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After the New York Times published a report alleging the long history of emotional abuse, manipulation and harassment of at least seven women by Ryan Adams – including sexually explicit communication with a minor (accusations Adams denied) – a colleague pointed out Adams' words changed when he covers Taylor Swift's "Style" for reinventing his album 1989 in 2015:
"You have that good girl thing, tight ass," he sang, sexualizing Swift's provocation and substituting "ass" for "skirt".
"We should have known," remarked my colleague.
When I read my colleague's message, I stopped. I reviewed Adams' 1989 – why did not I remember these words?
In 2015, less than a year after supposedly sending him to a 16-year-old girl with whom he had had sex, Adams would have written, "If people knew that they would say, I would say I'm like R Kelley [sic] lol "- I gave Adams the version of 1989 a 3.5 star review for Rolling stone.
Not only did I review the album, but I focused on the lyrical changes brought by Adams to this song, "Style." Only, I had not heard the declared sexualization of Adams; rather I had heard, but it was not saved enough to remember a few years later.
Instead, I focused on his change in Swift's description of a "James Dean dream look" and a reference to the Sonic Youth album. Dream Nation.
Namedropping a Sonic Youth album in the cover of a Taylor Swift song was a catnip for white male music critics. In my article, I described Adams' "style" as a "flirtfest".
Being a fan of Adams has always involved a certain degree of cognitive dissonance: his reckless bad boy character had long been part of his mythology and rumors about his dubious character had been circulating.
In the days since the New York Times published his report on Adams, the question remains: how can we dismantle the structures that have allowed Adams to get his transgressions out of the real world as a fictional art for so long?
If I could have ignored this line in "Style", what else could I have ignored?
A bit like Louis CKR. Kelly and Woody Allen, it is now easy to see how Adams used his art as a kind of hub for power abuse and transgressions in his personal life. The singer's finely tuned performance on emotional need was an integral part of the pattern of manipulation and alleged emotional abuse that he had been doing for most of his adult life. "A more insidious strain of destructive and misogynistic masculinity, not hiding their emotions but using them as weapons of domination and control," said Anna Leszkiewicz last week in her incisive essay. "This masculinity is a narcissism disguised as vulnerability and emotional honesty."
For years, fans and critics have bought the trap wholesale, praising Adams' writing for his emotional intensity and dark vulnerability. "Hedonism is a demonstration of authenticity," writes Amanda Petrusich, who describes the type of mythology of music journalism that has long raised a character like Adams. "His language is always based on vaguely mystical ideas about artistic creation as a kind of bleeding." In a review of his 2017 album Prisoner, I just did, describing Adams as a "Master chronicler of infinite forms and colors of romantic pain."
In his music, Adams often weapon this opening and even his vulnerability as a control instrument. "Nobody Girl", beyond 2001 Gold, is an almost boastful representation of gas lighting, the narrator spending a good part of the song trying to convince a woman to doubt her difficult decision to leave.
"Say you follow your heart / Well, darling, you're just losing yourself," sings Adams, "You could follow your instinct / But how much would it cost?" In the chorus, Adams makes her helpless while offering her version of an aggression slogan: "They do not know you anyway."
"You are nobody, girl. "You're nobody, man," he told him before stripping the woman of her identity: "You are a person girl. "
Adams "is obsessed with control," according to Abbey Simmons, tour manager. wrote last week on TwitterIn an illustrative anecdote, she related about an occasion where the singer had criticized him for what he perceived (wrongly) as a minor offense in the workplace. "These are different sides of the same toxic piece."
Throughout his career, the singer has gained a reputation for unregulated behavior: storming behind the scenes if a member of the public shouted something that did not like him; Block on Twitter anyone who has made a joke about the singer or who has said something nice; Scathing about the critics who reviewed his work negatively.
In Adams' songs – many of which are structured as orders, he establishes control by projecting his needs and vulnerability on his subjects: "Come and get me", "Call me on your way home"; Stay with me; "" Come to the house; "" Save me; "" If you like it, do not let me go; "" Will make me love myself; "Excuse me while I break my heart tonight. "
To reconsider Adams' music at this time is to recognize the fundamental mistake of treating his songs as purely fictitious or distinct from his wrongdoings. Adams' genius had always seemed that he had managed, for over 20 years, to imagine and create seemingly endless scenarios and premises for his raw emotional self-exposure. To think that his recklessness served as a direct and literal fuel to his songs not only gives the impression that his work is much less impressive, he also stains it with depravity and darkness, calling into question the number of victims in the world real by supporting the wicked in his first-person accounts of contempt and abuse.
Last week, the singer of New Pornographers, A.C. Newman, explained how he ended up becoming a "character" in Adams. Gold "Harder Now That's Its's," after telling the singer-songwriter to stop mistreating Adams' ex-girlfriend. "When I threw that drink in this guy's face / it was just to make you shit," Adams sang in 2001.
"I did not like it, I told him not to be a dick" Newman wrote"So he went to buy a drink to throw on me."
A year earlier, on his most praised album, Broken HeartAdams told the first person stories of former scorned lovers who had experienced a mixture of denial and harassment: "But you love me and I love you," he sings. in "Call me on your way home," before threatening his ex with the ultimate consequence of his decision to leave: "I just want to die without you."
the New York Times reported last week that when Adams's ex-fiancée, Megan Butterworth, had left the singer last year, he would have threatened her with death by suicide. According to TimeHe also threatened suicide several times during his brief relationship with singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, who did not respond promptly to his communications.
In 2014, two years before Mandy Moore's divorce, Adams published "I Just Might," leaving the threatening subtext of the unspoken song: "Do not want to lose control," he sang. "Baby, I could just."
I've always been drawn to songs that clearly expressed such a lowering – "Dear Chicago," "Hard to fall," "Come Pick Me Up" – songs that dress up somehow abject pity so absolute that they could look like balms, a way to validate any trace of those feelings that I could have myself. In 2011, in a review of a Adams concert, I described his songs as a "type of solipsism that was not a choice. an artist.
Adams' music rarely addressed an occasional fandom: "I really used a lot of his music to forge my understanding of love and heartache," a friend told me recently. "It's so scary to realize now that the motivation behind so many songs, or at least the understanding of the emotional responsibility that has led to these songs, is so horrible."
On another song of 2014, "Am I Safe", he spends a whole chorus asking the same question: "Am I safe?", Repeating the words constantly.
Adams has spent his entire musical career playing his emotional instability, asking fans, critics, and admirers for a version of this question: Am I safe?
In so doing, he has convinced many of us, despite decades of myths about his indignity, to be deeply and relentlessly concerned about the answer to this question. So much so that some people have never bothered to ask anyone.
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