Art isn’t a competition, but one arises nevertheless when two fans on opposite sides of the aisle let loose with the world’s evergreen battle cry: My shit is better than your shit. Music, especially, is filled with warring fanbases trying to assert supremacy. Did anyone really love the Beatles if they didn’t insist, at one point, that they were definitely better than the Rolling Stones? The same goes for Tupac and Biggie, Oasis and Blur, Pavement and the Smashing Pumpkins, and so forth.
It’s always a little silly, this competition: No one can scientifically prove that “Gold Soundz” goes harder than “1979,” and any reasonable person would admit the difference comes down to our individual biases. If you’re the type to sit around and shoot the shit about pop culture, thinking about the those biases is where the fun starts. That's the subject of Steven Hyden's new book, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, which traces those biases through 16 music rivalries. When Hyden (formerly of Grantland, The A.V. Club, and yes, Pitchfork) first thought about writing about music rivalries, he knew he didn’t just want to write about music. Starting with the Beatles vs. Stones or Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift was a way to discuss everything, not just whose shit is better.
“Artists often take on characteristics of larger ideas, like how the Cold War was a way for the U.S. and USSR to have a war without actually shooting each other,” he says, over the phone. “Rivalries are a way for people to have arguments about bigger ideas in a fairly harmless form.” Hyden is an effortless writer, and he draws clever connections between artists and cultural phenomena spanning decades. Nirvana and Pearl Jam isn’t just about Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, for example; it’s about Chris Christie. Neil Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd started a North vs. South conversation that can be read in 2014’s #CancelColbert movement, the White Stripes and Black Keys have just as much to do with male friendship as they do revivalist two-piece blues-rock, and Billy Corgan acted a lot more like Richard Nixon than any Siamese Dream fan would think at first listen.
There’s a lot going on, but the read is illuminating and often hilarious. (Nor does he lapse into the modern, web 3.0 trap of glibly suggesting that this is like that—the web is organically woven, and the bar-room tone is just right.) The book’s breezy style pairs well with the intrinsically low stakes: Hyden is wise enough to know that declaring a winner is pointless (and so the book never does), but smart enough to discuss everything that might come with “winning.” In that regard, it doesn’t matter if he never definitively comes down for one side, because exploring the hypothetical is fun enough.
Pitchfork: What was the first rivalry that you had to include?
Steven Hyden: The first thing I wrote was the White Stripes/Black Keys chapter. You know, it's just sort of funny that the two most famous two-person blues-rock bands ended up in this pissing match in the media. It's inevitable that that happened, in a way. But as I started thinking about it, it really became a way for me to talk about friendship. To me, the dynamic between Jack White and Dan Auerbach just reminded me of the dynamic between a lot of men—when they are trying to relate to each other, and they should be able to relate to each other, and they can't, it turns into this competition. Even if you don't care about the White Stripes and the Black Keys, you can still read this and relate to this thing that a lot of men can relate to, which is the weirdness of talking to other men. That was the first one I had to write about, but certainly there are other rivalries that I had to put in the book, like the Beatles and Stones, and Tupac and Biggie. With those, I was a little reluctant to write about them, because they had been so discussed in so many different places that I wasn't sure if I could come up with anything. But at the same time, when you're writing a rivalries book, if you don't talk about those two rivalries in particular, people are going to throw their book in the garbage immediately.
The Tupac/Biggie chapter is interesting, because you avoid drawing some greater cultural lesson from it. It concludes on a more human note of, “This is a tragic death that didn’t need to happen.”
With those guys, it's the same thing that's happened with Kurt Cobain, where everything that they do in their careers now is viewed as a prelude to their death. When we talk about Kurt Cobain, it's like all the music is just as a precursor to his suicide. It's especially true of that "Unplugged" special; you can't hear that now without thinking about how he died. With Biggie and Tupac, I think the same thing is true. With their music, it seems like it's framed through the prism of how they died, which is unfortunate. I think that probably happens with every iconic musician who died young. But if you can remove that filter and just imagine how Biggie and Tupac’s records would sound like now if they hadn't died, I think the messianic aspects that people project wouldn't necessarily be there. That's always hard to figure out: Does that make the music more resonant because of the backstory? Or does it take something away?
I always wished I could listen to Nirvana without the baggage of Kurt Cobain's death. Nevermind is a really fun record. But there's this sort of gloomy thing that's attached to it now that you can't really shake off, which is too bad. WhenMontage of Heck came out, I just remember thinking, "I wish I could listen to Nevermind as the record that some people didn't think was as good as Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque," you know what I mean? [Ed. note: Bandwagonesque memorably beat out Nevermind on Spin’s 1991 year-end list.]
But, you know, the narrative of records—that becomes overwhelming even for new records. The reaction to Beyoncé's Lemonade—do people really listen to that as a record? Or is the ginormousness of what Beyoncé is—does that just overwhelm everything that she puts out now? The narrative that gets patched in records—I don't know if that's stronger now than it was before the internet. That's always hard to judge. But with the sheer quantity of media that exists, it really is overwhelming. With the cult of personality that exists around huge pop stars right now, it just creates this centripetal force of discussion that just sucks people in. I just don't know if it's even possible to hear what that record sounds like now. Maybe that record should be reviewed ten years from now by a person who wasn't reading any media at this moment. Maybe they can more accurately assess it than we're capable of in the present time.
It doesn’t strike me as an exclusively modern phenomenon: Maybe diehard Beyoncé fans getting mad over Rita Ora aren’t so different from diehard Oasis fans getting mad over Blur.
No, probably not. The commonality there is identity, and how people use pop culture to define themselves. When I was 16, what drew me to Oasis is that they represented an ideal of the kind of music I really like: a loud, ballsy, kind of dumb but smart about being dumb rock band. And Blur offered a really convenient alternative to that, where they were just an arty, overtly intelligent, poppy band. The Oasis/Blur rivalry was trumped up in a lot of ways, but aesthetically those bands do exist on sort of a binary continuum. There's lots of ways in which they're sort of opposites. For a kid like me who loved music and wanted to define himself through music, it was very convenient to do that. When people are watching the Super Bowl and they see Beyoncé and Coldplay on the same stage, I wonder if that is a similar thing where they're like, "Beyoncé represents this thing in my mind, and Coldplay represents this thing in my mind, and they seem to be opposites, and I love this thing and I hate this thing, and I'm going to express this in the most hyperbolic way possible, because it's important, because I feel like I'm saying something about myself when I do this."
I'm not making a new observation here. It's pretty common for people when they're young to use music as a vehicle for self-definition: I'm a punk or I'm a metalhead or I'm really into hip-hop. You're going to love those records and you're going to dress a certain way and you're going to talk a certain way. And it is like putting on a costume in a way. It's sort of like an instant personality that you can put on. In the internet age, it's so easy to curate your personality online, and the way you do that is by talking about music or movies or television shows. That's a way to curate how you're perceived—by the TV shows you talk about or the movies or the music. People may not be conscious of that, but they are conscious too, at the same time. If you're the sort of person who really cares about this stuff, in a way, I think that does carry forward to adulthood and beyond.
Were there rivalries you left out?
If I had written my book a little later, I would have included Drake and Meek Mill, because I think that was a really interesting altercation. What that was about for me was Drake's celebrity totally overwhelming Meek Mill’s pleas to authenticity. In another era, Meek Mill accusing Drake of not writing his own songs would have been a much more powerful accusation. It would have been much more devastating for Drake. But we live in an age where celebrity is the new authenticity, and if you're famous enough, that justifies your place in the culture. This idea that maybe you're not famous but you're still considered important, that seems to be over. The only artists who critics take seriously and will discuss in depth are artists who are also hugely famous and successful.
As to whether Drake does write his own songs or uses ghostwriters, that still is unresolved as far as I know. It seems like it's pretty much accepted that he does, it's just not treated like a big deal. I'm not saying it's a big deal myself, but it's really interesting how that issue was totally set aside for the most part. It just became about Drake—the power of his celebrity, and how he could weaponize that and totally blow away someone who was lesser known than him. With Drake, that’s something that seems to be a recurring theme because people talk about him—let's see, what's a nice way of putting this—borrowing from lesser known rappers, basically, and incorporating their music and their bits into hits. He's done that repeatedly in his career, and gets away with it because he's this famous guy. We forgive it because, well, we love Drake.
Aside from the opening chapter, which is about giving Blur’s music a fair shot, did you re-evaluate any of the artists while writing the book?
When I was writing the Miley Cyrus/Sinéad O'Connor chapter, my respect for Sinéad O'Connor deepened a lot, just from reading about her and listening to her music. She writes these open letters to Miley Cyrus in the wake of the 2013 VMAs, and the tone initially was almost maternal: “You should watch out for yourself. You're being exploited by the music industry." Really, the intent of her letters, a lot of it seems pretty hard to argue with. The music industry is sleazy. The music industry does exploit young women. It doesn't seem like that's terrible to hear from someone who’s been through it the way Sinéad O'Connor has. To do it in an open letter is maybe a shitty thing to do, because open letters in general are just the most condescending form of writing that exists—this idea that you're going to give advice to someone that you don't know and also do it in public. But the content of the letter seemed pretty valid. Then, Sinéad gets mocked for this, and her subsequent letters just get more and more unhinged.
Looking at what she went through with the "Saturday Night Live" incident—tearing up the picture of the Pope in 1992— that just seems like like one of the most powerful musical performances I've ever seen on TV. The intensity, and the lack of irony—this is as direct and brutal of a protest as you can get. It's incredible to see. It just seems so unlike musical performances that you see now, which are set up for the way that people consume media, through multiple screens, and multiple levels of appreciation and irony. I really came to respect her and to empathize with her as I was writing the chapter.
Writing the Clapton/Hendrix chapter, there was a lot of discovery—more so about myself, being introspective and realizing that I'm not an Eric Clapton fan, but that I relate to his path in life. That process of how in order to survive in life, you have to make yourself lame—and how that's sort of an inevitable part of getting older, because if you don't do that, then you end up dying. That was kind of a heavy thing for me to write, and that's probably my favorite chapter of the book. But it's weird to be like, oh yeah, Eric Clapton, I kind of relate to this guy.
One of the things that struck me is that even though the book is fundamentally about rivalries and the passion that attracts people to music, the tone is pretty balanced. Have you transitioned from being the inflamed, passionate listener to being older but still engaged?
When I was younger, it was very much about finding a side and lashing out against the other side, whatever that might be. It was really important for me to argue what I felt was right and also go against the people that I felt were wrong. Now that I'm older, I'm much more interested in finding the connections between groups that don't seem like they should be connected. I think that's an evolution that happens in the book, too. The first essay is on Oasis and Blur because that was a big rivalry for me when I was a kid, and that's the only chapter where I really pick one side. For the most part, I did not want to take sides in the book. I didn't want to write a book where I decide that Nirvana is better than Pearl Jam, or Madonna is better than Cyndi Lauper, or whatever. It's much more interesting for me to explore the dynamics between the artists in question and talk about why there's a rivalry, and ultimately find what connects them.
I think this is a pretty common trajectory for a lot of people. When you're young, you're much more into proving yourself. Then maybe you get a little bit older and you don't really want to argue about why a band sucks or why they're great. I'd much rather talk to someone who I could just enjoy music with. When you're younger, you're trying to figure out who you are. You do that often by defining yourself against people that you feel like you're not. People do that with politics, they do that with culture, all the way down the line. And maybe that's an important thing for people to go through. But I think when you get past that, you start to feel like, I want to find connection, I want to find a community—even if it's with people who aren't exactly like me, or aren't anything like me. Maybe those are the people I want to be around the most. At that point you want to get rid of a line in the sand and kind of bring it all together.
This is getting a little "We Are The World" here at the end, but fittingly, this is also the arc of the book: Getting from a place of defining yourself against other people to empathizing with other people, especially people who aren't like you.