The Hype Cycle Comes For Dove Ellis
Also: My top five indie albums of 2006 and a strong debut from my favorite new NYC-sounding rock band in Los Angeles
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You might have noticed my re-entry earlier this week into the irresistible (to me) “state of music criticism” conversation, in which I strike a tentatively hopeful note about the future of the business and the potential financial prospects for yours truly. But let’s, for now, go the other way. What if things go permanently south for the industry (boo!) and your boy here (BOO!!)? What if I am typing these words from the deck of the Titanic? Or, to put it in the parlance of Sam’s Town, what if I am executing music criticism while precariously burning down the highway skyline on the back of a hurricane?
The only thing left to do in this scenario is host a retrospective clip show about the life and death of my profession. A Tribute To Fallen Heroes for the least famous people on the guest list. In this hypothetical, I would start at the end and work my way back, since “the end” is where I came in, like Tony Soprano with the mafia, and it’s what I know firsthand.
In that spirit, I want to talk about the most contentious piece of music criticism from the last 15 years. It was published by Grantland (my old place of work), it was written by Chuck Klosterman (whose new book out this week, the self-explanatory Football, is really good and worth buying), and it was about the indie-pop project Tune-Yards (sometimes styled as tUnE-yArDs, possibly the most irritating application of “creative” capitalization ever, responsible for countless instances of strained pinkies due to awkward over-application of the Caps Lock key).
If you cared at all about such things back then, you already know the story. But for everybody else: Tune-Yards is a duo composed of Merrill Garbus and Nate Brenner. In 2011, they put out their second album, Whokill (styled, again, as w h o k i l l, this time injuring thumbs hammering that space bar). It received great critical acclaim. If I can lazily quote from Pitchfork: The album was widely praised for for the way it “fuses acoustic folk, R&B, funk, Afro-pop, and rock into a bold, uncompromising hybrid all her own.” From that description, you can probably guess that it sounds like the sum total of everything derided as “hipster music” during the first Obama administration.
In early 2012, Whokill topped Pazz & Jop, which used to be (affects old man voice reminiscent of Walter Brennan, a pop-culture reference relevant to virtually no one under the age of 80) the most comprehensive annual poll of music critics determining the consensus “best” music of the year. Whokill was, at the time, the worst-selling album ever to achieve that status. (I’m confident the poll ultimately ended with that album holding the title.) Enter Chuck, who used Tune-Yards and the poll as a vehicle to talk about a larger topic that’s relevant to the point I’ll be arriving at soon.
Here is the most interesting and, not coincidentally, most incendiary paragraph:
The takeaway from all this, I suppose, is that w h o k i l l is a creative record, made by an auteur with (at least a modicum of) irrefutable talent. But the fact that this subjective opinion has now been validated by the only sector of the media that cares about such qualities puts the 33-year-old Garbus in a strange cultural position. It’s possible that she’s an authentic genius, and that w h o k i l l will mark the “breakthrough” beginning of a major career punctuated by intermittent moments of meaningful innovation. She could end up like James Murphy or Cat Power. But it’s just as possible — in fact, more possible — that this will not happen. She will probably just make a bunch more albums of varying quality, none of which will get the collective adoration of w h o k i l l. And then Garbus will end up with this bizarre 40-year-old life, where her singular claim to fame will be future people saying things like, “Hey, remember that one winter when we all thought tUnE-yArDs was supposed to be brilliant? That fucking puppeteer? Were we all high at the same time? What was wrong with us?”
More than anything else about the piece, this caused a huge shitstorm 14 years ago. Reams of thinkpieces were written about it. Scores of angry tweets were angrily tweeted. Chuck Klosterman was condemned far and wide. And if this is the first you’re hearing about this, you might be thinking: Really? Why? The uproar makes little sense when divorced from the time. It’s like seeing black and white footage of Elvis shake his hips on TV in the 1950s, or hearing Lenny Bruce use mildly coarse language from a stand-up routine in the ’60s, and straining to understand what all the contemporaneous outrage was about.
In retrospect, Chuck did two things “wrong,” in terms of the people who were angry at him. The first happened in the third paragraph, when he admitted he “barely listened to Whokill.” The second happened in the second paragraph, when he matter-of-factly asserted that being named album of the year by Pazz & Jop “doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people in the entire country.” Neither statement was untrue. (The first one, in fact, could be described as “too honest.”) But it created a framework that was destined to piss off anyone who had 1) listened to Whokill with extreme attention and 2) was among the (maybe) 10,000 people who care deeply about year-end critics polls. And, unfortunately, every single individual in these categories was already addicted to expressing their indignation about anything and everything online. (If you want to rankle a demo with no blowback, pick on the Amish or Zen Buddhist monks.)
But re-reading the piece in 2026, it’s clearer to me than ever that he wasn’t really interested in writing about Whokill. He was talking instead about the moment when the conversation about a particular work of art stops being about the artist, the artist’s intentions, or the sum total of the aesthetic choices made within, and instead focuses exclusively on the conversation about that work of art. He was making the case that Whokill was no longer a “bold, uncompromising hybrid” of different of music styles, at least as far as most people were concerned. It was now this record that critics really, really loved in the year 2011, and it was going to be heard and judged via that lens, mostly for the worst, for the rest of time.
Which is exactly what happened. Chuck (inadvertently?) proved his point by the reaction he provoked. In the moment, the conversation about Whokill became all about whether you liked or hated Klosterman’s piece. And now, many years later, if people bring up Whokill at all, it’s either an excuse to talk about the preferences of music critics specific to the early 2010s or it’s a callback to that old Grantland column which sparked a weirdly hyperbolic reaction. That is Tune-Yards’ legacy in the popular consciousness — they made that one record remembered for what people thought about what was written about the record that one time.
But this, again, is about more than just Tune-Yards. This sort of thing happens all the time, more now than it did in 2012, when social media was still relatively nascent. I’ll give you an example: Ever since the Golden Globes, when it was affirmed as an awards season juggernaut and presumptive Oscar favorite on its biggest stage yet, One Battle After Another has been subsumed by chatter about whether it “deserves” the attention — on artistic, cultural and political grounds — which has inevitably colored how people watch the movie. In this context, “merely good” suddenly feels like “underwhelming,” and “I didn’t care for it” turns into “this is worst movie I have ever seen.” For reasons that are not entirely their fault, new viewers are judging the veracity of the conversation about One Battle After Another as much as the film itself. (The same just happened to Sinners after it became the most nominated film in history of the Oscars.)
Here’s another example that’s much more obscure, though I don’t think that will be true much longer: The 22-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Dove Ellis and his recently released debut, Blizzard.
If you haven’t felt oppressed by the conversation about Dove Ellis yet, savor that feeling, because I suspect it will end soon.
