St. Vincent - New York
By 2014, with the release of her fourth album, St. Vincent, it was clear that if anybody in this world deserved to be called the new Bowie, it was Annie Clark. It was not only her electric virtuosism at playing guitar, or her way of create high-art pop that was smart and quirky and poignant, it was her way of reminding of what a performance is. In a world where singers compete every year to create high-produced shows, with effects, costume changes, pyrotechnics, and at times, even dancing sharks, what St. Vincent was doing in her live shows was reminding all that the artist and the performance should be always to support the statement they are doing in their music, and not the music being a excuse to put on a show where the track is playing in the background. Like Bowie, she created a persona that went along with her music and not one that could shock the media and the audience (in the Lady Gaga costumes style).
Two years later, David Bowie died. It was a monumental moment for music because he managed to turn his death into the final act of the performance that was his entire career, even if he got closure and he left this world as the biggest pop music artist in history, it touched deeply the hearts of thousands of people. To someone who has publicly acknowledged how much Bowie influenced her music and her art, St. Vincent needed to address her personal feeling of loss. She never got to personally met her idol, but it didn't made it felt less like she had lost one of her best friends.
New York contrast sharply with the rest of her catalogue, she has never sounded this intimate before. We might not be treated for her amazing guitar skills, but the accompanying piano and the crescendo synths give it a beautiful elegance that is able to keep the track very simple, but make it sound grandiloquent. It is a song about the desolation feeling that 2016 left in the world, and probably on a personal level it wasn't also the best time for Clark, since the media reported heavy on her failed romances with two famous celebrities. It is the isolation paradox of being in the most agitated city on the world but feeling empty and alone. But even there, she uses her wit to call for the "only motherfucker in this city that can handle me/stand me/forgive me". Like in a Woody Allen movie located in this same city, the song is not only about a lover, it might be an important part of it, but it is about oneself and the relationships that we carry with all the people that, from the 8.5 millions of people that inhabit New York, form our selected circle and are the ones who shape our experience of what New York means to us.
St. Vincent is a master an contrast and this song sharply opposes her second single of Masseduction, called Los Ageless. Her talking to extreme opposite cities (both in location and in North American lifestyle) is show very well in her music, so this leave us with high expectations to see how this two tracks play in the entire album. Annie Clark is still not Bowie, but the trajectory that she has been tracing aims there.
