Song of the Day 8/11: Bleachers, “Stop Making It Hurt”
I heard this song on the radio the other day and, being a sucker for major-key pop song with a good hook, I looked up who did it, because I had never heard of Bleachers. Turns out the guy, real name Jack Antonoff, was the guitarist for Fun, which had a big hit in 2012 with “We Are Young.” Bleachers is his solo project, and he’s also busy as a producer and collaborator with some of the most popular pop acts in the world — people like Taylor Swift, Lorde, Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent.
What I also learned was that the Kool Kid Kritics diss Antonoff’s solo work. I’m not surprised they would dislike a catchy song with a retro feel — not after how they sniffed at “Uptown Funk” despite it being the only popular hit of the past 10 years that was funky enough to dance to. Music critics don’t do much dancing.
In addition to making hit records on purpose, he also gets mocked for idolizing Bruce Springsteen, to the point where he got Springsteen himself to join him on a tune and video called “Chinatown” last year. Like “Stop Making It Hurt,” the song is included on the new Bleachers LP, “Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night,” and it’s a dead ringer for one of late-era Springsteen’s slow, brooding ballads.
Antonoff is hardly the first New Jersey kid to emulate The Boss. So what’s the problem? Here, I’ll let the guy from Pitchfork have his say:
Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night… sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops. Everything feels a little too sweaty and effortful, and the yelpy millennial-pop singles gobble up the scenery behind more nuanced and emotionally textured album cuts.
Come the fuck on. You’re slagging the guy for being versatile, and because the songs are not sequenced to your liking.
After several days of listening to lots of his stuff, there’s one charge I agree with: Nothing Antonoff does sounds new; he’s not an innovator but rather an encyclopedia of popular music, donning sounds from genres and eras like a chameleon. That pretty much describes Beck, too, but the critics are fine with him, despite (or because of) his relative lack of sales success.
Most of Antonoff’s stuff is pleasant enough pop that I can take or leave. But I can’t resist a good pop hook.
