The Many Ways To Be Tone-Deaf
I’ve been loath to talk about more contemporary artists on this show. Maybe I want to give their legacy more time to form. Maybe I’m afraid they’ll actually find this podcast and realize they’re the litigious type. Either way, Chainsmokers were further down on my list of potential Skip Button topics.
However, in July, when videos of their not-so-socially-distant concert at The Hamptons went viral, it reminded me just how much we love it when Alex Pall and Drew Taggart settle back into their roles as the irresponsible, dangerous frat bros of EDM-pop. Perhaps these guys were worth a deep dive.
No episode of this show has left me with more songs stuck in my head than this one. Even as I nit-picked and groaned my way through their lazy, women-hating lyrics and lackluster vocals, there was just no denying that they knew how to make a catchy tune. It brought me to a question I’ve been thinking a lot about since I started this show: If an artist is able to reverse-engineer an effective song, is that a cheat, or a talent? The Chainsmokers seem incapable of making music that’s organic and honest, so doesn’t that make it all the more impressive that they’ve nonetheless found a way to create something that resonates with so many people?
Every time I inch towards a No, I think about “Closer”, and how seamlessly they married the ultra-specific (Play that Blink-182 song/That we beat to death in Tucson) with the ultra-banal (We ain’t ever getting older) to create a song so big it seemed to swallow the country whole. I think of how they’ve worked with everyone from Bebe Rexha, to Ty Dolla $ign, to Coldplay, each time putting their collaborator on a pedestal just high enough that you could push their two faces to the back of your mind.
Every time I inch towards a Yes, lyrics like “I’m fucked up, I’m faded/I’m so complicated” and “She wants to break up every night/Then tries to fuck me back to life” remind me what can be so dangerous about their brand of pop alchemy. Emotionally manipulative music can be fun to study until that manipulation extends beyond the music. Saying whatever’s necessary to get the response they want seems to come naturally to The Chainsmokers as men, not just as artists. Maybe that’s why they were able to convince thousands of people to ignore health and safety protocol and pay up to $25,000 to see them in person. Maybe it’s why, during a concert benefiting an organization that provides transitional housing to women facing domestic violence situations, they brought freshman girls on stage to dance with them and gave a shout-out to “all the basic bitches at The Mary Parrish Center”.
You can only autotune so much tone-deafness.
Still, when it came to critiquing their music, I had to remind myself that I’m an outsider to EDM culture. I struggled to name an artist within The Chainsmokers’ genre whose work stood out to me, which meant that maybe I had no right to go after the kind of music they make; “All this music sounds the same” is a sentence usually spoken by someone who isn’t really listening. Maybe I need to do more to embed myself within the world of EDM before casting any aspersions (although speaking with Fader’s Larry Fitzmaurice made me think that The Chainsmokers are a symptom of a greater disease within the world of EDM). If there are artists out there that can connect with people the way The Chainsmokers do and aren’t perpetuating EDM culture’s male toxicity, then maybe these two bros deserve the skip button (he said, voluntarily listening to “Who Do You Love” for the 100th time).
