"I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs"
About this Quote
There is a sly restraint in that line: a preemptive concession that sounds like humility but functions like armor. Joanna Newsom has spent her whole career as a high-skill outlier - harp-driven epics, ornate lyrics, a voice that refuses the easy lane of “pleasant.” So when she says, “I can understand someone not liking the voice or the songs,” she’s not begging for approval; she’s marking the boundary between taste and legitimacy.
The intent is disarmingly practical. She names the two most immediate friction points in her work - timbre and composition - and grants the listener permission to opt out. That matters because her reception has often been framed as a dare: you either “get it” or you don’t. Newsom sidesteps that snobbery. Dislike becomes an ordinary, almost reasonable response, not a moral failure or a sign of insufficient intelligence.
The subtext, though, cuts sharper: if you don’t like it, fine, but your dislike doesn’t get to rewrite what it is. It’s a quiet refusal of the internet’s favorite move: translating “not for me” into “objectively bad,” “annoying,” “unlistenable.” By keeping the complaint specific (voice, songs), she denies critics the grander narrative - that the weirdness is accidental, that the craft is a mistake.
Contextually, it reads like an artist who has watched discourse flatten music into hot takes and memes. She answers with a controlled shrug: taste is real; contempt is lazy.
The intent is disarmingly practical. She names the two most immediate friction points in her work - timbre and composition - and grants the listener permission to opt out. That matters because her reception has often been framed as a dare: you either “get it” or you don’t. Newsom sidesteps that snobbery. Dislike becomes an ordinary, almost reasonable response, not a moral failure or a sign of insufficient intelligence.
The subtext, though, cuts sharper: if you don’t like it, fine, but your dislike doesn’t get to rewrite what it is. It’s a quiet refusal of the internet’s favorite move: translating “not for me” into “objectively bad,” “annoying,” “unlistenable.” By keeping the complaint specific (voice, songs), she denies critics the grander narrative - that the weirdness is accidental, that the craft is a mistake.
Contextually, it reads like an artist who has watched discourse flatten music into hot takes and memes. She answers with a controlled shrug: taste is real; contempt is lazy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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