I don’t think of Ethel Cain as a pop star, but it seems that some people do or at least want to. I’m not the first to note her complicated strained relationship with the pop elements in her work. Evan Retylewksi’s review of her 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter is introduced with a summation on her previous works up to that point:
“[On 2021 EP Inbred], she presented herself as a kind of American gothic Lana Del Rey, with a flair for lurid prose about hateful sex and violent impulses. Split between dreamy, contemporary pop and brutalist, witchy dirges, the EP left uncertain whether Cain, then 23, was setting out for cult stardom or actual stardom. At times, like the opening single “Michelle Pfeiffer,” she seemed to be campaigning for total TikTok saturation; at others she sounded as if she might retreat permanently back into the woods.”
Retylewksi then notes how Preacher’s Daughter’s one smash pop track “American Teenager” is presented up front as the second song on the tracklist while the rest of the record “roiling gloom and smoldering Americana.” At the end of the review, the writer wishes that there were more thrills to lift the album out of the sprawled dirges. “American Teenager” and the previously released “Crush” are the most anthemic-appearing tracks in Cain’s discography. They’ve got the big choruses and hooks – “Crush” had a TikTok moment and “American Teenager” ended up on Obama’s summer playlist [insert Lucy Dacus “war criminal” tweet here]. The funny thing is, as Meaghan Garvey notes, even with its big Heartland rock sound and perhaps some sonic similarities to one of Taylor’s Swift glossy and implicitly neoliberal eras, “American Teenager” is an anti-patriotic pop songs that critiques the ridiculous false promises of the American dream. It even goes so far as to satirically include a riff from pull-yourself-by-the-bootstraps mega-dud “Don’t Stop Believing.” Of course, not everyone interprets music the same way, and so not everyone hears the dark underbelly of this song. Difference in audience interpretation also influences why some people want Ethel Cain to be a main pop girlie and to treat her like one. Differences in audience interpretation also help to explain why some people view Ethel Cain’s latest EP Perverts as a diversion from her sound or even as fuck-off to parts of her fan base viewing her through a pop artist lens.
It is true that Cain has reacted before to the response to her music by some who opt to respond in annoying stan or weirdo memeified forms. A since-deleted Tumblr post lamented what she saw as the irony-poisoned and insincere engagement that art is commonly met with within the echo chambers of fan groups these days. This problem seems to be most present where people engage with culture primarily through media platforms and with the least proximity to those making art on a local DIY level. In other words, the bigger the star, the greater the inclination to not treat them like a regular person. You might hear some say “Mother is mothering” at the arena concert, but probably not at the nail salon, grocery store, or during your friend’s set at a local open mic night.
On the Indiecast podcast, Ian Cohen and Steven Hyden wondered whether Perverts’ increased reliance on droning repetition, murky ambiance, and longevity was an attempt by the artist to de-centre herself, as represented by her voice, from the music. Who’s to say, although it is also clear from her other posts that she also is a fan of drone music and so it makes sense to make a project that leans more in that direction.
Some of the reaction to the record has been negative due to the lack of immediacy or any of those raw thrills that are there on Preacher’s Daughter. Through the language of the pop fan online macroculture, those disappointed that they didn’t get what they want may go so far as to call this EP a flop. However, I feel like the main pop girlie industrial complex requires women artists to conform to a certain set of expectations and a set template that does offer some wiggle room but, ultimately, is not one that Cain slots easily into. The main pop girlie template requires, in addition to pop songs obviously, some lore and a strong aesthetic, and the character of Ethel Cain, as created by Hayden Anhedonia, does have that. It exists vividly in much of the songwriting, in various music videos, and through her Tumblr posts. Combine that with a few great pop songs, and it makes sense why people are trying to shoehorn Cain into the figure they’d like her to be based on a familiar template of easily consumable and highly mediatized solo musicians.
But let’s be honest, Ethel Cain is not that pop. Most songs on Preacher’s Daughter are longer than 5 minutes and short on immediacy. For chrissakes she’s been putting out ambient music for several years through a side project. Had she come up a decade earlier, it may be more likely that she’d be compared to singer-songwriters with a background in metal or other black t-shirt music scenes, like Chelsea Wolfe, Emma Ruth Rundle, or Marissa Nadler, for example. Despite the comparisons to Lana Del Ray, that are perhaps apt on the level of both artists mining the aesthetics of a seedy and corrupted Americana, I feel Cain has more in common artistically with the artists she has collaborated with such as dour “heaven metal” guitarist Midwife, doomy shoegazer Vyva Melinkolya, midwest emo frontman turned Soundcloud emo rapper Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, or ambient slowcore trio Good Night and Good Morning. These are not artists you’re gonna find Obama’s stupid fucking playlist, but these are some of the artists Cain has connected and collaborated with.
I think another reason why some might want to slot Cain into the pop girl mode, is that Cain’s character, as informed by Anhedonia’s backstory, fits well into a specific framework for assessing art made by women and marginalized individuals in a manner that is informed by the “affective bonds between Western liberal feminisms and financial logics.” The marginalized woman, (especially those who are racialized, queer, living in the Third World, etc.) who is lacking in material resources/capital in relation to bourgeois white men in the Western world, requires resilience in order to overcome the odds and make it in the world. This resilience is necessitated by the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s austerity modes of governance and its globalized plundering of resources from developing nations. At the same time, this resilience is celebrated by liberal popular feminism, who cheers on the resilient woman for overcoming obstacles to break through the glass ceiling, so to speak, while disregarding the class-based oppression that forces some individuals to be more “resilient” than others. Those who invest in the [resilient] woman stand to gain more on their “return” because the woman starts from a lower rung on the socioeconomic hierarchy. Michelle Murphy has written about this financial logic on an economic level, whereas Robin James has extended Murphy’s analysis to demonstrate how resilience discourse has manifested culturally, particularly within pop music.
Compared to, say, the numerous female pop stars who were shaped for pop music stardom in the training ground that is the Disney industrial complex (Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Miley Cyrus, etc.), Hayden Anhedonia’s music starts from a much different position as a trans woman raised in a heavily religious household in the rural American South. Attempts to insert her work in the main pop girl realm are investments with more return than those of more institutionalized stars, whose investors have already cashed in significantly. Music publications, journalists, streaming services, and the record labels that are certainly knocking on Cain’s door could turn her story into a triumph of resilience, and one with larger political relevance due to attacks on trans people’s rights and safety by right wing Christian transphobes with political power. There could all kinds of click-baiting catchy headlines that could’ve produced all kinds of annoying inescapable discourse if Cain made an album full of big melodic sad-girl bops, so I’m kinda glad that didn’t happen.
The spectacle that is the techno-corporate popular music industrial complex and its sanctioned practice fandom are lucrative bourgeois appropriations of the ways in which the masses connected with one another through the creation and performance of music. It is a machine built based on the desires and actions of groups of people, which influence the desires and actions of people that both perpetuate and resist its aims. Whether it was intended or not, Perverts feels like a wrench that resists the churn of the gears turning the machine toward a hegemonic form of engagement with Cain’s music. As listeners have commented online, significant whiplash occurs when the EP ends and the algorithm serves up a Chappell Roan or Charli XCX song immediately afterward. This rips a chasm in the predictability of the patterns created through the negotiation of desires between listeners and the music/tech industry. Surely the algorithm will evolve in response to the habits of who choose to return to this EP again and who doesn’t. But in this moment, it seems apparent from the various reactions I’ve seen this record, making a challenging and left-of-centre record was the far more compelling thing to do.