007. "Masseduction", St. Vincent (2017)
This is the third part of a three-essay exploration of the work of St. Vincent. Read the first and second parts.
For St. Vincent, releasing an album is “like having a bridezilla-style wedding…except, in this case, you’re walking down the aisle to your own music, by yourself, to yourself”. In a mock press conference streamed on Facebook Watch, Annie Clark underwent the ever-arduous task of announcing the release of her fifth solo studio album, Masseduction, posturing herself behind a hot-pink lectern and a cluster of hot-pink microphones, speaking from hot-pink lips.
“You, the fans, are the attendees”, she continues with a nod, “you’ll pick sides. This side prefers the old me walking down the aisle; this side is on board for the new me waiting at the altar. And there is definitely at least one person who will protest the marriage in a drunk and a dramatic way”.
To be fair, she warned us. By now, St. Vincent has weathered a decades-long career, undergoing dramatic transformations with the dawn of each new album. She described her acclaimed 2011 release Strange Mercy as the depiction of “a repressed housewife on barbiturates and white wine” and 2014’s self-titled album as the doctrine of “a near-future cult leader”, donning new hairstyles and ensembles in music videos and onstage. In other words, Clark’s new music is never just new music - it’s a new image, the dawn of a new public persona. With each introduction of a fresh sonic profile, she adapts, moving faster than her audience can keep up. In Masseduction, she pivots to the self-described “dominatrix at the mental institution”.
The ontogenesis of Masseduction is no different. In addition to the mock press conference, she released a series of short clips written by comedian and Sleater-Kinney former Carrie Brownstein — with whom she would later collaborate on the 2020 mockumentary film The Nowhere Inn — answering a sequence of dull, mildly trenchant questions: Insert question about what seduction means to her. Insert question about whether she Googles herself. Ask whether Annie Clark and St. Vincent are the same person. “Honestly, you’d have to ask her”.
In the three years between the releases of St. Vincent and Masseduction, Annie Clark entered a new pedigree of fame, soaring beyond Billboard charts and landing firmly in the tabloids, where she was often documented with ex-girlfriend, supermodel, and general rich person Cara Delevigne. In my article on Strange Mercy, I delineated the untimely exposition of the imprisonment of Annie Clark’s father for stock market manipulation at the hands of the Daily Mail, a circumstance that Clark kept in the shadows for years (until, of course, making an album about it).
Annie Clark has a storied relationship with the press, to put it gently - she received a good Internet finger-wagging following a 2021 interview with writer Emma Madden that Clark demanded be shelved. During her press cycle for the album at hand, she invited journalists to crawl into a 10-by-10 pink wooden box with her in London, reportedly playing pre-recorded answers from her phone or pretending to check her email if she found a reporter’s inquiries redundant. Resulting interviews portrayed her as an aloof, hostile figure who refused to make eye contact with those tasked with interrogating her.
The content of Masseduction, in an eerie way, cannot be separated from these bizarre, unsympathetic appearances. Apart from the public aftereffects of her behavior, which live anywhere along the spectrum between “cheeky” and “churlish” , and unfortunately apart from the disrespect she paid a cohort of journalists in service of her performance, Clark’s distance makes perfect sense. After a decade of writing, producing, publicizing, touring, and everything in between that is inherent to a successful solo musician’s career, St. Vincent expressed exhaustion. For years, reporters had regurgitated the same banal inquiries, asking about her weight and her shoes and her hair. They had, perhaps, stepped an inch too near, defying the artist’s own insistences of personal penetralia. In 2016, they violated her deepest sense of privacy — her family — and they would do it again. She pointed a finger, however crudely, at the vultures, those circling the carcass of her secrets and humiliations.
And in that vein, Masseduction feels similarly aloof when compared to the artist’s previous cornerstone works. Gone were the musical idiosyncrasies of her former self, the twee resonance of Marry Me and the math rock guitar melodies of Strange Mercy. Masseduction is St. Vincent wrapped in airtight pink cellophane, extremities constricted, grinning atop her pedestal.
Although Masseduction might sound like a prescriptive pop record with razor-blade edges, insecurity and curiosity alike are woven into the lyrical fabric. The subject matter is pointedly mature, recalling the strident depravity of Strange Mercy and St. Vincent with a toothier bite and a coarser bark. In the album’s titular track, a warbled, deliciously over-processed version of Clark’s signature voice bounces between the phrases “mass seduction” and “mass destruction” as she delivers a sorry-not-sorry expression to exhaustion: “I can’t turn off what turns me on!”
The record’s perversion permeates the song “Savior”, in which St. Vincent and an invisible sexual partner experiment with role-play, depicting Clark as a teacher, a nun, a policeman, straddled firmly in imitations of power but never fully grasping that power itself. Between costume changes are admissions of impotence: “But I keep you on your best behavior / honey, I can’t be your savior”.
Masseduction is, in its entirety, about the costumes St. Vincent wears - or, rather, a slipping of the gimp mask, revealing an underbelly of desperation and dread beyond her proclaimed desires. In “Los Ageless”, she masquerades as a predator, declaring herself a “monster” and her lover a “sacred cow” over a shredding, distorted guitar riff. But dominance slips through her fingers as the chorus makes way to her true vulnerability: “How can anybody have you and lose you / and not lose their minds too?”.
The album’s strengths lie in its most sonically rapturous moments; in “Fear the Future”, a resounding manifesto that slivers the space around it into shreds, Clark is once again on her knees, pleading for respite: “Come on, sir / now I need an answer / my baby’s lost to the monster”. The ensuing “Young Lover” illustrates the monster’s carnage, depicting a paramour lost in the fog of drug addiction: “You’re boozin’ on a midday / and I don’t see no cake”. The “dominatrix at the mental institution”, portrayed through Clark’s falsetto howl, begs for salvation: “Young lover, I wish that I was your drug”.
The album concludes with a piano-driven, steel-guitar-woven waltz revealing the bedrock of Clark’s most depraved desires. Removed from talk of latex and rubber, from fetish and excitation, she divulges in baseless, immature threat, a desperate ploy for attention: “And sometimes I go to the edge of my roof / and I think I’ll jump just to punish you / and if I should float on the taxis below / no one will notice, no one will know”. But in a moment of détente, St. Vincent concedes: “And then I think / what could be better than love, than love, than love?”
If the release of Masseduction can be likened to a wedding ceremony, then, according to St. Vincent’s original mock press conference, “the record’s about love. At its best, and at its core, it’s about love. That’s it, that is all, that is literally the only point. And I do mean literally to mean literally.”
Therein lies the true essence of Masseduction: it’s love shrouded in desperation, cloaked in layers of perverted pretense. In a somewhat befuddling way, the album stands as the most intemerate representation of St. Vincent herself: it punctures her performance art and unravels in real-time before our eyes. It is the deliberately documented downfall of a woman in distress, a kicking-and-screaming rapture of an identity befallen. Annie Clark has never wanted to be asked what she means; it’s all there, all through and between the moments of musical eruption, of screaming synth lines and bubbling beats. And, at the end, among the shattered glass and fragments of splintered guitar, there is only love.
Through everything - through the hotel room in “Chloe in the Afternoon” and the “Severed Crossed Fingers”, there is only love. At the beginning of this series, I wrote that I couldn’t quite figure out St. Vincent, and in all honesty, I couldn’t. But St. Vincent has never asked for us to figure her out, not really - she’s given it to us, plain and simple, through the music. “At its best, and at its core, it’s about love.”