The Problematic Punk Piano

Taurus/Piano month goes hard on the keyboard

This month, as you might know, the Musical Zodiac - a weekly series in which we arbitrarily match up a musical instrument (or instrument family) with an astrological sign - paired the Piano with Taurus. Ironically, I’m a Taurus who can’t play the piano, but there is an artist who does play and consistently hammers my heart strings.

Let’s talk about Ben Folds.

Drowning Slowly

Like many people, my first encounter with Ben Folds Five was hearing “Brick” on the radio in 1998. The bowed bass hooked me, and as I sought out more from the band, I found a lot to love.

At the time, I was a new father, and the U.S. Air Force had just sent me to England, where I spent three years working 12-hour, rotating shifts. I was in my twenties, and still on a journey to figure out who I was. I’m not proud of many of the opinions I defended back then. I was reading Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, and trying to figure out who to be if I wasn’t going to be the evangelical Christian kid I had been.

I was also still figuring out how to approach music. I’ve talked about my first steps into the world of pop and rock, and shared some of my early favorites (now in the archives), but I wasn’t thinking about music back then the way I do now.

Like most 20-something cis-gender ex-evangelical American males, I wasn’t as impressed by the emotional weight of “Brick” as I was by the bombast and edgy ironic humor of “Song for the Dumped” with its aggressive chorus, “Give me my money back, you bitch!” I didn’t judge things based on how they hit, or whether they punched up or down; I only cared if they made me laugh.

And despite the deeper thoughts in evidence on certain tracks, Ben Folds Five made me laugh.

Burning Their Own Memories

There is a case to be made that some of Ben’s choices are deeply problematic.

In their early days, Ben Folds Five promoted themselves as “punk rock for pussies,” later softening that to “punk rock for sissies,” which only shifts the punching down from women to gay men. Many of his songs over the years have voiced the inner thoughts of narrators that I would describe as incels— “Song for the Dumped,” and “Bitch Went Nuts.”

Arguing that these lyrics are meant to be ironic is a common defense, and if these songs were only meant to be funny, I would agree that it is an inadequate defense. However, there is a lot of nuance in the way Ben writes these characters in his songs. They are not good people making a solid case for their point of view; instead, they are humans behaving in ways that are all too common. You may (correctly) reject their point of view, but we often forget to acknowledge their humanity, and Ben forces us to do that.

His cover of Dr. Dre’s “Bitches Ain’t Shit” for example, resonates with audiences for the irony of a suburban white pianist treating hip-hop lyrics seriously. It’s funny, at first, but then it sinks in that (as Ben explains in his intro in this 2017 video) underneath the abusive language and hyper-masculine posturing, there is a sad country song.

Setting aside accusations of cultural appropriation or perpetuating the dark side of hip-hop culture, arguably for a laugh, I see a valid attempt to engage with the material on its merits and let the audience arrive at a place where they judge the behavior of the characters for themselves.

He puts himself in this uncomfortable space on purpose, and for a reason. And I think that reason is to help people outgrow that stage where they uncritically accept awful ideas under the guise of entertainment.

So I Can’t Be Saved

I think we all try to forget that stage of our lives once we get past it. If we get past it. It’s a vulnerable, larval phase of our emotional and intellectual development, no matter when we go through it. For most of us, it can start in middle school—for me, it started much later. And we build up mental defenses until we find a place where we are confident that we don’t have to think about the uncomfortable stuff anymore. Our biases solidify, and we stop questioning our foundational assumptions.

A few years before the release of The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Tori Amos had set me on a trajectory away from my childhood notions of faith and religion. In 1999, I still wasn’t sure if I was ready to abandon the magical thinking and dependence on mysticism that religion demands. I was scared to let go, but I hadn’t grappled with what I was scared of.

Tori set me up in 1994, and five years later, Ben spiked the ball.

I was driving on an English fen road, by myself, the first time I heard these lyrics. I had to pull over. My emotional Jenga tower of defense mechanisms and philosophical fakery were knocked down outright by that simple statement. “I don’t believe in God, so I can’t be saved.”

There was a lot to unpack then, and I still experience tremors from that moment, but it clarified what was holding me back. I was still letting a fear of an imaginary hell created to intimidate me keep me from seeing the universe as it was.

Ben’s catalog is full of simple, revelatory moments like this one. And so, of course, the music critics dubbed him “sentimental” and insisted that he stay true to the “punk rock for pussies” slogan from the band’s early days.

Still Rockin’ the Suburbs

I’ve always felt that what elevates art is the artist’s ability to entertain and teach. There is a trick to putting yourself into your work in a way that connects without feeding into the kind of parasocial relationship that plagues our celebrity culture.

Ben Folds is an artist who seems to have found the ability to do that—to be an authentic version of himself and create art that feels like it is about us, the audience.

Here he is, reading my wife’s request on his MySpace live stream:

I think he also continues to grow and develop, and acknowledges the problems created by his edgier material. Take this self-critical banger from the 2013 BFF reunion The Sound of the Life of the Mind¹:

There’s no hiding from the joke when you make yourself the joke.

And I think that’s brave.

1. Full disclosure, if you look for my name in the credits, you’ll see I helped crowd fund this album. ImaVeePee