Fuck you, Sufjan Stevens

Soof-yan

I bought David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this morning, inspired by the Infinite Summer project. In the prologue, Dave Eggers extols Wallace’s ambition—appropriately, I assume, as of page xiv—and compares the scope of the now much-lamented novelist’s aims to, among other things, Sufjan Stevens’s 50-state album project. This comparison is at once stunningly apt, and powerfully infuriating. Eggers isn’t at fault here, except for perhaps just a touche of naivete. He’s bought the hype, and that’s the problem.

Sufjan Stevens, as you may recall, burst into our consciousness (or at least, my consciousness) sometime between 2003-2006. And when I say “consciousness,” I am referring to that of a very specific subset of scenesters. Stevens, with his just a bit precious and twee music, his interest in Americana, and his notable but non-threatening Christianity, seemed like a character created exactly to appeal to the This American Life and New Yorker set. Sealing the deal was the towering ambition he promised us: “Come On, Hear the Illinoise!” and “Greetings from Michigan,” the first two albums of his that I was familiar with, were just the first two chapters of an immense portrait of the country, the Great American Novel re-writ as indie-pop folk, with attention lavished on our national quirk and pathos. How bold Stevens was. Not only was he reaching for the heights of Melville and Twain, he was offering us, in the depths of post-2004 anti-Bush wallowing, a chance to reclaim a shred of patriotism. Americana without the bombs. (No coincidence, perhaps, that this music featured heavily in “Little Miss Sunshine,” a seemingly lovable comedy that, in retrospect, dripped with smug blue-state self-regard and condescension.)

But it was a bait-and-switch. Stevens sold us a bill of goods—”Michigan” and “Illinois”—with a promise of 48 more on the way to justify the project. Reward me for the next 48 chapters, he seemed to ask, by buying these two. So we did, and he’s gone ahead and broken the promise. A full three years after completing “Illinois,” he was still teasing the press about his next choice. (New Jersey? Do mine next!) At this rate, he won’t even finish the Big 10 states, much less all 50.

Artistic ambition deserves reward, even if it falls short of the goals it sets. But to sell the first installments of a project by titillating an audience with a faked promise of extreme boldness—that’s awfully bad faith. Stevens was cynical enough to push all of our hipster buttons without seeming to actually feel it, and that’s the peak of artistic sleaze, and bad enough that I’m probably never going to listen Stevens again. The two albums don’t stand on their own. They only work as part of a project that we now find out is not real.

Good thing I stole “Michigan” and “Illinois.”