Musical Irony and Lyrical Sincerity in Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher
The album cover of Phoebe Bridgers’ new album Punisher depicts a subtle yet blunt doubling between herself and a rock formation in the background. Bridgers stands in a familiar position - neck craned up at the stars, leaning back as if to fit as many constellations into her periphery as possible. At first glance, it appears as if the rock is mimicking her, with Bridgers foregrounded clearly (albeit it small and vulnerable) and the rock relegated to the shadowy background. Her placement anthropomorphizes the rock as if it too were craning its head up at the cosmos. But of course, it’s the rock Bridgers is emulating and this whole problem with origins and ends, similarity and difference is exactly what Bridgers is after. It’s why her music is full of divergent doublings - a persistent tension between what we hear musically versus what we hear lyrically.
Reading the lyrics of Phoebe Bridgers without its accompanying music has the same impact that comes with reading any great poet. She plays with perspective, tense, and structure with the same grace you’d see in a Philip Larkin or an Anne Sexton. She’s leagues above fellow lyricists because the paradoxes and self-doubt music is supposed to resolve are left in her songs like the overgrown foliage in an unkempt garden. This garden doesn’t feel domesticated or safe but an invitation to explore and wonder.
Yet Bridgers isn’t a poet - she’s a songwriter - and the songs she writes set up contradictions and ironies not just between the words, but between what’s happening lyrically and musically. In addition to language, the songwriter uses sound to deflate, amplify, nuance, doubt, and complement the words we hear, effectively raising the number of ways we can interpret the lyrics to the power of two. With Punisher we get a strange composite of irony and truth, with words contradicting the music or vice versa. What is sung undermines what we hear and what we hear undermines what is sung. You hear it in the bright guitar chords in a song about disappointment, or the murky background ambience diametrically opposed to words sung with precision and clarity. Listening to Bridgers’ voice feels like she’s in an elliptical orbit around some object just out of reach - steady and secure but distant from what she wants - getting close before slingshotting past her center of gravity in an incessant loop. The casual listener is guaranteed to revel in the honeyed words and sounds, but a careful listen reveals a constant strain belied by the soft clarity of Bridgers’ crystalline singing. There’s always an underside to everything going on with Punisher.
Case in point: the title of her new album refers to an obsessive fan who “punishes” a musician by “hanging out at the merch booth a little too long,” so in awe of their hero they don’t even see the person in front of them. Buttonholing your musical idol in star struck admiration can’t help but feel like a selfish interaction, but the irony is that these stars were once “punishers” themselves: in Bridgers’ case, her obsession with Elliot Smith before his passing. The “punisher” is something of a reminder for the successful musician - a full circle for Bridgers as she approaches Smith’s status as an era-defining musician.
This love of an external thing (the adored musician) means that even the objects of our greatest love and inspiration usually don’t take the thing into consideration. Philosophies like object-oriented ontology (OOO) detail how we project so many presuppositions and expectations onto our environments we don’t even see the thing standing in front of us. For example, OOO recognizes that every object in the universe has its own individual and impossible to understand system, but that isn’t any reason not to appreciate or study how that object exists with its own internal logic. Immersing yourself in the devilish details of any object helps us explore how that thing ticks even if we admit we won’t know how to solve its Gordian knot of total comprehension. By titling her album Punisher, the entire record becomes a reconsideration of things, an establishment of unknowing and a process of listening. This self-criticism is a maturation of her previous record A Stranger in the Alps whose “Motion Sickness” damned an emotionally-abusive Ryan Adams. Now she has the confidence to make her own self-criticisms alongside the critique of others.
The disconnect between sound and words engages with how what we feel is not what is on the outside. Punisher’s principle strategy is teaching listeners how to have more honest relationships with people and things, reconciling the gap between ourselves and the world, be it by a hair’s breadth or a chasm. This is because like all immersive art, the more we’re immersed in the art, the richer it becomes as we depart our own self-centered logic for a dynamic and foreign one. Objects aren’t meant to be understood. They’re meant to be explored, listened to, played with. As Theodor Adorno puts it, “Actually, the more [artworks] are understood the less they are enjoyed. Formerly, even the traditional attitude to the artwork, if it was to be absolutely relevant to the work, was that of admiration that the works exist as they do in themselves and not for the sake of the observer.” Bringing Adorno’s attitude to a work of art can and should be applied to everything we perceive. Be it an animal, a person, or an object, true understanding is eliminating the possibility of total understanding. Immersive art doesn’t get us anywhere because we’re always there on this winding road of recognizing possibility and complexity in others.
I want to apply this kind of immersion in one of the most accessible mediums - music. Listening to Punisher as a document of personal experience and applying object-orientated ontology means the interpretive process requires pointing out presence and relationships between the qualities of things. Everything might be subjective, but objectivity still resides as the multiplicity of things, things that are often underappreciated or unnoticed.
Punisher is pure melancholy and melody, airy desires and haunting banalities. Up until the last two tracks, the entire album feels like a floaty dream, a foggy high, a hazy memory. What makes the record so engaging is that two opposing tones are always at play while never feeling discordant. The lucidity of Bridgers’ voice butts up against the ambiguity of the instrumentation and lyrics, contrasting but complementing. There are moments of catharsis like the rounded trumpet lines in “Kyoto”, but the triumphant brass is as ironic as it is sincere because her conquest is the acceptance of disappointment, the victory being able to move past a failed expectation. If the album has a general sense of meaning, it’s the simultaneity of these opposites - acceptance and disappointment, ghosts and the living, dreams and realities, faith and doubt. Luckily, Bridgers ties it together in this documentation of anxiety that is one part personal and one part foreign.
“Garden Song” is a terrific microcosm for the album’s big picture, and it introduces Bridgers’ lyricism at its most brilliant. Like the subject-object dichotomy OOO is interested in dissolving, “Garden Song” wavers between consciousness and sleep, memory and the present where that memory is recalled. It follows the brief opener “DVD Menu,” which is a sort of liminal space as well. A DVD menu is where we start a movie, where we end it, and where we find ourselves when we wake after falling asleep - which is what this particular DVD menu sounds like, the weird whispers of lonely longing at 3 A.M.
What makes “Garden Song” so immersive is how fragmented it feels. Her encryption of the art encourages immersion because you have to sit with the art and piece it together like a puzzle. This isn’t just nerdy hermeneutics but a basic desire to understand what the hell you’re experiencing, to enrich already pleasurable sounds and playful lyrical twists. It’s why the lyricism of Bob Dylan or Bjork endures - because they are designed to be confusing or defer interpretation.
Beneath “Garden Song’s” foregrounded vocals is the strange undercurrent of programmed sounds mixed with arpeggiated guitar, giving a sense of swampy ambiguity that comes through in snippets, a current of anxiety that sounds like an electronic record warped by time into a crackly antique. The only thing heard clearly is Bridgers’ vocals, but even that limpid delivery is composed of cryptic allusions and personal histories that hop around time and space, unmoored to the conventional storytelling you’d expect from a indie/folk singer.
The first words on the record are, “Someday, I’m gonna live / In your house up on the hill. / And when your skinhead neighbor goes missing / I’ll plant a garden in the yard.” This initial word “someday” is the first word of the song and album, and sets the tone for the whole record. Beginning with “someday” establishes a potential reality that isn’t and may never arrive. Indeed, both verses begin in this future tense and each chorus starts in the present tense along with a second deep voice underneath Bridgers on both choruses. These verses stage a nebulous future that absorbs subsequent phrases that could or could not be in the present tense. For example, when she seems to shift and say “And when,” does this mean the skinhead neighbor is part of the dreamy “someday” she’s conjuring or have we returned to the present? You’d think the way it’s sung would clarify whether or not there’s a temporal jump, but Bridgers refrains from handholding and leaves us wondering.
“Garden Song” is crafted in a very weird way. It’s plaintive but hopeful, dark but shot through with beams of light. It’s cheesy to say, but you can walk away from this song (and the whole album) either despondent at life’s fleeting gifts or warmth at finally acknowledging how natural these movements are. That dissonance, however, isn’t conflicting, like the rabbit-duck illusion where a viewer can see one of each animal but never both at the same time. Instead of oscillating between opposites, Bridgers synthesizes the two without hierarchizing or negating either. We get certainty and doubt, dreams and reality.
The song’s haunting theme gives us the impression of some dark truth manifesting in the present tense. Much of the song concerns dreams, the verses being dream states while each chorus represents a waking life haunted by a deep voice lurking in the track’s background. The future tense of the verses and the present tense of the choruses confirm this temporal division. There’s a purposeful dissonance here. Our daily existence feels haunted by some loss while our dreams give us the ability to plant this garden of hope. Dreams reify possibility and our waking lives are where we’re haunted by the impossibility of actualizing those dreams, haunted because we’re doomed to realize our dreams only when dreaming. The final line of the first chorus gives us a hint, “I hopped the fence when I was seventeen / Then I knew what I wanted.” We find peaceful affirmation in reflection and memory while the affirmation of the present requires recognizing this uncomfortable tension - hence why we hear the dual vocals of Bridgers and the deep voice clashing and harmonizing.
This tension between expectation and reality has to do with manifestation. Bridgers has clarified that the song is about manifesting, the idea that thinking or saying something helps inform it into reality:
It’s very much about dreams and — to get really LA on it —
manifesting. It’s about all your good thoughts that you have becoming real, and all the shitty stuff that you think becoming real, too. If you’re afraid of something all the time, you’re going to look for proof that it happened, or that it’s going to happen. And if you’re a miserable person who thinks that good people die young and evil corporations rule everything, there is enough proof in the world that that’s true. But if you’re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there’s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you’re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn’t really affect your worldview. It’s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.
Despite object-oriented ontology’s hardcore materialism, Bridgers’ fixation on manifestation makes a lot of sense under its lens. One of the most important pillars of OOO is understanding that objects can also be ideas, constructs, or concepts. This isn’t anti-materialism, but materialism 2.0 that understands how thoughts or feelings are immaterial objects and that the way in which we frame a situation has influence on that object in front of us. What Bridgers suggests is that our mental framework has a direct influence on our external world. Whether you believe in agency or not, a thought is a thing we make and that thing by virtue of existing can change the world around it. Agency is really just another word for emphasizing certain thoughts in our mind - and what we emphasize isn’t something we really control anyway. This runs contrary to the idea we can only “make things happen” by manhandling the world into fitting our desires. Perspective is just as important.
This idea percolates through the rest of the album as well: the irony of musical moods versus what’s being said. On “I Know the End” the Sufjanian gang vocals joyously sing the apocalyptic refrain “the end is near!” The Christian pop chords on “Chinese Satellite,” would fit in a mega church’s Sunday service but the song explores the lack of faith. The outro of “Halloween” repeats the possibility that “we can be anything,” but the tone is so listless and noncommittal that limitless choice seems pointless for a loaded question. The musical irony keeps the lyrics from feeling melodramatic and makes her sincerity palpable to a generation craving the sugar rush of ironic detachment. Phoebe Bridgers is making sincerity cool again.
“Moon Song” and “Savior Complex” are respectively about someone who hates themself and someone who helps others to the point of self-neglect. These songs are played back to back with the speaker trying to see the beauty in someone with self-loathing and the speaker criticizing their own white knight syndrome. In typical Bridgers’ fashion, what’s being emphasized is the inverse of what’s presented, so we’re always getting both sides of something - or at least an external side (represented sonically by the tone of the music) and the speaker’s side of things expressed lyrically. In the case of the sad-sack in “Moon Song” the slow, swooning waltz in a quiet major key reflects the speaker’s attempt to be positive with her terminally depressed friend while the lyrics clarify her frustration at a friend impossible to cheer up. Her friend is unable to understand the tragic nature of the world - “When you saw the dead little bird / You started crying / But you know the killer doesn’t understand.”
“Savior Complex” is a bit sunnier but with the criticisms directed at her own overly comforting persona. Here the speaker almost wants a pained person to be depressed (“I’m a bad liar / With a savior complex / All the Skeletons you hide / Show me yours and I’ll show you mine”) to either feel better about herself or to feel needed. The line “smoking in the car, windows up” has the windows rolled up to get herself (and/or the person she’s consoling) to tear up even more than might be legitimate. This way she can feed her savior complex even more, establishing how this “savior” can create problems so she can solve them, a point she criticizes in herself. Smoke getting in your eyes is the point rather than the excuse for tears. Both songs criticize how we can screw up helping and how we can screw up being helped, but the important takeaway is to recognize how each song gives each side a chance to be heard via critique.
On the penultimate track “Graceland Too”, she sings from the perspective of someone leaving rehab in the South, “So she picks a direction, it’s ninety in Memphis / Turns up the music so thoughts don’t intrude / Predictably winds up thinking of Elvis / And wonders if he believed songs could come true.” This continues the idea behind manifestation that art can realize something. Instead of the uncertainty of “Garden Song” however, we feel nothing but warmth and love, the fruition of the seed she planted in “Garden Song”, albeit, in a haunted garden.
She doesn’t end on this note, but instead on “I Know the End”, a song divided into two halves - the first acoustically driven with a distorted organ underneath her vocals, and the second defined by a rock build that accepts the end of the world but unpredictably goes out swinging like a mother.
It’s this second half that does something very important for the album and OOO’s preoccupations with understanding the world beyond our ego. The first half is subject-oriented and follows a somewhat standard verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. The tone is sentimental, regretful, but ultimately balanced by the speaker’s ability to move on and to end things as she sings, “I’m not gonna go down with my tornado in my hometown / I’m gonna chase it, I know, I know, I know.” These lines transition into the second half which trades out contemplative stability with a quickening pace that feels like a train leaving a station, picking up steam as it accelerates.
A great tactic to exemplify objects without a hierarchy is the list. Sorry to get academic, but in syntax you’d call this a paratactical structure. In a paratactic sentence, every clause is usually brief and without a dominant clause. So it’s very paratactical when Bridgers enumerates: “Windows down, scream along / To some America First rap country song / A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall / Slot machines, fear of God / Windows down, heater on / Big bolt of lightning hanging low.” We also see the problems that arise from this sort of neutrality to things. Singing along “to some America First rap country song” is an ironic sing-along, the same irony used as a defense mechanism from being goaded into argumentation. It’s also obvious she’s against whatever this conservative song is celebrating anyway because the selection of things she points out critiques the American landscape she’s probably witnessing on some musical cross-country tour. The inverse is true on the line in “Moon Song” when she sings, “We hate ‘Tears in Heaven’ / But it’s sad that his baby died.” The Eric Clapton song “Tears in Heaven” can be rejected without negating the sadness coming from the song - a song about the tragic death of Clapton’s four-year-old son. Like an America First rap country song, there’s probably something grossly catchy about it, but you can accept its presence without accepting it’s toxic nationalism. Bridgers’ acceptance goes so far as to just let the world run its course and try and be as critical and kind of a person as you can be without attempting to change it all yourself.
Graham Harman, the main figure behind object-oriented ontology, cites how “if true political transformation wants to be grounded in reality, then it is more likely to be driven by environmental or technological changes than by manifestoes and courageous stands at the barricades.” Harman continues to explain how conservative thinkers like Donald Trump are motivated by escapism, by ignoring the climate, refugees, and pandemics. Bridgers sets herself up in stark contrast because she accepts even the things she doesn't like into her periphery, including finality, doubt, the end.
This is why there’s so much sarcasm and irony on the record - it’s a way of letting painful things in at arm’s reach, which people in power seem incapable of doing. Bridgers’ irony isn’t a millennial crutch because the songs ultimately point toward Bridgers’ underlying sincerity that necessitates a sense of irony. Her irony isn’t deflection - it’s a polyvocal space for difference. Understanding the presence of the musical irony means you understand what’s being said and it’s musical inverse, gesturing multiplicity. Recognizing the irony means you’ve heard Bridgers’ sincerity and acknowledge more than a single perspective. Not only is the irony necessary for making the record culturally more applicable, but it also facilitates a more ethical aesthetic by opening up Bridgers the human by including its tonal opposite. Incorporating these contradictions and ironies doesn’t diminish Bridgers’ self and art - it realizes a selfhood that only takes shape when considering these external contradictions.
Punisher is the record for a dark milieu ready for its conclusion. The lyrics and music are two opposed entities that still rely on the other to get their point across. They manage to acknowledge an opposing presence without privileging anything less than acknowledgement driven by immersion. My favorite line is one of the record’s last: “Over the coast, everyone’s convinced / It’s a government drone or an alien spaceship / Either way, we’re not alone.” Truth is hard to come by these days but all we know for sure is we should acknowledge - not ignore - the strange objects around us, whether they spell our end or confound with beautiful ambiguity.
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.