I see what you're saying but I really don't hear passive aggression; I feel like she's being pretty healthily frank about simply not wanting to follow the band down this new path they're on. She says it in a nice way, but there's not a lot of room for misinterpretation.LoathedVermin72 wrote:Also, is it just me or does her statement sound a little passive aggressive? It seems like she’s barely veiling contempt for their new direction.
What's most interesting to me is her indication that the whole St. Vincent thing is indeed a "direction," and not a one-off fluke of a project (though I suppose it could be a one-off and she just hates it so much that she can't stand to ride it out) -- in any case, a conscious effort to move not only toward a new thing, but specifically away from an old thing. That's got to be a tough pill to swallow. As a listener, the most jarring thing about this transformation isn't so much the nature of the transformation itself (virtually all the bands I really love and respect have changed course at one time or another, and at this point I'm pretty used to "just add synth" as the default recipe for rock bands trying to "evolve" their sound), it's more that they've gone so long without changing at all that the whole thing ends up feeling like a weird, artsy midlife crisis -- which isn't an attempt to psychoanalyze them, more just an observation that such a change is abrupt and long without precedent. Of course, this may be all the more reason to cheer them on, but it also may be all the more reason to recoil in embarrassment. It's like if Fugazi suddenly made a synth-heavy, deliberately image-driven record, or Shellac -- there's nothing wrong with that approach on principle, and there's always virtue in trying new things, but these are bands who've been who they are and only who they are for so long that it's hard to see the artifice they're suddenly trying to sell as any kind of believable extension of that.
If there's any element of that to what drove Janet to leave the band, she has my sympathy. Watching people you've known and loved for a long time change in ways you don't relate to is a very unique, specific kind of sad.
