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Playing Dumb with ‘Assume Form’: A Word on Pitchfork’s Pettiness

What is it about James Blake’s latest album that’s forced music journalists to forget what song-writing is?

The pervasive criticism of Assume Form seems not to be of any technical shortcomings in the album or non-delivery in any discernible musical terms, but instead a criticism which derides Blake for writing songs with apparent confessional themes that are within easy-reach of his personal life and recent circumstances. Pitchfork pronounces a decidedly ambiguous verdict on Assume Form with little technical justification, calling it ‘aggressively pastel’. This lazy critical response has nothing to do with the substance of the album. The reviewers’ problem lies not in their ability to interpret the developed confessional nature of Blake’s song-writing, but rather in Blake’s public-facing persona which has challenged music journalism’s ‘toxic masculinity’ in relation to his music.

Pitchfork justifies its 5.8/10 rating for Assume Form by describing: ‘a suffocating seriousness that runs through the singer and producer’s fourth album, one that bogs down genuine moments of levity and love.’ (Note here: the description of Blake as ‘singer and producer’, rather than songwriter.) This seriousness, they seem to suggest, is at odds with ‘an album ostensibly all about the freedom to be oneself that love bestows’ – their criticism is one of perceived mood and emotion, failing even to notice that ‘freedom’ has to come from a constriction – from being ‘bogged down’ in some way in the first place. That Assume Form might in fact be the journey of the very transition they are describing seems to have escaped them. In any case, Blake doesn’t owe it to himself, the Industry, or the art of expression through music to focus wholly on ‘levity and love’.

Elsewhere, Crack Magazine supplies this justification for its 6/10 ruling: an ‘aesthetic tangle is the undoing of Assume Form, an album of gorgeous moments going nowhere in particular.’ (Though, exactly which elements are caught up in this aesthetic tangle is unclear from the article, and an outline of where the gorgeous moments are expected to go is explained nowhere.) Both critical opinions do pick up on a tension in Blake’s sound which has historically been critically celebrated; but now these two facets have suddenly become problematic for the review-sites. The two facets are Blake’s electronic dance-music heritage and 808 drum-palette, alongside his soulful lyric moments, and often delicate harmonics and chord progressions. Pitchfork goes on to suggest that Blake ‘sounds hamstrung by old habits’, supposedly ‘trapped in a musical cage of his own making’; though these habits are not described anywhere in the article.

But if Pitchfork, Crack, and other outlets are having problems reconciling the two aspects of Blake’s sound on Assume Form – the tender, lyrically lucid and confessional, and the ‘heavier’, club-friendly 808 dance-music styles – then such journalists should remind themselves of how they celebrated the union of these supposedly disparate aspects on Blake’s first album. On Limit To Your Love low-frequency dubstep-style oscillations rumbled below Blake’s soulful lyrical delivery: ‘There’s a limit to your love / like a map with no ocean.’ There were no complaints here surrounding the same dual-influence of Blake’s song-writing style. And Assume Form with all its guest features, Spanish-language singing, and rap verses is hardly recycling the same material or composition habits. So, what’s changed?

Stepping back a few months into May 2018: Pitchfork journalist Kevin Lozano calls Blake’s Don’t Miss It ‘sumptuous sad boy music’ – suggesting ‘maybe he [Blake] needs a night out’. This prompted Blake to issue a social-media response where he expressed his frustration with such ignorant and intolerant labels being attached to creative work which attempts to deal with issues of mental health, male suicide and expression.

As industry leaders, we should be safe to assume that Pitchfork employ highly-skilled writers who are attuned to all the resonances of the terms they apply to artists’ work. These journalists serve as first-response commentators on so many significant album releases. As such, they have a serious responsibility for which they are – presumably? – paid. So when these writers use an oxymoronic term like ‘aggressively pastel’ as an overall summation of Assume Form, we must assume that they are doing so knowing their words’ full resonances, and are intentionally invoking a tension which is fair to the album at hand. ‘Pastel’: a sense of soft, subtlety within the music (perhaps also referencing back to Blake’s previous album The Colour in Anything), but which is also a tenderness that, in their opinion, is ‘aggressive’ – suggestive of an excess, an overworked or forceful wishy-washy nonchalance in the music.

The intended tension in their ‘aggressively pastel’ labelling is indicative of what they deem to be problematic: an unsatisfactorily-resolved (5.8/10-worthy) tension in the album. That is to say: the tension between ‘aggressive’ (as in a kind of angry and direct forward force) and ‘pastel’ (as in a refusal to commit to anything solid) exemplifies these journalists’ problem with the album. More distressingly, it demonstrates a really reductive preschool-level preoccupation with two aspects of Blake’s sound that the same journalists have hitherto celebrated in previous releases. They suddenly find it banal or unsuccessful that a lyrical or harmonic tenderness can be combined with harder, club-music sensibilities; that, suddenly, the music must commit to a unified mood or uncomplicated emotional discourse. But the reason the dual-aspects of Blake’s sound have now become problematic for these journalists is not because of any technical, musical shortcomings in Assume Form – it’s problematic because Blake has addressed these journalists head-on for labelling him a ‘sad boy’. Shortly after its publication, Blake sent a tweet about Pitchfork’s review: ‘I think they’re still angry that I called them out for their toxic masculinity [kissing-face emoji]’. Something we can now see – to the detriment of both the industry and its supporting journalistic craft – is beyond doubt.

Perhaps Lozano could have had a point in one sense: Blake’s musical versatility has had a slightly preferentially divisive effect among fans; some preferring the softer side to his sound, others his weightier dance-music heritage on his earliest EPs. And we might sympathize with new, first-time, or late-coming listeners who have to reconcile the James Blake of early 140-bpm productions such as CMYK with the more lucid present-day song-writing of Don’t Miss It. But, any journalist worth their Pitchfork page-space would surely recognize (if they could not praise) this development as part of Blake’s song-writing growth – not least in the ambitious lyrical departures and achievements he makes on Assume Form.

While for the first time to such an extent on a James Blake album, the reviews are quoting and dissecting Blake’s lyrics (indicating a transition to newfound significance and lucidity in Blake’s lyric-writing), none of the recent reviews make mention of Assume Form’s comment on the effects of technology and its influences on the contemporary mind and emotions. It’s one of the album’s most important successes, especially when considered in relation to (but not necessarily as a representation of) Blake’s openness about his mental health. ‘Drop the pin on the mood that you’re in’ sings Blake in Power On. ‘Power on’ as in continue, keep going, but also turn on your device; become connected – a kind of semantic neighbour to switch off. The role of technology in relation to its user is constantly reinforced on the album, especially in Don’t Miss It. The video for the track is a real-time scrolling iPhone-note transcription of Blake’s lyrics as he sings them: bringing both the lyrical content and technology’s role in intimate thought-transcription to the foreground of the audience’s mind.

Furthermore, the long list of ‘When you…’ clauses in Don’t Miss It seems to have escaped the reviewers’ attention so far. These ‘when-you’ clauses resonate with a contemporary format for internet memes that the modern listener (and music journalist) instantly recognizes: e.g. When you … ‘do X,Y,Z’ + image. Blake uses and repeats this familiar internet idiom from everyday meme frameworks to make a serious, accumulating, and accessible commentary about issues of mental health – ‘When you stop being a ghost in the shell / And everyone keeps saying you look well’. By using the language construction of an exclusively technological medium (the meme) in Don’t Miss It, the album enters into contemporary dialectic (through a contemporary idiom and sound palette) with contemporary issues surrounding mental health – interrogating how technology can be used to variously exacerbate and assuage our concerns of self-worth (‘if there’s no need for the perfect image’). The Pitchfork journalists owe it to their readers and to anyone who’s ever acknowledged (or has yet still to acknowledge) difficulties with their mental health to properly confront these crucial themes on the album. And whilst Blake’s frank responses and interview comments to Pitchfork, Dazed, and other outlets may indicate a personal struggle in this area, we do not necessarily have to equate a song’s experience of mental health with Blake’s own.

This is because Assume Form will inevitably be more than a ‘loved-up’ confessional outpouring of Blake’s feelings – ‘peeling off the layers to bare all his innermost thoughts’ as Pitchfork will have us believe. As its title suggests, Assume Form also allows Blake (the artist and songwriter, rather than the LA-dwelling Londoner) to assume the form of a number of variously afflicted, contented, and obsessive personas. These personas might closely align with Blake’s own at times, but they are not wholly or necessarily Blake himself. A confessional song-writing mode does not necessarily represent the artist directly. Surely Pitchfork’s journalists are aware by now that a songwriter’s physical singing voice is distinct from the possible persona or character established by the lyrical content of a song. In fact, the Pitchfork reviewer almost comes close to completing this distinction – but his adverb (‘off-puttingly’) betrays the whole problem. The reviewer ‘can’t help but find something off-puttingly performative and voyeuristic in its [the track Can’t Believe The Way We Flow’s] romantic rapture’. But the romantic rapture isn’t Blake’s – it’s a character, or derivative persona of Blake’s creation and articulation. If the track and its refrain is sickening or off-putting then it is deliberately so, in order to embody an excess of a particular romantic emotion. If the journalist is ‘off-put’ it’s because of the ‘voyeuristic’ position the song establishes; it’s because Blake is being deliberately ‘performative’ –articulating excess and astonishment through a separate character.

A similar thing happens on I’ll Come Too – what could be a kind of modern-day poolside crooning is transformed into something yet more severe and sinister through the obsessive persona’s asides, making him even stalker-like at times. Blake sings ‘Oh you’re going to New York, I’m going there / Why don’t I come with you? / Oh, you’ve changed to LA / I’m going there, I could go there too’. Any tenderness or romance in the song’s mood which is established by the rich chords and vocal hums as Blake sings ‘I don’t wanna go home / Shall we drive from zone to zone’ is quickly undercut by the sinister suggestions of finality: ‘if it’s the last thing I do’; ‘I’ve got nothing to lose.’ Even if she’s ‘the reason this album exists’, Blake isn’t describing his courting process with Jameela Jamil here – he’s embodying a persona to explore an obsessive kind of love.

It’s worth saying that elsewhere, in cruder musical instances, Pitchfork seem capable of grasping this distinction. They can identify an artist inhabiting a different persona for a certain rhetorical effect. They don’t really think Tyler, the Creator is writing a song to consolidate his first-hand experience of murder when he delivers the lines on Garbage: ‘I got violent, long story short he's not breathing / For some reason I liked it and it was really exciting’. These journalists do not take it to be an autobiographical statement from Tyler himself; in fact, they are able to define it as: ‘a rap persona pitched between shock-riddled misanthropy and confessional reflection’. So why are they taking all of James Blake’s ‘confessional’ lyrics to be entirely autobiographical – and failing both their readers and their own appreciations in the process? The answer is simple: they just don’t want to make the effort. Blake has called them out and now they’re playing dumb with his album.

The world of music journalism moves fast. But saying something quickly is far less important than saying something accurate and considered. It’s why Assume Form will survive to be an important album and the quick-fire clickbait labels of Kevin Lozano & Co. will be proved careless, petty, and ill-conceived. More importantly, such comments will be quickly forgotten when listeners witness for themselves the stunning tensions and resolutions of an album that can be both ‘aggressive’ and ‘pastel’ simultaneously.

With that in mind, Lozano, I’ve got tickets for James Blake’s Assume Form live show. I’m going to stand in the front row – maybe I’ll dance, maybe I’ll cry. Maybe I’ll do both at once.