One voice won’t stop Foxygen from seeing other people
“If you care about justice at all, are a feminist, or are against domestic violence please do not support the band Foxygen.”
Well, then… I suppose you can add me to the blacklist and give my address to the social justice police. Or can I speak to my lawyer to see if I can get an exemption because I haven’t been listening to Foxygen since their 2014 grandiose album …And Star Power?
Wait! I have… And I have listened to their latest album Seeing Other People (2019). Twice! But only so I could write this immoral review.
Okay, you know what? Fuck it. I liked some songs and had them on repeat in my head for a few days now, so maybe I am a bad person after all. Shame on me.
Yes, indeed, shame on me, a 26-year-old who still holds a grudge on her first boyfriend from 8 years ago, and who always cuts off all the possible ties after any real or imaginary break-up. It took me 4 years to detach Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary” from an evening when my ex-boyfriend played it for me at the bar. Indeed, I should be extremely ashamed because my teenage drama is incomparable to Elizabeth Le Fey’s quote that I started this review with. Stopping Foxygen is not just an act of hatred or revenge, but it’s a gest of solidarity towards other women who may have fallen for a similar bad luck. Heck, it’s even bigger than that! It’s about the music industry and its mysterious ways of deciding which artists should be silenced and which should be quietly overlooked for their dirty deeds. And the latter is the road that Foxygen seems to have managed to get themselves on.
I discovered Foxygen 8 years ago when I was looking for some other “sounds-like-Tame-Impala” bands. I never really cared about the meanings behind Foxygen’s music. I was happy with creating my own interpretations of their songs. But then on my Tumblr dashboard, a post appeared written by Elizabeth Le Fey aka Globelamp who joined Foxygen for a short time on their tour in 2012 and 2013 and was in a relationship with the band’s singer Sam France. It was a picture of her bruised lip followed by a story after France decided to use his fists instead of words. And since then, 2013, Le Fey has been restlessly fighting for justice and the right to be heard.
But you know who had an easy-given right to be heard and even got paid just to do it (to quote a line from the song “Work”)? Sam France and Jonathan Rado who since then had released the already mentioned …And Star Power, Hang (2017), and Seeing Other People, the latter one being their last album so far. Even though the band claims that Seeing Other People is about France’s and Rado’s relationship as colleagues and friends, about them moving away from one another and each of them doing their own things outside Foxygen, questioning other possible meanings seems only legit. Using Sam France’s accusations against Le Fey who, according to him, used their private details in her own songs, it sounds nothing but fair to view Seeing Other People from the same angle.
To start off, the album is… interesting, let’s put it that way. It’s nothing like We are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic or …And Star Power. It’s more like a successor to their 2017 album Hang. With their first song “Work” they kind of hint at the sound of the 80s by resembling a stripped-off version of “The power of love” by Huey Lewis and the News. I can see myself wearing wide-ass-disco-vibe trousers and walking down the street to the beat of “Mona”, “Face the facts” or “News”, the latter one reminding me of “Eye of the Tiger” with its tense guitar sound amplified by some edgy synths. And when I come back home after my public catwalk, I pour myself a glass of wine and sing my heart out to “Seeing other people” which makes a teensy-weensy part in me to believe France when he elongates on “that’s fiiiiiine”. When I get a bit light-headed from the bottle of wine that I had only for myself, “The thing is” sounds like a good song for my tipsy state of mind. However, I don’t know whether I can continue listening to the album up to its final song, “The Conclusion”, because the lyrics might make me feel low instead of high while dealing with the silence between me and my “boo”. But if I did not have a worry to care about, I would light up a cigarette and sensually sway my body to this groovy a la Sly and the Family Stone bass undertone figuring throughout the grand finale.
So far it seems like there is nothing wrong that can be said about Foxygen after all. But don’t worry, I have picked up some dirt to throw at them too. Before I devoted myself to listen through the whole album, some time ago I stumbled upon a music video for the song “Livin’ a lie”, and… Well, it didn’t leave a nice taste in my mouth. It’s nothing like any other song on the album and it kind of kills the mood when I have been already vibing halfway through the set. France portrays himself as a boy who cried wolf in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s like reading countless articles about the feud between him and Le Fey. She says that he hit her in the mouth, and he says that she called him a bad boyfriend in the middle of the night. The classic game of “I’m not guilty, YOU are”. If you look more into the duel (because I’m not going to retell it when there have been so many articles written all over the Internet), you might start having double thoughts, just like me. Either he is genuinely crying over the friendship with Rado but on expense of the album’s vibe or suddenly this tough guy who managed to fight tooth and nail for his justice is now presenting himself as a victim.
It’s interesting to see how Foxygen have still managed to go on and the only sources which are not afraid to drop some shit on them are Le Fey’s texts. Seeing Other People still got reviewed by Pitchfork (even though they granted them a humble 5.0/10 rating) and other music sites, and the record label Jagjaguwar still holds them under the same roof together with the artists like Bon Iver and Unknown Mortal Orchestra. But everybody seems to have forgotten about the feud. Only the angry feminist voice is still somewhere in the background reminding of everything that has happened. Maybe it’s because Foxygen has been calling their two recent albums as “their last ones” as an excuse to keep on going. Or maybe one person’s accusation is not enough to make a difference.
All I can say is that even though I feel sympathy for Le Fey and I hope that eventually the justice will be on her side, accusing me of being anti-feminist is just as incorrect as it is for the music industry to keep the shit secret. Le Fey has a voice and she has a right to use it just as much as Foxygen has theirs together with the granted power. Everybody knows about Jimmy Page’s underage misconduct but still puts him on the pedestal of the greatest guitar players. Knowing the context is fine because then I can decide for myself whether I agree with the artists’ life outside their music or not. In Foxygen’s case, I am genuinely laughing from their cries in “Livin’ a Lie”, but, also, I find it as my own personal right to reinterpret the song to my very own context. I mean, isn’t that one of the reasons why people listen to music in the first place? If no one could relate to it in their own personal way, what would be the point of listening to music at all?
