Mark Kozelek needed the listening world to understand that he was above its new digital fray, no matter how much he was being lambasted or lauded online for his onstage attitude.
"I don’t have Twitter or Facebook," he began the last paragraph of a letter to the music news outlets that had covered his recent onstage tantrums and to the source of one such paroxysm, the rock band the War on Drugs. "I make albums."
In September, Kozelek had gone rogue, turning his long-gruff stage banter into the stuff of hall-of-fame (or shame, depending on your perspective) trolls. In Raleigh, North Carolina, in a sweaty rock club on a Friday night, he entered a back-and-forth argument with a cadre of noisy fans. He called them "fucking hillbillies," and they told him to go fuck his sad self. In Ottawa, less than 10 days later at another music festival, he blasted the War on Drugs, interchangeably referring to them as John Cougar Mellencamp and "beer commercial lead-guitar shit." By way of one song’s introduction, he suggested that the Philadelphia fellows might even give him a blowjob.
But Kozelek, despite his self-proclamation as an online troglodyte, didn’t leave this stuff behind like the night’s setlist. Instead, he drug his squabbles onto his website at least three distinctly marketable times, generating attention by producing divisive "content." He first swiped an idea from Raleigh graphic designer Skillet Gilmore to print a T-shirt that read "All you fuckin’ hillbillies shut the fuck up," which he’d said onstage. He sold his own version. In early October, he posted the brooding song "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock" to the same site, calling a female reporter a "spoiled bitch rich-kid blogger brat" and repeating the title’s fellatio plea 22 times. And when the War on Drugs finally responded a month later, Kozelek upped yet another song, "Adam Granofsky Blues". He dissected and joked everything Granofsky had said about him over a walking-blues guitar line, becoming the bully who’s decided to poke fun at his enemy rather than actually put up metaphorical fists. Kozelek sounded either like he’d finally gone mad or he’d gotten incredibly smart when it came to stoking online fires, to fueling a month-long feud that should have never really existed.
Kozelek became his own clickbait buffet.
But the effect of Kozelek’s chicanery wasn’t to keep me intrigued or to make me wonder what the hard-browed curmudgeon with the soft voice might do next. Instead, it made me not want to hear him at all, though both Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon had long been favorites and he’d crafted one of the year’s most cutting and captivating records, Benji. In the 10 months that had passed between my first encounter with Benji’s poignant tunes and the moment that Kozelek turned himself into a virus, I’d listened to the album a few dozen times. Since, though, I’ve only heard it in passing. I’ve been too repulsed by the dude’s empty provocation to care about how much he loves his mom, how much he pities a man named Jim Wise or how much Postal Service shows make him feel like the middle-aged mope he has indeed become. I found it hard to care about the hypersensitivity of someone who used someone else’s feelings as his own bully pulpit.
Kozelek wasn’t the only one whose online presence pushed me away from their music, an increasingly frequent and modern syndrome. It used to be so easy to separate an artist from their personality, to buy their records or books or see their photographs or movies and end the one-way relationship there. You could be a fan without being a follower, knowing the work more than the person who made it. The gap between artist and audience allowed a measure of objectivity, freeing you from the prejudice of their arrogance or attitude or from knowing everything about them. You could take the art as it came.
But social media—or in Kozelek’s case, the ability to turn what would be a series of tweets or inside jokes with friends into a song that’s posted online for all the world to hear—has made such division almost untenable. It’s attached yards of string to works of art. Liking someone’s work now means deciding if you like them as a person, too, because they’re sharing so much of their lives and feelings in a public setting. The latter condition isn’t necessary in order to hold fast to the former, but it can certainly make it harder. (I am not immune to this, I should say, having recently lost a longtime reader who said "You are better than this" after I ribbed UNC basketball coach Roy Williams. We’ve since reconciled.)
At least for me, then, 2014 felt like the year of The Great Unfollow, where I chose to opt out of reading or hearing many artists’ spontaneous social media revelations so that I didn’t end up hating them. I treasured the gap and the wonder it allowed.
Indeed, El-P made one of the year’s best records with Killer Mike. Their excoriation of both cop and corporate duplicitousness felt urgent and necessary in a year of cops killing the unarmed and businesses continuing to find sanctuary from more-than-willing governments. But then you followed El-P on Twitter, perhaps, and the world seemed to revolve not around those issues but around his need to promote his material and his positions and to showcase just how good he was at invoking Internet brouhaha. It felt as if every time someone wanted to praise him, they earned a retweet; every detractor, however, got a period in front of their name and an unapologetic blast.
That self-promotional autopilot has become de rigeur for so many artists on Twitter, and annoyingly so; in my Twitter timeline only, I watch How to Dress Well, Hiss Golden Messenger and Stephen O’Malley do it, too, and it makes you wonder if they know how Twitter works. Do preexistent fans really need to serve witness to all of your laurels? But El-P evolved into a special case during the last two months. As with Kozelek, it became hard to reconcile the ferocious, focused rapper with the glad-handing and hyper-reactive online presence. I had to unfollow the latter, for fear of the former falling out of my own favor.
And then there was Diplo, whose online obnoxiousness climbed to unexpected new heights when he lobbied for a crowdfunding campaign to "get taylor swift a booty." (Lorde, mind you, won this battle quickly and decisively.) Pete Rock, meanwhile, turned allegations of rape and sexual harassment by Bill Cosby from at least 25 different women into a race-baiting conspiracy aimed against a wealthy black man: "Buy dem mafuggas out," Rock concluded. His evidence seemed specious.
Only last week, Philip McSorley, the former Cobalt singer , spiraled into an online rampage, resorting to Facebook to tell the British black metal band Caïna that they "sound like faggots fucking in a rest stop bathroom." (He was fired just last night.) And speaking of homophobic slurs, if you thought about Brand Nubian’s Lord Jamar at all this year, it probably had something to do with him calling Kanye West "#halfafag" on Instagram or rapping that the "pioneer of this queer shit is Kanye West." All of this is like watching someone’s private, poisoned monologue scroll across a public teleprompter, revealing prejudices and predilections that they should be ashamed to have, let alone immortalize for an infinity of strangers.
I’m realizing only in retrospect that this cast of online commenters is full of straight white men, much like myself. It’s as if we’ve now agreed to engage in an open exhibition of very hard chest-pounding and very loud pontification, a demonstrative mating call that urges everyone to take notice of a great mind or warrior at work. For ostensibly cerebral beings, it reveals a pathetically animalistic urge. Thinking a thought, of course, has never meant you need to say it. But if you do, remember there’s an easy enough fix in this online age—except, well, for Kozelek, who can’t be unfollowed because he’s too busy writing songs that sound like Twitter to be on Twitter.