keeping things at a near anemic pace, only broken up by a few faster tracks that could be easily plucked for single material.
Similarly, for a record whose listed influences seem to go for a wider range of the era, the music feels so limited in scope and just generally unexciting as a whole. When it comes together as a complete record, it’s all a blur other than “Pay Your Way In Pain”, a veritable La Brea tar pit of bad ideas that I have ranted about ad nauseum in our podcast chat and our Patreon chat (Just $1/month for you to join!). The only other thing I have to note about the album music-wise: what is with all the electric sitar all over this thing? It’s such a notably distracting element in the mix and it’s on nearly eighty percent of the album, a bizarre decision that I have no idea how to account for, as with seemingly everything else here. It all amounts to a big formless nothing, which is certainly less offensive than the alternative.
The place where my discussion really requires me to get into the weeds, however, is with Annie Clark’s own press discussion of lyrics and the content of the record. I’m only going to touch briefly on the most notable issue here, that of prison abolition and Clark’s seeming unwillingness to discuss it directly in any of her interviews, because I personally feel that this piece from Samantha Grasso on Discourse Blog discusses it a lot better than I myself could.
In the same realm of bizarre and problematic issues with this record, it’s also worth talking about Annie Clark’s treatment of the persona of Candy Darling, an issue that personally irks me just as much as her clear lack of willingness to engage with the issue of incarceration on an album that’s supposedly so deeply tied to it. On the record’s cover and in much of the promotional material, Clark has opted to dress up in a look incredibly similar to Darling’s own, as well as repeatedly cite her as an inspiration for the record’s aesthetic and style, going as far as writing a song for her as the album closer. I don’t think I need to tell you how inherently weird and outright gross it is for a cis woman to be explicitly trying to present like a trans woman, but to also model her vocal style in such a way that reporters such as Emma Madden thought it was a conscious choice is perhaps several bridges too far.
This is only more problematic in the light of her strange co-signing of noted shitbag Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes monologue, which featured very flagrant transphobia (I know “Ricky Gervais being transphobic” is not a surprising thing but nevertheless.) and was generally just poking into dogwhistles for dogwhistling’s sake. It’s one thing to engage in such openly extractive behavior and reduce the persona of a trans woman to that of simply an icon for era-appropriate “sleaze”, but to also be praising people who act openly against transness is its own level of awful. To put it simply, you don’t get to praise us and then turn around and act like we’re disposable too.
The problem at the heart of this is that she’s reduced Candy to merely a hallmark of the thing she’s trying to emulate, rather than a person who had a meaningful and complex life, as with every other 70’s celebrity she feels the need to namedrop along with the most basic information about their life. In that sense, the problems with Daddy’s Home remain rooted in its unwillingness to engage with anything on a deeper level. It is merely a record that’s adjacent to the 70s, written by a woman who’s singing about things adjacent to prison incarceration, taking style adjacent to that of a dead trans woman.
For Annie Clark, it apparently doesn’t need to go deeper than that. She’s at a place in her career where she absolutely is not obligated to do this press anymore, considering her level of popularity, but she instead chooses to “take control” of her own narrative, so these minor disasters are entirely of her own volition. My only question is: Why do any of it? Why bother to throw yourself into a place where you know you aren’t qualified to discuss the things you’re talking about, and embarrass yourself repeatedly with your own shallow aesthetic presentation? I don’t understand the need for any of it, and at this point my only answer for it is simply that she doesn’t realize she’s screwing it up this badly. When you’re at that level of fame, I can only imagine how easy it is to be shielded from any sort of criticism of your presentation, and the way it all seems to be so much easier. At that level of life, you’d probably start idolizing a place where things were more difficult, perhaps not even from a time you lived in, wanting to take some part of that into your own and regain that sense of genuine struggle for your art.. Let’s just say, for example, 1970’s New York. That would probably get you somewhere.