In Defense of Taking Offense
Finding common cause with Billie Eilish, Adam Driver, and Johnny Rotten
Faithful readers around here know that I often use these pages (or pixels, if romance is dead and you must be a stickler for accuracy) to lower our collective temperature, to provide more light than heat, to give neck rubs to our better angels. That is, when I’m not impaling someone, or gutting them for sport, then using their bone splinters for toothpicks. What can I say? We all contain multitudes, and as Oscar Wilde, who seems to have authored every epigram that Mark Twain didn’t, once (allegedly) said, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”
And so, while doing my dutiful Thought-Leader reading rounds earlier this week (which for me, mostly consists of fishing blogs, media gossip sites, and Dodo videos of dogs dropping shoes into bathtubs – the deep stuff), I was offended. Which, let’s be honest, is why we spend so much time on the internet. Yes, it’s an open sewer, an endless parade of human debris. But it’s also a self-esteem enhancer, allowing us to feel morally superior to the people we’re watching or reading about.
While I often like to be offended by celebrities – who tend to be pampered, solipsistic, and entitled – in the interest of maintaining diversity (here at Slack Tide, our diversity is our strength), I chose to be offended on behalf of them. And not just on behalf of any celebrity. But on behalf of the singer Billie Eilish, whose music I generally loathe, even though critics and Grammy-bestowers seem to regard her as the second coming of Christ, if Christ looked like a 12-year-old green-haired skate rat who sang in cloying mumblecore.
I regularly inflict my musical taste on readers around these parts, as those of you who have sat through several hundred of my Bonus Track videos can testify. And I think my taste is pretty good, but then, I would. Whenever we have bad taste, we are none the wiser. Having bad taste is a bit like walking around with your fly down or a booger on the end of your nose. The person who does so is always the last to know.
I won’t bother critiquing Billie Eilish’s music, as I don’t have enough exposure to it to be authoritative, since every time I hear her punishing electro-drone, I rush to change the station. I would rather listen to the sound of puppies drowning – and I think you know from my heartfelt Dodo hyperlink above how much I love canine companions – than to hear even the introductory bars of her overplayed, omnipresent hit, “Bad Guy.” Her emo whisper gives me the creeps. Her uninspired non-hooks often sound to me like they were written in the shower five minutes before she suited up in baggy sweats to go accept yet another Grammy for mediocre songwriting. And she seems uncomfortably close to her brother, Finneas, who co-writes and produces her offerings. Here they are on a flying bed together, singing “I Love You.” I have a sister, too. We’re pretty close. But we usually just give each other Happy Siblings Day cards, exchange obligatory hugs, and leave it at that.
Yet I’m not here to rake Billie Eilish, I’m here to defend her. (Fooled you, didn’t I?)