Billy Joel, Leslie Jameson, the Saccharine, and how to “earn” emotion in art
Except of a longer essay in progress
What I will now label my obsession with the music of Jimmy Buffett wasn’t just out of character for my 19-year-old self, although it was that as well. The jarring leap from 150-plus hip hop albums to the box set Boats, Beaches, Bars & Ballads accounted for the surprise that you might feel when you arrived at the Buffett section of my CDs. But there was also a sharper secondary reaction — something close to disgust. At least, this is what I imagined I saw in the faces of those potential friends. Jimmy Buffet wasn’t simply incongruous with the identity I was selling. His presence could be read, by those more uncharitable souls, as a crime against taste.
This isn’t simply a charge of aesthetics. It is possible that Jimmy Buffett has not been read as “cool” by the larger culture since he was opening shows for the Eagles in the 70s, flying around on his tour plane “Cheeseburger,” and being mistaken as a small-time dope smuggler in the Florida Keys.
Writing about Billy Joel in 2002, Cluck Klosterman separated the artist’s music (“Great,” in Klosterman’s words) from Joel’s lack of aesthetic appeal. “Nobody would ever claim that Billy Joel is cool in the conventional sense,” Klosterman wrote. “The bottom line is that it’s never cool to look like you’re trying … and Joel tries really, really hard.” This critical Klostermanian dualism of music and aesthetics, though, seems to crumble when applied to the image and music sold to the masses by Jimmy Buffett.
It’s nearly impossible to argue for Buffett’s coolness now, even though it was exactly his image as a semi-accidental artist and full-on maritime slacker that won him his first big swell of fame. What’s left, after those initial swells of fame and attendant coolness, is a 70-plus-year-old man on perpetual tour, sitting at the head of a megacorporation he’s built around an initial image that he abandoned long ago. Is Jimmy Buffett cool? Any affirmative answer to that question is instantly negated by the person answering. Jimmy Buffett can only be cool to those white, upper-middle-class, upper-middle-age die-hards who comprise the Parrothead nation, a group so unoriginal, so uncool, that they had to swipe their name from Grateful Dead fans.
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Even 20-some years ago, my freshmen year, Jimmy Buffett was not cool. His uncoolness was so powerful that it even resisted ironic fandom, which was just beginning to emerge as a real power in the cultural backwaters of my Midwest. And while Billy Joel wasn’t cool, at least in Klosterman’s estimation he created great music. Can the same be said for Buffett?
In the face of Buffett, the dichotomy of Klosterman’s critical lens breaks down. Because the man has reconstituted his personhood into a global brand, it’s impossible to consider his music apart from his image. You almost can’t ask Is the music any good? without at the same time asking Is Jimmy Buffett cool? Once the single “Margaritaville” charted and Buffett began the shift from selling songs and albums to selling a lifestyle based on a version of himself, it became impossible to listen to his music without visualizing pudgy, middle aged business execs in faux grass skirts drinking sickeningly sweet boat drinks out of a plastic, trademarked Lost Shaker of Salt tumbler.
Here’s a sampling of the book against Jimmy Buffett from the website antiMUSIC: “Jimmy Buffett is the business man’s Phish — soulless, tragically unhip, white collar business drones …. More fucking reconstituted leftovers from the Baby Boomer generation. The proof is in the tunes, my friend. Soft, safe, and horribly lame.”
What’s interesting about the majority of anti-Buffett criticism is that it can’t be contained to the music. So potent is this criticism that it seeps from the songs into the man, and even (especially) his fans: “The shows: a gaggle of balding, beer-gutted buffons in grass skirts, proving to all women present (and the world for that matter) exactly where the stereotype of white men having NO business on a dancefloor is derived from.”
Even when it’s suppressed by the veneer of even-handedness, it’s hard for most people to contain their winking disdain. In her New York Times piece about Buffett’s 2018 Broadway musical “Escape to Margaritaville,” Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes, “The show’s pre-Broadway runs in San Diego, New Orleans, Houston and Chicago had been well-received, but he still had concerns.” Buried in her piece was the larger world’s assumption about not only the play but the man himself — of course they’ll do well in the provincial, uncool places. Of course, it will bomb once it comes to New York, the Mecca of artistic good taste.
Buffett is often dismissed on these terms. There is the obviousness of his music, though “obviousness” seems an odd charge to level at someone who carved such a sui generis path around and through such staid genres as country and 70s rock. There is also the crassness of his aesthetic, a lack of refinement perhaps, a hole where the musicality or the serious artistic stuff is supposed to go.
But if Buffett’s music is to be dismissed, it’s usually on the grounds that most kitsch or pre-packaged culture is cut down: sentimentality.
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In her essay “In Defense of Saccahrin(e),” Leslie Jamison explores the parallels between artificial sweeteners and sentimentality in art. She begins by saying, “Saccharine is our sweetest word for fear.” This fear, for Jamison, is at the core of her thinking about both physical sweetness and sentimentality, “the fear of too much sentiment, too much taste.”
Both are bound up in excess, a too-muchness that threatens to upset more level-headed ideas about good taste. But what struck me about Jamison is the way she uses the language of commerce, of work, to unpack the problem of sentimentality in art. Here’s Jamison’s definition of this too-muchness: “Sentimentality is an accusation leveled against unearned emotion.” She quotes Oscar Wilde as saying, “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of emotion without paying for it.”
Tucked into both these quotes are ideas about wages paid to access the commodity of emotion.
Any first-year MFA student can tell you that in art emotion must be earned. What they won’t tell you, what no one can tell you, is how one earns such a wage. Even the provenance of this labor is unclear. Whose emotion? Is the artist exchanging their labor in this transaction? Or is it the reader’s or listener’s? Things get fuzzy quickly, but this much is clear: In the artist marketplace, sentimentality is that economist’s chimera: a free lunch. So when literature or a song defies the natural transaction, when it tips into sentimentality, it upsets what Jamison calls the “Horatio Alger-bootstrap ethos in our aesthetic economy: you need to earn your reactions to art, not simply collect easy sentiment handed out like welfare.”
So … have Buffett fans not earned their sentiment, their reactions to his music? How does anyone earn their reactions to art? “By parsing figurative opacity,” says Jamison. “We think we should have to work in order to feel.” If a song doesn’t require you to unpack metaphors or drag ambiguous nuance kicking and screaming into the bright lights of the police lineup of clarity — if you are not required to work to extract meaning and genuine emotion from a song, then that song has failed as true art.
It’s precisely this work requirement that’s missing in Buffett’s music, according to his critics. His music refuses to offer listeners the amount of resistance necessary to unlock a true emotional response. At their corniest, at their most sentimental, Buffett’s songs say to the listener, “I will do the work for you.” Buffett is sentimentmental, is tacky, in the sense that he satisfies, as Jamison puts it, “our least complicated desires.”
This is not an altogether unexpected irony, however, given that the main ethos of Buffett’s music and Parrotheadism is the rejection of work as life’s organizing principle. In their study of fan practice, “Parrothead in Margaritaville,” sociologists John Mihelich and John Papineau try to understand Buffett fandom as an “oppositional culture,” one that resists our dominant culture of market capitalism and materialism by fostering what they call a traditional sense of “leisure, rest, and celebration.” In other words, those flabby 50-something men in coconut bras, full of tequila and Coronas, are participating in an “embedded resistance” to the American ethos that our lives and worth should be ordered and determined by our labor. But more on that later.
For now, it’s not hard to see how this ethos of labor translates to artistic taste. If there is no critical work to be done as a listener, then whatever enjoyment or meaning we get from a song is in some way tainted or spoiled because it is divorced from critical labor. It is unearned. It is, therefore, sentimental.
Some of Buffett’s best-known songs are built on cute rhymes or turns of phrase that might conjure in the more sophisticated listener the reaction to encountering something tacky or sentimental — the initial jolt of surprise or pleasure, not unlike the first taste of sweet in piece of child’s candy, that does not fade into something more complex or meaningful but rather stays as we’ve first encountered it, the taste of sugar growing evermore sickeningly sweet.
“If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me,” seems clever upon first impression, or at least it did to 19-year-old me. The song behind the flipped cliche, though, is an achingly earnest ballad directly addressing the dissolution of a marriage. The song begins with these two lines: “There are oceans of feelings between us / Currents that take us and sweep us away.” These lines establish the metaphorical field the song will work from. It’s no surprise that Buffett has picked the ocean to do the work of carrying meaning here. But there’s little for the listener to do here, critical work-wise. Oceans are vast, thus are the feelings. Currents are powerful, etc.. The metaphors demand little from the listener except to feel the sentiments they try to deliver.
Jamison thinks of metaphor as a direct line to the sentimental, the saccharine. The overly trod figure of speech, yesterday’s cliches, these are the building blocks of sentimental art because the listener already knows what to do with them. Their meaning comes pre-extracted. That is to say, these metaphors are not metaphors at all; they are cliches. If the artist selects an off-the-rack figure of speech rather than crafting something bespoke, then they are dodging the need for work both on their part and the audience’s.
“If the tropes are too easy, the narrative too predictably mannered, the sentiments exaggerated for the sake of emotional manipulation, the language cloying rather than fresh,” says Jamison, “all these cheapen the eliciting of emotion.”
When Jamison chooses the metaphor of “cheapen” here, she again plops us down into the realm of commerce and market capitalism. If the eliciting of emotion is “cheapened,” then the audience is at once receiving a degraded emotion while also not paying enough for it. In sentimental art, the audience has not parted with something valuable enough to “earn” or “deserve” the arising and experience of that emotion.
If the opening lines of “If The Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me,” transport you to the most devastating heartbreak of your past, the ghosts of those emotions still haunting your guts, have you not paid enough for the trip? In Jamison’s words, we have been “manipulated” into these emotions, tricked. Although this might be the only con where the mark is duped into paying too little for something rather than too much.
The primary flaw of sentimentality, says Jamison, is that it attempts to win our favor with flattery. Such an attempt is rooted in insincerity and self-interest. Behind flattery’s toothy grin lurks a sort of contempt for its target. Buffett has certainly spent the last 30 years furthering his self-interests: the megacorporations, the perpetual tour playing only his most popular songs. Isn’t this flattery?
But I wonder, does such flattery — and by extension this catalog’s sentimentality — reside in the mechanized performance of his brand or in the music itself? I suppose another way to say this is: Doesn’t it take two to flatter?