Beach Bunny
This saga begins last spring when I stumbled across Spotify’s “Surf Rock Sunshine” playlist and became infatuated with a handful of the featured tracks—one of which was by a group called Beach Bunny. The more I encountered Beach Bunny’s music, the more I fell in love with what the group was up to. I’d play their music in the store where I worked and would always be elated when a customer recognized their songs. I started learning how to play guitar and set my sights on mastering the chord progressions from a few of my favorite tracks. I picked up tickets to see them play when they came to Boston (in a show that has since been postponed due to you-know-what). I guess you could say I’m a Fan™.
Beach Bunny’s music is bright and uptempo with a light-hearted yet melancholy energy. Their tracks have a vibe that would make them fit in seamlessly with Pandora’s “Summer Hits of the 90s.” Beach Bunny sounds like if grunge really loved Starbucks, or if folk did a line of Adderall. They’re peak alt-indie-emo-pop-punk with memorable lyrics that take on the impossible task of boiling down complex emotional entanglements into poignant phrases without even batting an eye.
When I saw that an upcoming issue of my favorite periodical, The New Yorker, was going to feature a write-up on the band, I was totally jazzed that they’d be getting the mainstream recognition that they deserved! To say I was disappointed by the magazine’s coverage would be an understatement.
Carrie Battan’s “Clip Art: The TikTok-ready sounds of Beach Bunny” is a truly bewildering take that attempts to unpack the role that social media plays in creating viral hype around music while “reviewing” Beach Bunny’s debut album Honeymoon. Battan careens dangerously close to straight-up calling Beach Bunny’s frontwoman Lili Trifilio stupid while flattering Trifilio’s songwriting prowess with a sticky insincerity. The entire article raises the question, “Do you like the album or...?”
I’ve been fuming about this for months.
Why? Because I have the time.
When I started writing this post, I had a lofty vision of creating a sharply articulate take-down of Battan’s article. (Lord knows I love a take-down.) After a bit of soul-searching (i. e. a string of unhinged texts to my dear podcast co-host), I’ve decided to lean in to the tone of “how I text my closest friends at 3am.” So, as we move onward from this relatively cogent introduction, brace yourself for a tidal wave of out-of-context Vine quotes/Drag Race gifs, chaotic punctuation usage, gratuitous profanity, and what may be a startling snapshot of just how many screws I have loose.
Come along to witness my rapid approach to a psychotic break via a sentence-by-sentence roast of a two-page New Yorker article from the end of February.
For an optimal content experience, I recommend following along in “Clip Art: The TikTok-ready sounds of Beach Bunny” as the ride we’re about to embark on makes haphazard reference back to the original text as we move through it chronologically.
As we jump into the body of the article it’s obvious that Battan is about to try making some kind of a point about the role that TikTok plays in catalyzing the rapid injection of buzzy tracks into the millennial/Gen-Z cultural hivemind. This introduction sets the article up with an extremely ~kids these days~ energy. Sure, it feels relevant to reference that one of the band’s singles blew up on the app, but trying to stretch this into a commentary on modern media consumption feels like, well, a stretch.
And this is likely beyond my scope in this salt-caked rant, but when is society going to let teenage girls enjoy things without belittling them? You know what other band teenage girls notoriously lost their minds over only to be dragged ceaselessly? The Beatles. Next!
Anyway, we’re now a solid chunk into the article and so far our TikTok-to-Beach Bunny reference ratio is weighted disconcertingly towards the app. We know that the band is from Chicago, has at least one song, and that Lili Trifilio is a “twenty-three-year-old recent college graduate” (redundant? infantilizing?) who “sings in a disaffected tone” (does not read like a compliment, that’s for sure). Once Battan attempts to swing a pivot from a tour of the #promqueen highlights into actually breaking down Beach Bunny’s musical stylings we hit some rocky rhetorical terrain.
“Of all the confessional, female-fronted indie-rock bands to flourish in the past decade, Beach Bunny is perhaps the most shrewdly tailored to the whims of the social Internet, where everything, especially the misery and humiliation of youth, is molded into a bite-size piece of comic relief.”
Okay—to start, this sentence is a real bitch to parse. Let’s do it!
Beach Bunny is part of a cohort of “confessional, female-fronted indie rock bands” that have “flourish[ed] in the past decade.”
I am going to use this opportunity to remind you that the past decade was neither the ‘90s, nor the ‘00s.
What differentiates Beach Bunny from this cohort is that they are “the most shrewdly tailored to the whims of the social Internet.”
Here it is not Beach Bunny who is tailoring their music to an audience, but rather the entire group has been tailored to these whims. By whom?
Confusing use of the passive voice; consider revising.
Given the article’s preoccupation with TikTok and Battan’s inability to pull another point of reference for what constitutes “the social Internet,” we will infer that this phrase is basically being used as a stand-in for TikTok.
On TikTok, “everything…is molded into a bite-size piece of comic relief” and this especially includes “the misery and humiliation of youth.”
Is everything molded into a single bite-size piece? Is every discreet thing molded into respective bite-size pieces?
As we reach the end of this sentence, we are left to conclude that Battan is attempting to assert that by writing pithy lyrics that resonate with an audience of angsty adolescents, Beach Bunny is intentionally catering to sharability on TikTok.
Violently close reading a text is my kink. It truly took all of my willpower to not draw a syntax tree here. Nevertheless, the weird baggage in this sentence is worth unpacking as it underscores the perplexing tone of the article moving forward.
“Trifilio is a potent lyricist who tends towards despondency, but her songs are deceptively snackable—each is a two-minute burst of honey-butter melody, often with a title that incorporates hashtag-worthy slang.”
Things that are “deceptively snackable”: buffalo cauliflower, Trader Joe’s Salt & Pepper Potato Chips, deviled eggs, gummy vitamins, raw cookie dough.
I really love this idea of being deceived by a snack. It feels simultaneously sinister and adorable in a way that absolutely sparks joy. The insistence on the edibility of Beach Bunny’s music and, by extension, millennial/Gen-Z culture that persists through the article requires more attention than I am willing to give it at the present moment.
A brief sample of the “hashtag-worthy slang” Beach Bunny incorporates in their song titles: February, April, July, Sports, Promises, Rearview, Painkiller, Racetrack, Boys.
I’ll give you “burst of honey-butter melody.” I’ve seen many apt synesthetic descriptions linking tasty salty/sweet snacks to Beach Bunny’s sound and energy. I won’t, however, give you “potent lyricist” as Battan almost immediately backs down from that claim, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
“Despite Beach Bunny’s pink bubble wrapping, the band’s début album, ‘Honeymoon,’ which came out this month outlines the silhouettes of despair and longing with an unusually refined emotional nuance.”
Battan’s choice to deploy “despite” and “unusually” here are throwing up a few red flags as Battan is essentially equating having “pink bubble wrapping” with lacking “refined emotional nuance.” A cute thing for girls is actually a sincere project with depth? More on this at eleven.
“The title [‘Cuffing Season’] comes from a term for the coupling up that occurs during the winter months—a cloying (???) reference that masks (???) the song’s subtle (???) exploration of romantic uncertainty.”
Girl, what? The song’s exploration of romantic uncertainty is pretty overt, and calling it “Cuffing Season” emphasizes that…? How is that…cloying? This reads like when you’re pretty close to being fluent in another language so you gloss over a couple of words you don’t totally recognize because you basically understand what’s going on in the sentence. Except English is my first language and I really have no grasp on what is going on in this sentence.
As an aside, I spent most of my life thinking that “cuffing season” had something to do with hunting.
“Her lyrics are simple and blunt, as if she were teaching verb conjugation to a remedial English class.”
Remember that “potent lyricist” thing from like two sentences ago? How the turn tables.
Here we are starting to ramp up on Battan’s suggestions that Trifilio is not the brightest bulb in the box and that Beach Bunny’s lyrics lack a certain je ne sais quoi (parce que Battan ne nous dit jamais). You can tell Battan was raised in a household where the word “stupid” was outlawed because her finesse in calling Beach Bunny just about everything but is God-tier.
To be fair, “simple and blunt” are not intrinsically bad qualities for lyrics. However, equating lyrics with utilizing the mechanics of grammar with below-grade-level mastery is definitely not a suggestion that said lyrics are good. It’s also worth pointing out that this is how Battan is choosing to describe the lyrics to “Rearview” which she views as the “strongest song on the album” !!!
This is almost entirely beside the point, but if you’re teaching remedial English to presumably native speakers, odds are slim-to-none that you’ll be teaching verb conjugation. I’d hope a journalist who is effectively executing English’s elusive subjunctive mood would have a firmer grip on that as to avoid such a schlocky simile. A minor gripe, yet one that haunts me nevertheless. Moving on.
“Beach Bunny’s tracks are not exactly innovative—most contain an uncomplicated chord progression, a frenzied drum explosion, and not much else.”
Woof! Gonna go out on a limb here and say that “not exactly innovative” is not exactly praise. Just say you don’t like the band and move on, Carrie! Are we trying to trivialize everything Beach Bunny has done to prove some kind of point about how TikTok is bad for music? Because that would be a pretty whack-ass take and it seems like that’s what’s bubbling under the surface as we get deeper into this article.
tag urself I’m “not much else”
“The Internet’s memory is rapidly shortening.”
Yvie Oddly is doing a spot-on impression of me reading this article for the 50th time.
This sentence appears just as disconnected within the context of the article as it appears here as a standalone quote, but it speaks to what I think may be the source of Battan’s discontent with Beach Bunny: the music that influenced Battan’s and her contemporaries’ taste is often not the same music that influences young artists today. New up-and-coming bands don’t lack memories of the Cranberries because of a “Generation Me” attention span issue, they lack these memories because the Cranberries’ biggest hits came out before these new artists were born.
“Beach Bunny may not even know that its name sounds like a reference to a time in the late two-thousands when indie-rock bands were naming themselves things like Beach Fossils and Wavves.”
may 👏 not 👏 even 👏 know 👏
You know who you could ask about the references Beach Bunny is making? Probably, like, fucking them? Call me crazy but I’d bet they’d gladly hop on a call with The fucking New Yorker while doing press for their first album!
I have a friend with a band called Poolhaus, do they count as a reference too? Or did the Beach Fossils invent the fucking water? #JusticeForTheBeachBoys
“When a journalist compared Trifilio to the grunge icon Liz Phair in an interview last year, she admitted to being unfamiliar with Phair’s work.”
When did interviews become a frickin’ thesis defense where artists have to prove their depth of music history mastery? I’m exhausted by the insistence that in order to be taken seriously, musicians must have encyclopedic knowledge of every artist that has come before them, like they’re the Avatar or some shit. (And this happens disproportionately to artists of the “young” and “woman” varieties.) It is infinitely more interesting to hear an artist talk about work that has influenced them than to put them on blast for being unfamiliar with music that came out before they were even born.
Jimmy Kimmel asking Billie Eilish to name the members of Van Halen tells me nothing about her music.
“Acts of earlier eras could more easily be traced to their predecessors, often by the artists’ own admission, but Beach Bunny comes from a generation for which stylistic influence is absorbed through lifelong exposure to a mass jumble of online reference points.”
The volume of the ~kids these days~ energy in this sentence is astronomical. Being able to absorb stylistic influence from unique, niche corners of the interwebs isn’t as toxic as “lifelong exposure” seems to suggest. And it’s not like when you open up Spotify the interface collapses in on itself to present you with a completely incomprehensible whirlwind of content to sift through. Music folx on the internet go to great lengths to curate content that they dig and to share with other people who would dig it. This often means that voices in the space that were previously pushed aside or ignored in these mythical musical genealogies can reach more people. And I feel like that’s, dare I say, good?!
I guess what I’m trying to say is, “Mass jumble of online reference points? Uh, yeah. I sure hope it does.”
“Trifilio got her start in music by performing acoustic guitar covers and uploading them to YouTube, as so many of her peers did before TikTok began pulling aspiring talents into its slipstream. One song she covered was Katy Perry’s ‘E.T.,’ a faintly industrial-sounding collaboration with Kanye West. In a track on ‘Honeymoon’ called ‘Ms. California,’ Trifilio sings ‘She’s your girl/She’s in all your pictures/California girl/I wish I was her.’ It’s hard not to hear this song as a kind of garage-rock photo negative of Katy Perry’s ‘California Gurls.’ An homage like this would have seemed incongruous in an earlier era of indie rock, but Trifilio’s generation uses pop songwriting as a primary source rather than as a counterpoint, translating it effortlessly.”
Leaked footage of Carrie Battan trying to establish that Honeymoon’s “Ms. California” is an homage to Katy Perry because Lili Trifilio performed an acoustic cover of “E.T.” when she was in high school.
Beach Bunny frequently covers the theme song for SpongeBob at their concerts. How incongruous! A band doing something for fun? Carrie really said “stay in your lane” +/- ”get off my lawn.”
Scalding hot take alert: “Ms. California” is not obviously similar to “California Gurls” no matter how many times I play them back-to-back. And to suggest that Katy Perry represents the whole concept of songs about California is bonkers. #JusticeForTheBeachBoys
Here’s even a whole-ass, not-even-vaguely-comprehensive playlist of songs about California that I made in 2018:
To wrap up the article, Battan devotes two more paragraphs to explaining the functionality of the TikTok interface and suggests that its format intentionally maximizes the “mere-exposure effect,” wherein the more often you hear a song, the more likely you are to have a positive impression of it. Rapidly approaching the article’s conclusion, I’m still left wondering why exactly we all gathered here today. Was it just to say that Beach Bunny’s new album is only generating hype because their single from two years ago was part of a viral trend?
“Without TikTok, it’s unlikely that a song like ‘Prom Queen’ could have reached the velocity that it did.”
Based on all of the contextual baggage that leads up to this moment, this sentence reads as follows: “Without [dumb kids with no taste sharing the track because it resonates with their so-called lived experiences], it’s unlikely that a[n unimaginative and vapid] song like ‘Prom Queen’ could have reached [success that warrants my coverage of the band].”
I don’t want to totally write off the role of TikTok in spreading some hype around the band, but Battan insists that Beach Bunny was formed specifically to fit this niche of TikTok-ability. So which came first, the Bunny or the ’Tok? The further into the article we go the more circular Battan’s point becomes: did Beach Bunny make music for the explicit purpose of blowing up on TikTok or is TikTok responsible for Beach Bunny blowing up? Do you love this shit? Are you high right now? Do you ever get nervous?
Also, I have to take the idea that Beach Bunny would be nowhere without TikTok with a grain of salt since I became a huge fan of theirs well over a year before I even downloaded the app.
“The message was about two hundred words—a longer piece of writing than any Beach Bunny song.”
This sentence that the article wraps with just about sums up the whole vibe of Battan refusing to take Beach Bunny or their success seriously while needlessly needling Trifilio in the weirdest ways. And, as a point of reference, The Beatles’ Abbey Road averages 102 words per song.
The primary reason that I’ve been so hung up on this article for months is that it’s exceedingly difficult to pin down the point that Battan is trying to make. It’s not a review of the album, it’s not a profile on the band, it’s not an analysis of TikTok’s influence in the music industry, and yet it is somehow attempting to be all three.
Battan obsessively attributes the band’s success entirely to TikTok. You get the sense that Battan thinks TikTok is Bad™ for Music™, but that argument still waits to be made. The whole thing reads like an eye-roll and a shrug. More than anything, it just boggles my mind that someone could be driven to write something so painfully pointless on the surface with such petty pretentiousness as an undercurrent.
She seems loathe to flat-out critique Beach Bunny and their audience, but there is an overwhelming vibe that the band just doesn’t do it for her. Which is fine, but like, there needs to be a better reason than “the lead singer doesn’t know who Liz Phair is.” Or, at the very least there needs a more fleshed out argument that the tracks are too simplistic for Battan’s taste if we’re going to justify writing a whole-ass article. Hell, my introduction to this rant gives you a fuller picture of what Beach Bunny sounds like than Battan’s snack-infatuated non-critique.
Before our journey through my manic downward spiral into the pages of the March 2, 2020 issue of The New Yorker comes to an end, let’s look back to the title of Battan’s article: “Clip Art: The TikTok-ready Sounds of Beach Bunny.” When going on my weekly rant about this article to my dear podcast co-host, he pointed out that I had yet to take issue with this headline—surprising since I had taken issue with just about every other word in the article. And there’s no time like the present to get freshly heated about something so inconsequential! As she likens Beach Bunny’s music to clip art (read: not real art, or art that lacks the requisite substance to qualify as a freestanding piece) and describes their sound as “TikTok-ready” (read: superficial and ~for the kids~), Battan’s point finally seems crystal clear. But was it a point worth making?
In summary,
Also next journalist to say we’re a tic tok band gets punched
— Beach Bunny (@BeachBunnyMusic) February 24, 2020