Suck Season

The Misguided Resurrection of Stomp-and-Holler, and the Long Shadow of Whiny Bullcrap

It’s at least half his fault. At least.

I

“Hey guys, I have an idea!”  Peter Griffin sarcastically tells Chris Martin and the members of Coldplay, in the sixteenth episode of Family Guy’s eighth season.  “How ‘bout we do a song that’s not whiny bullcrap?”

I was eleven years old when this episode aired in 2010, and this joke was perfectly timed for me.  My then-thirteen-year-old sister had just gotten a new iPod Touch, and embarked on something of a whiny bullcrap bender.  She was always the main DJ of our family car trips, and I had gotten used to a steady diet of centrist Top 40 girl power anthems, Radio Disney, and even the occasional B-list British glam-pop heartthrob.  Seemingly out of the blue, they had vanished from our family’s gray 2001 VW Passat, and in their stead, a stream of soulful indie folk dudes.  At that point in my musical development, the only mode of masculine musical emotional vulnerability I’d been acclimated to was the pop-punk of Green Day and the All American Rejects: simple chord progressions with rigid verse-chorus structures, soaring (and very brief) electric guitar solos instead of bridges, screeching male lead singers over-enunciating every single vowel, and lyrics with clear messages, scrubbed clean of any traces of ambivalence or internal conflict.  Now, I was expected to sit quietly and listen as hours upon hours of Death Cab for Cutie, Bright Eyes, and Iron and Wine gently wafted through my increasingly baffled eardrums, all these soft, plaintive, intensely acoustic ballads with incomprehensible lyrics and absolutely no electric guitar solos.  I probably listened to Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes,” and Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love” fifty times each, far more than the FDA-approved dose of whispery melancholy and vague existential angst for even the most pretentious liberal arts college student.  I had no idea what the heck these dudes were going on about, and I hated every second of it.  It was all whiny bullcrap.

No one can resist the pull of pretentious folk music forever, and by the time I had gotten to college, I had learned to love whiny bullcrap more passionately and deeply than anyone else in my family.  I’ve seen Bon Iver live twice and they were both transcendent, life-changing experiences.  I got an acoustic guitar sophomore year of college, and since then my phone’s “Recently Deleted” folder always has two or three truly mortifying, would-have-to-leave-the-country-forever-if-anyone-saw-them videos of me on my bed trying to hack my way through “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” or whatever.  My eleven-year old self would be shocked and disgusted.

But long before my descent into full whiny bullcrap immersion, something happened that provided a bridge between my reticent late aughts poptimism and my sister’s newfound love of men with acoustic guitars, which is that from around 2011 to 2013, indie folk/rock moved alarmingly close to the mainstream of the music industry.  In addition to the massive success of whiny bullcrap stalwarts like Bon Iver and Coldplay, this period saw the rise of folk-y rock-adjacent bands (this genre was sometimes labeled “stomp-and-holler”) like the Head and the Heart, Mumford and Sons, and the Lumineers.  These bands came from a similar starting point as their indie predecessors: incoherent, pseudointellectual lyrics sung by intense men, folk-y rural influences and styles from college-educated Brooklynites, and tons of acoustic guitars.  But they also had pop-rock drum tracks, simple chord progressions, and every once in a while, deeply catchy melodic hooks that could drive radio traffic.  Today, most things you read about this period will emphasize that the resulting music sucked. The indie folk snobs of Pitchfork found this pivot to mass appeal enraging, and these bands received some of the most scathing media criticism I’ve ever read.  But I, and everyone else I knew, thought it was all awesome, and we weren’t alone.  Mumford and Sons’ sophomore album Babel won the 2013 Grammy Award for Album of the Year, after a string of nominations in the previous two years.  After their hit dirge “Rivers and Roads” made its way into approximately every single tv show and film score that year, the Head and the Heart’s Let’s Be Still debuted at number 10 on the Billboard 200 album charts.  And in December of 2012, the Lumineers’s echoey ballad “Ho Hey” escaped containment completely, passing Kesha’s “Die Young,” and Justin Bieber’s “Beauty and a Beat” to reach #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (it couldn't quite get past Bruno Mars’s “Locked Out of Heaven.”  But there’s no shame in that).  I think with the benefit of hindsight I can acknowledge that underneath the soaring melodies, many of these stomp-and-holler songs are a bit empty, “roots music without actual roots,” as Pitchfork writer Stephen Deusner put it in his review of the Head and the Heart’s self-titled debut.  But whatever, goofy pop trends come and go, this one had its moment in the sun, then quickly vanished, and whatever it’s faults or merits, stomp-and-holler indie folk rock has been safely quarantined in the early 2010s.  No one has touched it since.

No one, that is until last fall, when a long-haired, bearded twenty-something from Vermont with sad eyes and an acoustic guitar began to light up the charts with a jangly folk song about sticks and how they make him sad.  In five days, we will reach the two-year anniversary of the original release date of Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season,” an exhumation of the heretofore peacefully undisturbed corpse of early 2010s stomp-and-holler, and I’m here to tell you that, in his hands, this shit sucks so hard.

II

“I fucking hate social media,” Kahan told interviewer Amanda Petruisch in her longform profile of him for The New Yorker last February.  “TikTok for me was just like ‘what the fuck, dude’.”  This quote highlights the irony that underlies the piece, that despite his reticence and (alleged) lack of premeditation, “Stick Season” became absolutely massive on TikTok.¹  There aren’t publicly available metrics for this, but a viral, platform-driven pop song has a particular signature in its journey on the charts.  Whereas a traditional label-driven lead single might debut high on the charts and then gradually fade, or else debut lower down and then climb incrementally as more radio plays, marketing campaigns, and releases of new remixes featuring other buzzy artists ensue, a TikTok-driven smash² will emerge out of thin air, sometimes months or years after its release, rocket straight to the top overnight, and then stay there forever.  Kahan released “Stick Season,” on July 8th, 2022.  For more than a year, essentially no one listened to it.  But after gaining some traction on TikTok during the fall of 2023, it made its Billboard Top 100 debut in November of 2023, and after bouncing around in December³, surged to No 19 by the end of January of this year.  More outrageously, the song has basically maintained this position for six months, a period of time in which entire albums worth of new songs have been released by Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift.  It’s never fallen below No 30 (its current spot), and it made it all the way to No. 9 on April 27th,  and stayed in the top 20 throughout all of May.  It is not an exaggeration to say that this song, and Kahan’s meteoric rise behind it, is one of the music industry’s biggest underdog success stories in many years.  It’s a shame that I’ve listened to the songs Kahan is aping enough that Spotify will not stop recommending it to me, which is another way of saying that it’s a shame that this song is so irredeemably, relentlessly awful.

Let’s get to the song, shall we?  Musically, it’s incredibly straightforward, just a guy singing as gently finger picks four chords on an acoustic guitar.  He switches to full strumming for the first chorus, often taking big breaks between strums and only getting one strum out per chord.  This is how I play guitar, because I’m not very good and it takes me a while to switch my fingers from one chord.  It sounds better if you can play more than one strum per chord.  Anyway, there are no other instruments for most of the song; a kickdrum keeps a metronomic beat after the first verse, and then a banjo joins the guitar strumming after the last chorus for maximal Mumford and Sons imitation. This is all fine.  Tons of songs sound like this and many of them are great.  The melody of the song is relentlessly repetitive, as Kahan lingers on one note for most of the verse and then a different note for most of the chorus.  This again is fine.  My favorite songwriter does this too.  All of these decisions, however, raise the bar for the writing.  If you’re not doing anything interesting musically, either with the instrumentation, melody, chord progression, or general song structure, you better have some really awesome lyrics.

The song’s core message follows a familiar, exhausting trope: a guy whining about a mean, superficial girl who broke up with him.  Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, Bruno Mars, and pretty much every other male pop star for the last hundred years has at some point crooned out a song like this, and while many of them are bangers, they are all plagued by a vaguely misogynistic sense of entitlement, and a complete lack of introspection.  Kahan’s entry is especially nauseating to me because of the repeated attempts to address the latter concern, which read to me as inauthentic and self-congratulatory.  It’s half his fault, he just likes to play the victim, he assures us, with all the confidence and pride of someone who has just been to therapy for the first time and now wants to lecture all his friends about attachment theory.  He admits that he “inherited darkness from dad,” which sounds impressively confessional, but is actually a brag (because darkness in a singer/songwriter is kinda sexy) and a dodge, shifting all responsibility off himself.  And these lines are both throwaways, tucked away in the middle of phrases without any melodic emphasis.  He brings much more passion (and vocal fry) to his true message, which is the part when he moans that the girl still won’t call him baaaaaack.  I can’t blame her, he sounds like a bummer.

The song’s other core message seems to be that Vermont is a depressing place to be in late fall, the “season of the sticks,” as he elegantly puts it.  I know that this is not the main point of the song, but I feel compelled to say that this is a crazy take.  Vermont is gorgeous three hundred and sixty five days a year, but it is especially amazing in late November and early December, when the last traces of world class fall foliage are still visible, it’s less likely to be raining all the time than in September and October, and it’s chilly enough to wear cozy sweaters but not yet oppressively cold everyday.  A decade ago, a different young singer/songwriter made her love for this time of year, when the air was cold and autumn leaves were falling down like pieces into place, a massive part of the promotion of her fourth album.  I side with her: fall is awesome, even if there are sometimes sticks on the ground.  And what a weird complaint!  There are always sticks on the ground!  And they’ve never once triggered a depressive episode for me, in any season!

I think the thing that bothers me most about the lyrics is how smug and self-satisfied they are.  “I’m no longer funny” Kahan sings, in the second verse.  Man, I sure don’t think so, but it’s hard to believe he doesn’t, given that this line comes right after a dumb homophone pun (“cut in half well that’ll have to do”) and right before an even dumber variant of the classic “don’t call me late for dinner” dad joke (“you once called me forever now you still can’t call me baaaaaack”).  There’s another homophone pun in the first verse, when Kahan sings that “you kept on driving straight and left our future to the right.”  Never mind that this completely nukes the continuity of the already convoluted driving metaphor he had set up in the previous three lines, in which their relationship was a drive on which his ex had a change of heart halfway through, and that he was an exit sign (from the relationship highway?) that she didn’t take, even though she had promised him that he “was more than all the miles combined.”  Is he the exit that she drove past?  Or is he a passenger in the car of their relationship that she’s driving, and their hypothetical future is the exit, which she avoids?  In which case, is he still in the car (this is a breakup song right?) or did he jump from it when it was still moving?  Anyway, who cares, Kahan is psyched about the fact that he got the words “left,” “right” and “straight” into the same line, and he’s gonna make sure you are too.

But look, plenty of awesome pop songs contain incorrect opinions, plenty others succeed despite bewilderingly incoherent lyrics, and certainly many (perhaps too many) others have immoral messages or vaguely (or explicitly) misogynistic themes, but still manage to be certifiable bangers.  What all of these songs have, and what “Stick Season” lacks utterly for me, is a shred of emotional catharsis.  The singing human voice can be an engine for radical empathy.  It can change minds, break hearts, and move bodies, and break down barriers.  We’re now in extremely subjective territory here, but Kahan’s nasally faux-falsetto moaning just really doesn’t work for me, and his artistic choices with it, when to fade into a whisper, when to slur words together, and especially when to let his voice crack and strain under the pressure of sections that I guess pass for “belting” in this song, all seem designed to convey effort (successfully) and virtuosity (much less so) rather than genuine emotion.  If Kahan the writer is telling you he’s not funny in order to get you to laugh at his terrible jokes that he’s extremely proud of, Kahan the singer is operating in a limited vocal range that similarly conveys both humility (“I’m not a trained, polished opera star, I’m just a normal guy who picked up a guitar because he was sad”) and immense self-satisfaction (“look how hard I’m working despite how raw I am.”)

There’s one more vocal choice I have to mention, because it makes me want to bash my head into a wall every time I hear it.  In the second half of each chorus, after bravely admitting that it’s half his fault, Kahan tells us that he will “drink… [big pause] AL-CO-HAAWWWL” until his friends come home for Christmas.  Putting aside how both vague (he’s missing an opportunity to flex his rugged, uncouth, masculine credentials by specifying that he’s drinking either cheap beer or whiskey, an opportunity that most male singer/songwriters would find completely irresistible), and superfluous (can you imagine how many pop songs would have been ruined if the singer felt they had to specify the drink they were drinking was alcoholic, instead of just singing “drink” and “drinking”?) this second word is, he gets the emphasis completely wrong.  Alcohol is a tricky word to sing because the first syllable is stressed, but the third could be too.  If you want to hear someone sing the word alcohol well, listen to Jamie Foxx in his 2010 hit “Blame It,” and listen to how he bounces rhythmically from “Al” to “hol” without spending almost any time on “co.”  Kahan positively screams the “co.”  He pulls the same trick in the first verse when he sings about the  “memoREEES,” that “even smoking weed can not replace.”

Ironically, whining so hard that you stress an unstressed syllable is a hallmark of the unique vocal style of Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay and godfather of whiny bullcrap, at least according to Peter Griffin.  In his (absolutely incredible) 2017 smash hit collaboration with the Chainsmokers “Something Just Like This,” Martin sings that he’s not looking for “somebody with superhuman gifts, a superheROW-OOO,” emphasizing the last syllable of superhero, a word that plainly has stresses on its first and third syllables, not its second and fourth ones, so intensely that he stretches it into two different syllables, inventing a new five syllable word.  In another (freaking amazing) song, the 2016 single “Everglow,” Martin sings that this particular diamond is “extra speh-SHUU-ULLLL.”  In both songs, Martin’s egregious poetic violations don’t strike me as sloppy or inaccurate, they sound like he is so overcome with awe and wonder that he’s momentarily forgotten how language works.  He may be whining, but you can hear in his voice the yearning and aching for someone so special, so superhuman, that they would change the whole world forever.  Kahan’s whining about himself, and how epic it is that he’s drinking while feeling sad.  He doesn’t get to suspend habeas corpus on the laws of syllabic emphasis for that.  You have to have a compelling reason to whine convincingly like this, some sort of inner passion or truth or pain or feeling or something.  If you’re doing it just to look cool, then Peter’s right, it’s bullcrap.

1. The slightly less overt irony captured by this quote, and by the rest of the profile, is that Kahan, hailed by legions of fans to be a sage dispenser of wise and important truths about the human spirit, often says things that make him sound like a preening and inarticulate moron.

2. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” being the prototypical example.

3. Christmas music floods the charts so intensely during this period that staying on at all is an accomplishment.