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In Partial Defense of Reddit

Note: This essay is not intended as a blanket endorsement of Reddit. The platform has many well-documented flaws: trolling, pile-ons, misinformation, and a general tendency toward chaos. Much of its reputation as one of the rougher corners of the internet is entirely deserved.

The point here is narrower.

Despite its disorder, Reddit also preserves something that has become rarer elsewhere on the modern web: large, open conversations among people who possess small but real pockets of knowledge about highly specific subjects. When these fragments accumulate—through correction, argument, memory, and curiosity—they can occasionally produce surprisingly informative results.

The examples in this essay range from the internal royalty disputes of Jane’s Addiction to a map of alleged sightings compiled by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. In both cases the same phenomenon appears: individuals contributing small pieces of cultural memory that gradually assemble into something resembling a collective understanding.

This is the limited claim of the essay. Reddit is frequently messy and unreliable, but it also functions as a peculiar kind of public knowledge commons—one where curiosity, enthusiasm, and the occasional obsessive hobbyist can still combine to produce insights that might otherwise remain scattered or forgotten.

Everyone knows that Reddit is terrible.

It is chaotic. It is full of profanity, bad jokes, half-informed opinions, and the occasional theory that appears to have been typed at three in the morning by someone who has not slept since the Clinton administration. Entire careers have been built explaining why Reddit represents the worst tendencies of the modern internet.

And yet.

The other day I was reading a thread about the latest implosion of Jane’s Addiction, the once-great Los Angeles group whose internal tensions have been simmering since roughly the Reagan administration. The immediate subject was the collapse of a reunion tour following an onstage altercation involving frontman Perry Farrell. The comments were exactly what one would expect from Reddit: profanity, gallows humor, and several variations of “this band has been breaking up since 1991.”

But as the thread continued something interesting happened.

Between the jokes and one-line reactions, the users began reconstructing the band’s internal history. Someone noted that Jane’s had already declared itself finished several times across the decades. Someone else pointed out that the early sound of the band had been shaped heavily by bassist Eric Avery. Another commenter raised the eternal rock-band problem: royalties.

And this, as it turns out, is where the story becomes interesting.

Money has a way of dissolving even the most inspired musical partnerships. Bands begin as small utopian experiments—four or five people creating something new together—and then the checks begin to arrive. Once that happens, questions emerge that are almost impossible to resolve cleanly. Who wrote the song? Who contributed the riff? Who deserves the lion’s share of the publishing?

Rock history is essentially a graveyard of groups destroyed by arguments over fractions of ownership.

In the thread I was reading, one user mentioned a detail I had not known: a claim that Avery at one point wore or promoted merchandise suggesting a 51 percent stake in the band’s identity. Whether literally true or not, the anecdote captured something fundamental about how these disputes unfold. Creative partnerships may begin democratically, but the distribution of credit rarely stays that way.

The remarkable part was that I had learned all of this not from a music journalist or a band biography, but from a chaotic conversation among strangers.

Which brings me to the modest defense of Reddit.

The platform’s reputation is built on its worst features: trolling, argument, and endless bad takes. All of those things exist, of course. But what critics often miss is that Reddit also contains something else: an enormous micro-density of cultural knowledge.

The process is messy. Someone posts a half-remembered fact. Someone else corrects it. Another person adds a detail from an interview they once read fifteen years ago. Gradually, through the collision of dozens of small contributions, something resembling a coherent picture emerges.

It is not elegant. It is rarely authoritative in the traditional sense. But it is often surprisingly informative.

What Reddit does, at its best, is something the modern media ecosystem sometimes struggles to replicate: it gathers together thousands of people who care obsessively about very specific things. Musicians. Gearheads. Amateur historians. Programmers. Aviation nerds. Movie buffs. Backyard astronomers.

And when those people start talking, knowledge begins to accumulate.

The phenomenon becomes even clearer when the subject matter becomes absurd.

Consider a thread from the cryptozoology corner of Reddit devoted to a map of Bigfoot sightings. At first glance the discussion appears to be pure nonsense. The premise itself—tracking sightings of a large unidentified forest creature—is hardly the sort of topic one expects to produce serious information.

And yet the map itself is strangely compelling.

People immediately begin checking their regions. Someone from Maine wonders why Bigfoot seems to avoid the state despite its endless forests. Another user proposes that two “alpha Bigfoots” are fighting for territorial dominance between Maine and Canada. Someone else links to the sightings database maintained by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. A commenter from rural Illinois notices that two reported sightings occurred along the same river that runs behind his property and proceeds to describe the terrain—swampy woods surrounded by miles of farmland where, he notes, something large might plausibly remain hidden.

The subject is ridiculous.

The conversation, however, is oddly informative.

You learn about geography. You learn about folklore. You learn where people live, how they interpret the landscapes around them, and how stories circulate through local communities. What begins as a joke about Bigfoot gradually becomes something like amateur field anthropology.

This is the strange virtue of Reddit.

The platform functions as a kind of digital commons in which thousands of small fragments of knowledge collide in public. No single commenter possesses the full story. But collectively they often assemble something larger than any individual source might provide.

Which leads to the modest conclusion of this essay.

If you want perfectly verified information delivered in polished and authoritative form, Reddit is not the place to go. But if you want to watch curiosity, memory, obsession, and local knowledge combine in unpredictable ways, it can be surprisingly useful.

It turns out that when enough ordinary people gather in one place to talk about the things they care about—even Jane’s Addiction royalty disputes or the migratory patterns of an imaginary forest giant—they occasionally produce something that the official channels of culture struggle to replicate.

Not perfection.

But knowledge, nonetheless.

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks V: Rod Blagojevich

Note: This essay concludes the small series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces explored several very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan, the sly tactical persistence of Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks, the tragic artistic authenticity of Amy Winehouse, and the mythic public legend surrounding Muhammad Ali.


The story of Rod Blagojevich introduces a different category altogether: the shameless comeback.

Unlike the other figures in the series, Blagojevich’s return to public life does not depend on moral vindication, heroic persistence, or cultural myth. Instead it illustrates something more peculiar about contemporary politics and media. In an age of fragmented audiences and constant attention cycles, a disgraced figure may sometimes reappear simply by refusing to leave the stage.

Whether one sees Blagojevich’s re-emergence as comic, absurd, or oddly instructive, it provides a fitting final example for the series. Not every comeback is admirable, but each one reveals something about the strange ways public life allows stories to continue.

Not all comebacks are noble.

Some are heroic, like the moral vindication of Kofi Annan. Some are tactical, like the sly fourth-quarter returns engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks. Some exist somewhere between tragedy and authenticity, like the brief blazing career of Amy Winehouse. And some, like the legend of Muhammad Ali, grow into something close to myth.

But there is another type of comeback altogether.

The shameless comeback.

For that, it is difficult to find a more perfect case than Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois whose political career once appeared to have ended in spectacular disgrace.

The original scandal is by now familiar. In 2008 federal investigators revealed that Blagojevich had been recorded on FBI wiretaps discussing how he might profit from appointing a replacement to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. The recordings were devastating. In one of the most memorable lines in modern American political scandal, Blagojevich described the Senate seat as something valuable that he was reluctant to give away for nothing.

The fallout was swift. Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office by the Illinois legislature. Later he was convicted on multiple corruption charges and sentenced to federal prison. For most politicians, this sequence would represent the end of the story.

Disgrace. Prison. Silence.

But American public life has always contained another possibility: the comeback powered not by redemption but by spectacle.

Even before his imprisonment, Blagojevich seemed instinctively drawn toward the theatrical dimension of his situation. He appeared on television talk shows, launched media interviews, and treated the unfolding scandal almost as if it were a strange kind of reality program in which he remained the central character.

His appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice, hosted by Donald Trump, felt less like an attempt to restore dignity than a recognition that modern politics and entertainment had already merged.

Then came the commutation.

In 2020 Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence, releasing him after several years behind bars. The decision itself was controversial, but the effect was unmistakable: the stage was suddenly open again.

And Blagojevich, to his credit—or perhaps to his creditlessness—walked right back onto it.

The most striking feature of his post-prison public life has been the absence of embarrassment. Many disgraced politicians attempt some form of contrition when they re-enter the public conversation. Apologies are issued. Lessons are discussed. A tone of humility is adopted.

Blagojevich chose a different path.

Instead he embraced a kind of shameless persistence, appearing in conservative media outlets, repositioning himself politically, and speaking about his case with the tone of someone who believes the whole episode was misunderstood or exaggerated. The ideological shift from Democrat to Republican was particularly striking, not because party changes are unheard of but because in Blagojevich’s case it seemed less like a conversion than a strategic recalibration.

It was, in other words, a comeback powered by the modern media ecosystem.

In an earlier era, a corruption scandal of this magnitude might have consigned a politician to permanent obscurity. But the fragmented media landscape of the twenty-first century offers a different possibility. There is always another audience somewhere, another platform, another narrative waiting to be constructed.

Blagojevich appears to understand this instinctively.

Which is why his story belongs in a series about comebacks, even if the comeback itself is of a peculiar variety. Unlike the moral return of Annan or the mythic return of Ali, Blagojevich’s version depends less on redemption than on endurance.

The secret of the shameless comeback is simple.

You refuse to leave the stage.

You keep talking. You keep appearing. You keep telling your version of the story until, slowly but inevitably, the scandal itself begins to blur into just another chapter in the larger spectacle of American politics.

In that sense Rod Blagojevich may represent a distinctly modern form of comeback: not heroic, not tragic, but theatrical.

And in the strange carnival of contemporary public life, theatrical persistence can sometimes be enough.

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks IV: Muhammad Ali

Note: This essay is the third entry in the series “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” The earlier pieces looked at very different kinds of returns: the moral vindication of Kofi Annan and the small, tactical in-game comebacks engineered by Joe Nash of the Seattle Seahawks.


The story of Muhammad Ali operates on a much larger stage. Ali’s exile from boxing after refusing the Vietnam draft and his eventual return to the championship ranks is one of the most famous comebacks in sports history. But the episode described here—the Los Angeles suicide rescue in 1981—is a smaller and stranger moment.


The event appears to have genuinely occurred, yet it also carries the faint aura of legend that often surrounds Ali’s public life. The champion arrives, speaks to a desperate man at a window, and the crisis resolves itself. It is almost too perfectly aligned with the myth of Muhammad Ali not to raise a few questions about performance, storytelling, and the way public figures sometimes inhabit the roles the world expects them to play.


In that sense the episode captures something essential about Ali’s comeback. By the time his boxing career entered its final chapters, he had become more than an athlete. He had become a figure whose life continually generated stories that felt larger than ordinary events.


Whether one treats the Los Angeles episode as simple heroism, public theater, or some mixture of the two, it remains a fascinating illustration of how Ali’s legend continued to grow long after the great fights were over.

Some comebacks are measured in championships.

Others are measured in stories.

The career of Muhammad Ali contains both. His return to boxing after the long exile of the late 1960s is one of the great sporting comebacks of the twentieth century. Stripped of his title for refusing induction into the Vietnam War, banned from the ring during what should have been his athletic prime, Ali eventually returned to reclaim the heavyweight championship and cement his place as the most famous boxer on earth.

But the Ali comeback is not just about boxing.

Long before the exile and the triumphant return, the story had already begun to take on mythic dimensions. In 1964 a young fighter from Louisville named Cassius Clay stunned the world by defeating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title. Soon afterward he announced that Cassius Clay was a “slave name” and that he would henceforth be known as Muhammad Ali.

The change was shocking to much of the American public at the time. Ali aligned himself with the Nation of Islam, spoke openly about race and politics, and quickly became one of the most controversial athletes in the country.

Then came the draft.

In 1967 Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. The consequences were immediate and severe. He was stripped of his heavyweight title, banned from boxing, and faced the possibility of prison. For several years the greatest fighter in the world was not allowed to step into the ring.

The exile transformed him.

When Ali eventually returned to boxing in the early 1970s, he was no longer merely a talented heavyweight with a flair for poetry and bravado. He had become something larger: a political figure, a symbol of resistance, a man whose name carried moral and cultural weight far beyond the sport.

The comeback fights that followed helped cement that transformation. In 1974 Ali traveled to Zaire to face George Foreman in the legendary The Rumble in the Jungle. Foreman was younger, stronger, and widely expected to win easily.

Instead Ali introduced the world to the “rope-a-dope,” leaning back against the ropes and absorbing Foreman’s punches until the younger champion exhausted himself. In the eighth round Ali knocked him out.

It was one of the great theatrical moments in sports history: the exiled champion returning to reclaim the crown.

But somewhere along the way Ali’s comeback had begun to operate on another level entirely.

He had become something more than a boxer. Part athlete, part moral figure, part living myth. And like all myths, the Ali story eventually began to generate episodes that feel almost too perfectly suited to the character.

One of the strangest of these occurred in Los Angeles in 1981.

A man was threatening to jump from the ledge of a ninth-floor building. Police had been negotiating for hours. Crowds gathered below, watching the terrible drama unfold at a distance.

Then Muhammad Ali arrived.

Accounts differ slightly in the details, but the basic outline is consistent. Ali spoke to the man from a nearby window, urging him not to jump. Eventually the man climbed back inside the building with Ali beside him. Photographs exist of the moment, and police officers later confirmed the story.

By all reasonable accounts, Ali helped save the man’s life.

And yet the story carries a faint aura of improbability.

Not because it didn’t happen—it clearly did—but because it feels so perfectly aligned with the Ali persona that one can’t help wondering about the role of performance in the moment.

Ali had always understood something most athletes do not: that being Muhammad Ali was itself a kind of public art.

From the beginning he blurred the line between competition and theater. The rhymes, the predictions, the playful insults directed at opponents—all of it was part of a larger performance. Ali didn’t simply fight boxers. He performed the role of the greatest boxer in the world.

By the early 1980s that role had evolved even further. Ali was no longer just the heavyweight champion. He had become a global cultural figure, a symbol of resilience after exile, a man whose public presence carried moral weight.

So when the story of the suicide rescue circulated, it seemed less like an unexpected episode and more like the natural continuation of the legend.

Of course Muhammad Ali would appear at the window.

Of course Muhammad Ali would talk the man down.

Of course the cameras would be there.

None of this means the moment was insincere. Ali may well have acted from genuine compassion. But it is also possible—one suspects just slightly—that he understood something about the scene as it unfolded: that the story would become another chapter in the larger narrative of Muhammad Ali.

If so, it was a brilliant instinct.

Because the image of the champion talking a desperate man back from the ledge captures something essential about the Ali comeback. After the long years of controversy and exile, Ali returned not merely as a boxer but as a figure people wanted to believe in.

The story may be small compared with the great fights—the Rumble in the Jungle, the Thrilla in Manila. Yet in its own strange way it may be just as revealing.

A champion reclaiming his title is impressive.

A champion stepping to a window and becoming, for a moment, exactly the hero the world expects him to be—that is something else entirely.

And Muhammad Ali, more than anyone, always understood the power of the moment.

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks III: Amy Winehouse

Note: This short piece reflects on the strange artistic tension that defined the career of Amy Winehouse: the way her extraordinary authenticity as a singer seemed inseparable from the personal instability that surrounded her life.

Winehouse’s music—especially the songs on Back to Black—felt at once timeless and painfully immediate. The sound drew deeply from earlier traditions of soul and rhythm and blues, yet the emotional directness of the lyrics was unmistakably modern. Few artists have managed to sound so rooted in musical history while simultaneously feeling so exposed to the present moment.

The song Rehab stands as the clearest example of this tension. Its humor, defiance, and vulnerability all exist in the same breath, making it one of the most distinctive pop recordings of the twenty-first century.

Like many listeners, I remember the late-2000s period—particularly around the Glastonbury era—when Winehouse was both an enormous star and visibly struggling. Watching those performances could feel uneasy, yet the brilliance of the voice was undeniable. The same intensity that made the music so compelling also made her career difficult to sustain.

This piece is simply an attempt to think about that paradox: how authenticity and self-destruction can sometimes become intertwined in the lives of great artists.

There are many great singers, but very few voices that feel instantly definitional—voices that seem to arrive already carrying an entire world inside them.

Amy Winehouse was one of those voices.

By the time her second album, Back to Black, exploded in the mid-2000s, it already felt as though she had stepped fully formed out of some earlier musical era. The sound was unmistakably rooted in Motown and 1960s soul, yet the lyrics were brutally modern—messy, confessional, sometimes almost painfully direct.

Winehouse didn’t just sing about heartbreak and addiction. She sang about them as if the audience had wandered into the middle of a private argument she was having with herself.

That tension—between authentic confession and visible self-destruction—became the defining element of her career.

You could hear it most clearly in Rehab, which remains one of the most distinctive pop songs of the twenty-first century. The song is catchy, almost playful on the surface, driven by a swinging brass section that feels lifted from a lost Stax session.

But the lyrics are something else entirely.

They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no, no, no.

It’s funny. It’s defiant. It’s also deeply unsettling, because the listener quickly realizes that the singer is not playing a character. The refusal at the center of the song is real.

In that sense “Rehab” became more than a hit single. It became a kind of thesis statement for the strange artistic space Winehouse occupied. The same vulnerability that gave her music its emotional power also exposed the raw nerves of her life to public view.

You could feel that tension during the years when she was both at the height of her fame and visibly unraveling.

The Glastonbury era captured this perfectly. Winehouse had become a massive international star, yet her stage presence could swing wildly from moment to moment. One minute she would be commanding the crowd with that huge, smoky voice; the next she might appear distracted, fragile, or physically unsteady.

Watching those performances could be oddly uncomfortable. The audience was witnessing genuine brilliance, but it often felt as though the brilliance was emerging from a life that was spinning out of control.

And yet the authenticity of the music was inseparable from that volatility.

Winehouse sang as if every lyric had been torn directly out of lived experience. There was no polite distance between the artist and the material. When she sang about jealousy, addiction, or heartbreak, it sounded less like performance and more like confession.

That quality made her music electrifying. It also made her career precarious.

Pop music has always had a complicated relationship with self-destructive artists. Audiences are drawn to performers who seem emotionally transparent, but the same intensity that produces great art can also be difficult to sustain under the glare of fame.

Winehouse lived inside that contradiction.

The tabloids followed her relentlessly. Every public misstep, every argument, every sign of physical decline became part of a growing media narrative. The spectacle sometimes threatened to overwhelm the music itself.

Yet when she stepped to the microphone and began to sing, the spectacle vanished.

What remained was that extraordinary voice: raw, soulful, and oddly timeless, as if it had traveled forward from another musical generation. In a pop landscape often dominated by carefully engineered personas, Winehouse sounded startlingly real.

That authenticity is why her work still resonates long after her death in 2011.

Many talented singers release successful albums. Only a handful manage to create songs that feel permanently etched into the culture. “Rehab” is one of those songs. The moment those opening horns start, the listener knows exactly what world they are entering.

It is the world of Amy Winehouse: funny, defiant, wounded, brilliant.

A place where honesty and self-destruction were never quite separable—and where the truth of the music was powerful enough to survive them both.

Note:

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On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks I: Kofi Annan

Note: This piece begins a small series I’m calling “On Comebacks and Failed Comebacks.” Political and public life are full of attempted returns. Leaders lose elections, wars, or moral arguments and then try to reclaim the stage. Most of these efforts fail. The moment has passed, the audience has moved on, and what once felt urgent has dissolved into what might be called moral fatigue. Yet every so often a different pattern appears. Occasionally someone loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for history itself to shift. When that happens, what first looked like defeat begins to resemble something closer to a delayed victory. Kofi Annan provides a particularly interesting case. His opposition to the Iraq War did not stop the invasion, and at the time it appeared that the argument had been decisively lost. Yet as the years passed and the consequences of the war became clearer, the moral judgment he articulated gained increasing weight.
In that sense, the story of Annan’s career suggests a useful distinction: some comebacks succeed not because the player reclaims the moment, but because the argument itself eventually catches up with history. Future pieces in this series will look at other figures—some who managed remarkable returns, and others whose comebacks never quite arrived.

Political life especially produces them in abundance. A leader loses a battle—an election, a war, a moral argument—and disappears into the quiet margins where yesterday’s figures slowly fade. The public moves on. The moral urgency of the moment dissolves into what might be called moral fatigue. Outrage that once seemed unstoppable becomes background noise. A new crisis appears, and the world’s attention shifts.

Once this fatigue sets in, comebacks are difficult. The audience that once cared has already drifted elsewhere. The stage has changed. Most players who attempt to return find that the moment that once belonged to them has passed.

Yet every so often a different pattern appears.

Occasionally a figure loses the immediate battle but remains present long enough for the moral tide itself to turn. When that happens, what looked like defeat begins to resemble something else entirely.

Kofi Annan offers one of the most intriguing examples of this phenomenon.

In 2003 the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. The invasion was justified by a mixture of strategic arguments, intelligence claims, and moral rhetoric about tyranny and liberation. In Washington and London the momentum of the moment was overwhelming. The war was framed as both necessary and inevitable.

The United Nations, by contrast, found itself sidelined. Annan, then serving as Secretary-General, watched as the institution he led was bypassed by the coalition preparing for war. The moment belonged to the advocates of intervention—particularly the group of American policy thinkers who had spent years arguing for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

At the time, it was not at all clear who would ultimately win the argument. What was clear was that the United Nations had lost the immediate struggle for influence. The invasion proceeded without explicit UN authorization, and the diplomatic machinery that Annan represented appeared powerless to prevent it.

The moral emergency that had animated the debate quickly hardened into geopolitical reality.

Then, in September 2004, Annan said something remarkable. In a BBC interview he stated plainly that the invasion of Iraq was illegal under international law.

It was an extraordinary declaration. Rarely does a sitting Secretary-General of the United Nations describe the actions of the world’s most powerful government in such blunt terms. Yet the statement did not produce the dramatic reversal one might imagine. The war continued. Washington and London dismissed the criticism. The machinery of global politics moved forward largely unchanged.

In the short term, Annan had lost the battle.

And the personal toll of that moment appears to have been considerable. In his biography there is a striking image from this period: Annan alone in his darkened living room, unable for a time to rise from the floor. The room itself reportedly kept in near darkness. It was not exactly depression, at least not in the clinical sense, but something close to exhaustion after a prolonged moral struggle that had failed to alter events.

It is a haunting scene. One of the most powerful diplomats in the world sitting on the floor of a dark room, confronting the limits of his influence.

At that moment, the story of Kofi Annan could easily have ended as the story of a failed comeback. A leader who tried to reassert the moral authority of international law and found that the world had already moved on.

But history has a way of rearranging the meaning of certain moments.

As the years passed, the Iraq War came to be widely regarded as a profound strategic and humanitarian mistake. The claims that had justified the invasion collapsed. The war itself destabilized the region and reshaped global politics in ways that few of its original advocates had anticipated.

Gradually, the moral argument that Annan had made—quietly but firmly—became the prevailing historical judgment.

After leaving the United Nations, Annan did not retreat entirely from public life. Instead he reappeared in a different role as a member of The Elders, a group of former statesmen attempting to exert moral influence outside formal political structures.

It was a curious transformation. No longer the head of the UN, Annan had less formal power than he once possessed. Yet his voice now carried a different kind of authority—the authority of someone who had remained in the arena long enough for events to vindicate his judgment.

By the end of his life, the moral verdict on the Iraq War had shifted decisively. Few serious observers still defended the intervention with the confidence that characterized the early years of the conflict. The consensus had moved, slowly but unmistakably, toward the position Annan had articulated when it mattered least.

In this sense, his career offers an unusual example in the history of comebacks.

He lost the battle.
But he may have won the argument.

That distinction matters.

Most political figures attempt comebacks by trying to reclaim the exact moment they once dominated. They want the same stage, the same audience, the same authority. When the moment has passed, the comeback fails.

Annan’s story suggests a different possibility. Sometimes the moral argument itself continues moving through history long after the political battle appears settled. If a leader remains present long enough, the tide may eventually turn.

Which leads to a simple but revealing observation about great players in any arena.

A truly great player is never entirely out of the game.

The moment may pass. The audience may drift away. But if the underlying argument proves sound, history itself has a way of reopening the field.

And when it does, the comeback is already underway.

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Some Everyday Catalyzed Emergencies

Note: The examples in this piece are drawn from moments in my own life where the structure I call a catalyzed emergency appeared in miniature.

What these moments share is not their subject matter but their pattern. A system—whether emotional, institutional, or social—exists in a temporary equilibrium. Then a relatively small catalyst activates tensions that were already present beneath the surface. Once activated, the situation accelerates and decisions that previously seemed distant are suddenly made in real time.

In each case, the catalytic moment itself was small: a candid remark during a conference break, a humorous but revealing line in a professional meeting, or a single sentence spoken in a social situation. Yet in each instance the effect was immediate. The atmosphere shifted, ambiguity collapsed, and the underlying structure of the situation suddenly became visible.

The personal examples described here are therefore not offered as dramatic events in themselves. Their significance lies in the way they illustrate, at the scale of everyday life, the same structural pattern that appears in larger historical crises.

Catalyzed emergencies, it turns out, are not rare occurrences reserved for moments of world history. They happen quietly and frequently in ordinary human experience.

Once you begin thinking about catalyzed emergencies, it becomes difficult not to see them everywhere.

Most of life proceeds in a kind of provisional calm. Conversations unfold along familiar paths. Institutions conduct their meetings, relationships drift through their usual rhythms, and the tensions that exist beneath the surface remain politely contained. Decisions are postponed. Conflicts are softened by habit. The system holds together because nothing has yet forced it to reveal its deeper structure.

Then something small happens.

A sentence is spoken a little too plainly.
A truth appears unexpectedly in the middle of a casual conversation.
Someone says something in a meeting that suddenly exposes the machinery of the institution.

The catalyst itself is often tiny compared to the shift that follows. Yet once it occurs, the atmosphere changes almost immediately. Decisions that once felt distant suddenly move into the present. The underlying structure—emotional, institutional, or relational—becomes visible.

Once you start noticing these moments, you realize they are everywhere.

I remember one such moment during a conference break with the young woman I call Isobel. We were talking in that loose, slightly intimate way people sometimes do between sessions, when the formal structure of the day has momentarily dissolved. The conversation drifted into unexpectedly personal territory, and at one point she mentioned something about her private life that was startlingly candid.

The remark itself was quiet and almost offhand. Nothing in the hallway changed. People were still pouring coffee, drifting between rooms, checking their schedules. The conference continued exactly as it had a few minutes before.

Yet internally something shifted very quickly.

A boundary that had previously existed only as an assumption was suddenly visible. The emotional geometry of the situation rearranged itself in an instant. It was one of those moments when the surface calm of an interaction suddenly reveals the deeper structure beneath it.

Looking back, it was a perfect example of a small catalyzed emergency. The remark itself did not create the tension that followed. It simply activated something that had already been present but unspoken.

Institutional life produces similar moments, though usually in a different register.

Years ago I attended a meeting where Steve Keegan, then responsible for development at the International Baccalaureate, delivered one of the most unintentionally perfect lines I have ever heard in a professional setting. Attempting to strike a tone of humility, he reassured the room that the organization should not think too highly of itself.

“We are not special,” he said.

Then, after a brief pause that only improved the effect, he added:

“Of course we are unique and special in many ways.”

The room erupted in laughter, not because anyone intended to mock him but because the remark revealed something everyone recognized instantly. Institutions often survive on carefully balanced narratives about themselves—humble yet exceptional, ordinary yet distinctive. When those narratives momentarily contradict themselves in public, the entire room suddenly becomes aware of the structure holding the organization together.

Again, the catalyst was small: a single sentence.

But in that moment the underlying psychology of the institution briefly revealed itself. Everyone in the room could see the gears turning.

The same pattern appears in more personal moments as well, sometimes with surprisingly decisive consequences.

I remember a night when a man was attempting to pick up Mariko. It was the sort of situation that unfolds quietly in bars and restaurants all over the world—nothing dramatic, just two people talking while someone else tries to determine what role they themselves are supposed to play in the unfolding scene.

For a while the equilibrium held. The conversation drifted, the man continued his efforts, and I watched the situation with the vague uncertainty that sometimes accompanies these moments. Was I a bystander? A friend? Something else?

Eventually I said something very simple.

“We’re together.”

That was it. A single sentence. A declaration that had not existed in explicit form until the moment it was spoken.

But the effect was immediate.

The conversation stopped. The geometry of the room rearranged itself instantly. What had previously been ambiguous became clear. The situation resolved itself within seconds.

Looking back, it was another catalyzed emergency. The sentence itself did not create the underlying possibility. That possibility had already been present in the emotional structure of the evening. What the sentence did was activate it, collapsing uncertainty into decision.

The remarkable thing about these moments is how small they often appear at the time. They do not arrive with the dramatic clarity of historical turning points. They slip quietly into the flow of ordinary life—a conversation during a break, a remark in a meeting, a sentence spoken in a bar.

Only later does the pattern become visible.

Most of life feels gradual while we are living it. Days follow one another in a steady rhythm. Institutions maintain their procedures. Relationships drift along familiar channels. The tensions that shape events accumulate quietly beneath the surface, rarely forcing themselves into view.

Then something small happens.

A remark.
A confession.
A declaration.

And suddenly the structure reveals itself.

The catalyst may be nothing more than a sentence spoken at exactly the right moment. But once the reaction begins, the system rarely returns to its previous state unchanged.

Note: This is Part III is our series on the concept of the “Catalyzed Emergency.” You can read the other two essays below.

The Theory of Catalyzed Emergency
On the Origin of the Phrase “A Catalyzed Emergency”
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In Defense of Mayo Thompson

Note: This essay reflects on the artistic approach of Mayo Thompson and the work of Red Krayola, particularly the band’s deliberate challenge to conventional ideas of musical skill. The famous observation that Thompson plays the guitar “badly, on purpose,” often cited in critical discussions of the group’s work — including later reassessments of records such as Malefactor, Ade — captures something essential about that approach.

The phrase can sound dismissive at first, but it also points toward a deeper artistic intention. From the late-1960s underground scene through later recordings, Red Krayola consistently treated rock music less as a polished craft than as an open field for experimentation. Imperfection, disruption, and instability were not accidents but part of the aesthetic design.

Whatever one ultimately makes of the results, Thompson’s work continues to raise an interesting question: how much of what we call musical “skill” is simply a set of habits that artists occasionally need to break.

There are certain musicians whose reputations survive largely through footnotes. They appear in the histories. Critics cite them as influences. Other artists speak their names with reverence. Yet relatively few listeners spend their evenings actually playing the records.

Mayo Thompson, the guiding figure behind Red Krayola, occupies precisely that strange territory. His band is frequently described as “important,” “experimental,” or “avant-garde,” words that often function as polite signals that the music itself may not be especially enjoyable. Red Krayola records circulate through the culture like curious artifacts — admired, studied, but approached cautiously.

And the most famous criticism of Thompson’s musicianship captures the problem perfectly.

A critic once observed that Thompson plays the guitar “badly, on purpose.”

The line, often repeated in retrospective discussions of Red Krayola’s music, originally surfaced in commentary surrounding the band’s 1989 record Malefactor, Ade. Whether in a Pitchfork reassessment or earlier critical recollection, the phrase stuck because it seemed to summarize the entire aesthetic in five devastating words.

Badly. On purpose.

For many listeners the sentence reads like a dismissal. But read another way, it becomes the most accurate description of Thompson’s artistic method ever written.

Because the key word in that sentence is not badly.

It is purpose.

From the beginning, Red Krayola treated rock music not as a set of rules to master but as a field of possibilities to disrupt. When the band first appeared in the late 1960s, rock was rapidly developing its own conventions — tighter songwriting, increasingly polished production, guitar virtuosity becoming a badge of seriousness. Thompson responded by moving in the opposite direction.

Instead of improving technique, he destabilized it.

Instead of polishing songs, he dismantled them.

Instead of reassuring the audience, he occasionally seemed to provoke it.

To understand this impulse, it helps to remember the strange cultural environment out of which Red Krayola emerged. The late-1960s underground was full of what might loosely be called the freak scene — a loose constellation of psychedelic bands, communal happenings, and avant-leaning musicians who were less interested in building careers than in testing the boundaries of sound itself. In Texas, where Red Krayola formed, that scene intersected with the surreal humor and anarchic spirit of the local counterculture. Musicians were experimenting with noise, collective improvisation, and absurd theatrical gestures long before those practices acquired respectable academic labels.

Red Krayola fit naturally into that environment. Early performances sometimes resembled happenings more than concerts. Songs dissolved into noise. Improvised ensembles wandered across the stage. Audience expectations were occasionally disrupted on purpose. It was not chaos exactly — more like a deliberate challenge to the idea that a rock performance had to behave in a predictable way.

Thompson understood something fundamental about rock music that many technically superior players missed. The genre had always contained a certain productive roughness — a willingness to accept imperfection as part of its expressive vocabulary. Chuck Berry’s guitar was not elegant in the classical sense. Early garage bands could barely tune their instruments. Punk would later turn this roughness into a formal principle.

Red Krayola pushed that principle further than almost anyone else.

By “playing badly on purpose,” Thompson exposed the hidden assumptions behind musical skill. What does it actually mean to play well? To hit the expected notes? To follow the established structure of a genre? To demonstrate control over the instrument?

Or might it mean something else entirely: the ability to reshape the instrument so that it produces new kinds of thought?

Listen carefully to Red Krayola’s recordings and the supposed incompetence begins to look suspiciously intentional. The guitar lines wobble, fragment, and reassemble themselves in unexpected patterns. Rhythms appear and disappear. Melodies emerge briefly before dissolving into something stranger. The music behaves less like a traditional composition and more like an argument unfolding in real time.

The phrase “avant-rock” is often used to describe this territory, but the label can make the music sound colder than it actually is. Beneath the disruption lies a restless curiosity about what rock music could become if freed from its habits. Thompson’s playing does not reject the guitar so much as treat it like a tool for questioning the very idea of guitar playing.

Which brings us back to that famous line of criticism.

“Playing the guitar badly, on purpose.”

For some listeners the sentence still reads as an indictment. But for others it begins to sound like a manifesto. What if the deliberate abandonment of technical mastery allows a musician to explore new expressive territory? What if awkwardness becomes a form of freedom?

The history of experimental music is filled with similar gestures. Artists deliberately violate the rules of their medium in order to discover what lies beyond them. Painters distort perspective. Writers abandon traditional narrative structure. Filmmakers fracture chronology. Thompson simply applied the same logic to the electric guitar.

And the results, while sometimes difficult, have proven surprisingly durable. Decades after Red Krayola’s earliest recordings, the band’s influence can be heard echoing through the strange corners of indie rock, post-punk, and experimental pop. Musicians who grew up absorbing Thompson’s restless attitude toward form learned an important lesson: rock music does not have to choose between intellect and instinct. It can contain both.

Thompson himself has often downplayed his role in the process, describing music as merely a “means to an end.” That humility is part of the puzzle. The work was never about demonstrating personal virtuosity. It was about using the medium of rock music as a way of thinking — testing ideas about sound, structure, and audience expectation.

Which explains why Red Krayola’s catalog continues to feel oddly alive. The records are not polished monuments to technical achievement. They are documents of exploration, full of wrong turns, strange detours, and flashes of accidental beauty.

In a culture that often equates artistic success with increasing refinement, Mayo Thompson chose the opposite path. He embraced awkwardness, instability, and deliberate imperfection as creative tools.

And if that occasionally meant playing the guitar badly — well, that too was part of the design.

Badly, perhaps.

But never accidentally.

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In Defense of Conor Oberst

Note: This essay focuses on the songwriting of Conor Oberst and the broader arc of his work as a writer and performer. It does not attempt to settle every critical debate about his career or evaluate the many shifting narratives that have surrounded him over the years.

Instead, the argument here is simpler: when listeners return to the songs themselves — especially pieces like “Cape Canaveral,” “Easy/Lucky/Free,” and “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For” — the caricature of Oberst as merely an overwrought diarist becomes difficult to sustain. Whatever one thinks of the mythology around him, the writing continues to reward careful listening.

For more than twenty years now it has been fashionable to treat Conor Oberst as a kind of permanent adolescent: the patron saint of overwrought confession, the boy genius who mistook emotional intensity for wisdom and simply never grew out of it. Even listeners who admired the early records sometimes adopt a gentle condescension when talking about him now. Those songs were powerful, they say, but they belonged to a particular moment — a moment of youthful melodrama that serious listeners eventually leave behind.

The outline is familiar. Too many feelings. Too many words. Too much trembling urgency in the voice. Somewhere along the way Oberst became shorthand for the idea that emotional sincerity, taken too far, turns embarrassing.

But like many tidy cultural narratives, this one collapses as soon as you start listening carefully again.

The first thing worth remembering is that Oberst began writing and recording music at an age when most people are still learning how to articulate their own thoughts. The early Bright Eyes records captured something very specific: the internal weather of late adolescence and early adulthood. The confusion, the moral absolutism, the sudden swings between despair and hope. Critics often call this melodrama, but melodrama is sometimes just another word for emotional honesty before the world teaches you to disguise it.

What Oberst did during those years was document the process of becoming a person. The songs are full of doubt, self-contradiction, and grand declarations that may not survive contact with reality. But that is exactly how young consciousness works. It moves through extremes. It searches for certainty and then dismantles it. Listening to those records now is less like hearing a performance than like reading a diary written in real time while the author tries to understand himself.

The voice, which so many critics found grating, was central to that effect. Oberst sang as if the words were arriving at the exact moment he needed them. The wavering pitch, the occasional cracks, the sense of someone pushing language slightly faster than it could comfortably travel — all of that created the feeling of urgency. It sounded like a mind thinking out loud.

The strange thing about Oberst’s career is that this intensity became the very thing people later held against him. Emotional transparency, once celebrated as authenticity, gradually hardened into caricature. Listeners who had grown older began to treat the songs as artifacts from a younger self they preferred not to revisit. Oberst did not change enough for some critics, while for others he changed too much.

But the best way to understand his writing is to look closely at several songs that capture the full range of what he does. “Cape Canaveral,” from his 2008 solo record, is often cited by fans as one of his finest achievements, and for good reason. The song moves with a calm, reflective confidence, drifting through memory, regret, and travel before arriving at a quietly devastating insight: “Every time I try to pick up the pieces / Something shatters.” The writing has none of the frantic urgency critics associate with Oberst. Instead it feels mature, patient, almost philosophical — proof that his gift for emotional clarity did not disappear when he left his early twenties.

Another example arrives with “Easy/Lucky/Free,” one of the defining songs from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The track looks outward rather than inward, sketching a world where technology and surveillance gradually erode the illusion of personal freedom. The chorus lands with a mixture of dread and irony that feels more prophetic with every passing year. What might once have sounded like youthful paranoia now reads as a remarkably prescient meditation on the digital age.

And then there is “I Didn’t Know What I Was In For,” perhaps the most quietly devastating song of Oberst’s middle period. The track unfolds with almost conversational simplicity, recounting memories of youth, friendship, and the slow arrival of adult responsibility. By the time the final lines arrive — “You said that you hate my suffering / And you understood / And I said that I love you too” — the song has achieved something rare: a portrait of adulthood that feels honest without becoming cynical.

Taken together, these songs reveal the real architecture of Oberst’s songwriting. Beneath the reputation for emotional excess lies a writer deeply concerned with memory, time, and the fragile ways people try to make sense of their lives. His best work captures the moment when experience shifts from confusion into recognition — when a half-formed feeling finally finds the right words.

Another reason Oberst’s work continues to resonate is that he writes from inside experience rather than from a critical distance. Many songwriters polish their observations until the emotional edges disappear. Oberst tends to leave the edges intact. His songs preserve the awkwardness, the uncertainty, the half-formed thoughts that accompany real moments of reflection. The result is sometimes messy, occasionally excessive, but often uncannily recognizable.

This quality also explains why Oberst has remained so influential among younger songwriters. He helped create a space in indie music where vulnerability could coexist with literary ambition. The songs suggested that personal confession and careful craft were not mutually exclusive. For a generation of listeners trying to articulate their own emotional lives, that permission mattered.

None of this means that every Oberst record works equally well, or that every lyric survives scrutiny. A career built on openness will inevitably produce uneven moments. But the larger body of work tells a more interesting story than the caricature of a permanently anguished songwriter. It shows an artist who has spent decades documenting the slow evolution of a restless mind.

And perhaps that is the real reason Oberst continues to provoke such divided reactions. His songs refuse to adopt the protective distance that many listeners eventually develop toward their own past selves. Instead they remain exposed — still searching, still uncertain, still willing to ask questions that adulthood often teaches us to bury under routine.

In that sense the emotional intensity people once dismissed as youthful melodrama begins to look different. It becomes a record of someone refusing to abandon the difficult work of feeling deeply about the world. For listeners willing to meet him there, the songs offer something rare in modern music: the sound of a consciousness continuing to unfold, one uneasy thought at a time.

Note: This is the third piece in our series “In Defense Of.” Iy you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy the one on Mark Kozelek. You can access it below.

In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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In Defense of Mark Kozelek

Note: This essay addresses the artistic approach of Mark Kozelek as a songwriter. It does not attempt to evaluate or adjudicate the various personal controversies that have circulated around him in recent years, many of which remain publicly disputed and complex.

The focus here is narrower: how Kozelek’s long-form, diaristic songwriting works as a musical method — particularly in songs like “Ali/Spinks II,” where ordinary details accumulate into something emotionally larger. Whatever one thinks of the artist as a person, the question of how the music itself functions remains worth examining on its own terms.

For several years now it has been fashionable to treat Mark Kozelek as something like an exhausted case: a brilliant songwriter who wandered too far into self-absorption, whose songs became too long, too diaristic, too willing to linger on the small debris of daily life. Even some longtime listeners have adopted the shorthand. Early records were masterpieces; later ones were indulgent. The verdict sounds tidy. But like most tidy verdicts in music, it collapses as soon as you start listening again.

The basic complaint about Kozelek’s later work is well known. The songs stretch past ten minutes. The lyrics catalog ordinary events: hotel rooms, meals, airports, old friends, television shows, half-remembered conversations. The narrator seems to be narrating his own day in real time, occasionally pausing to note a basketball score or a passing cloud of melancholy. To critics raised on the discipline of verse-chorus songwriting, this can sound like navel-gazing elevated to an art form.

But the strange thing about Kozelek’s music is that the minutiae are not actually the point. They are the atmosphere. His songs work less like traditional compositions and more like extended walks through consciousness. The grocery lists, the memories of old bands, the stray anecdotes about touring musicians — all of it forms the texture through which something else slowly emerges. A mood. A sense of time passing. The feeling of being a person moving through an ordinary day while carrying decades of memory.

The best way to understand this approach is to listen carefully to “Ali/Spinks II,” one of the central tracks from Benji. The song begins almost casually, recounting the death of Kozelek’s cousin and drifting through fragments of memory connected to that loss. There is no obvious structure, no chorus that arrives to organize the material. Instead the narrative moves the way memory moves: sideways, unpredictably, circling back on itself. The details accumulate slowly until the emotional core of the story becomes unavoidable. What begins as a series of seemingly unrelated observations eventually reveals itself as a meditation on grief, family history, and the strange ways tragedy ripples through ordinary life. The song is long, messy, and digressive — and it works precisely because of those qualities. “Ali/Spinks II” is not merely an example of Kozelek’s method; it is the test case. If the listener accepts the logic of that song, the entire later catalog suddenly makes sense.

This approach did not come out of nowhere. Kozelek has always been a writer drawn to the long arc of a song. Even in the early days of Red House Painters, the music moved at a patient pace, letting chords hang in the air while the lyrics circled around regret, nostalgia, and quiet observation. What changed later was not the impulse but the level of exposure. The lens moved closer. The songs stopped pretending to be about characters and admitted they were about the singer himself.

For some listeners that shift felt like a loss of mystery. But there is another way to hear it. Kozelek’s later records are essentially field recordings of a mind at work. They capture the strange mixture of memory, boredom, humor, irritation, and melancholy that makes up ordinary consciousness. Most songwriters edit this material down to the highlights. Kozelek leaves it mostly intact. The result is less like reading a poem and more like sitting beside someone during a long drive while they talk about whatever crosses their mind.

The famous outbursts that circulate online tend to obscure this. Kozelek has never been particularly careful about public performance of personality, and that roughness often dominates the narrative around him. When he released the song “War on Drugs: Suck My Dick,” a public feud with The War on Drugs instantly became the headline. The track was petty, funny, abrasive, and entirely unnecessary — which is to say it was perfectly consistent with the same impulsive candor that fuels his songwriting. Kozelek has never seemed particularly interested in polishing the public version of himself.

But the deeper argument about his music usually centers on the accusation of self-indulgence. Why should listeners care about the details of a songwriter’s daily routine? Why should a song wander through anecdotes about hotels, meals, or aging friends? Why should anyone sit through ten or twelve minutes of conversational narrative when a tight three-minute composition could deliver the emotional payload more efficiently?

Kozelek himself once answered that question in a line that perfectly captures his stubborn philosophy: he said he liked playing shows for “dudes in tennis shoes.” The phrase sounds casual, almost dismissive, but it carries a small manifesto inside it. He is not writing for critics parsing lyrical elegance or for industry tastemakers deciding what counts as proper songcraft. He is writing for ordinary listeners who recognize the shape of everyday life — the boredom, the odd digressions, the strange humor that creeps into conversation when people talk long enough.

In that sense Kozelek’s songs resemble a certain kind of late-night storytelling more than traditional music. Imagine someone sitting across the table recounting a memory that begins in one place, wanders through several unrelated details, circles back to a childhood story, and eventually lands somewhere unexpectedly moving. The emotional impact arrives not through compression but through accumulation. You spend time inside the story until its meaning quietly surfaces.

The length of the songs, which so many critics treat as evidence of indulgence, is actually central to the effect. Time itself becomes part of the composition. The listener settles into the rhythm of the narration. Small details begin to gather weight simply because they have been allowed to exist long enough. By the time the song ends, the ordinary events that seemed trivial at the beginning have become part of a larger emotional landscape.

This is not the only way to write songs, and it is certainly not the most efficient one. But efficiency has never been Kozelek’s artistic goal. His music belongs to a tradition of artists who treat the everyday as worthy of sustained attention. The diary becomes the canvas. The passing moment becomes the subject. Instead of distilling experience into a polished metaphor, the songwriter simply records the experience itself and trusts that meaning will accumulate over time.

If that approach sometimes borders on excess, it also produces moments that feel uncannily real. A stray observation about a friend can suddenly open into a meditation on aging. A casual mention of a hotel room can turn into a reflection on the strange loneliness of touring musicians. The emotional truth arrives sideways, hidden among the details of ordinary life.

Which brings us back to the central criticism: that the songs are too long, too detailed, too inward. All of that is true. But it may also be precisely why they matter. Kozelek’s music asks listeners to do something that modern culture rarely encourages anymore — to slow down, to sit with the flow of another person’s thoughts, to accept that meaning often appears gradually rather than in a neatly packaged chorus.

Not every listener will have patience for that. But for those willing to spend time inside the songs, the reward is a strangely intimate experience: the feeling of inhabiting someone else’s memory stream for a while. The tennis shoes crowd, in other words, may understand something that critics occasionally miss. Sometimes the most honest art does not arrive in the form of a perfectly shaped statement. Sometimes it arrives as a long conversation that refuses to end too quickly.

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In Defense of Ryan Adams

Note: This essay is not an attempt to defend Ryan Adams the person. It’s an attempt to defend the continued seriousness of the music. The distinction matters, even if our cultural conversations sometimes pretend it doesn’t. Also, I fucking love Ryan Adams. He is the motherfucking man.

Epigraph:

“When the stars go blue.”
— Ryan Adams

For several years now it has been socially safer to treat Ryan Adams as a closed case: talented songwriter, personal flaws, cultural exile. The outline is familiar enough that most people no longer bother to revisit the work itself. But the strange thing about Adams is that the songs refuse to cooperate with the narrative. They remain stubbornly alive — hundreds of them scattered across albums, demos, and late-night recordings — carrying the same bruised intelligence that first made people pay attention twenty-five years ago. At some point the question stops being whether Ryan Adams is an admirable person. The real question becomes harder and less comfortable: what do we do with an artist whose flaws are obvious but whose music continues to tell the truth in ways very few writers can manage?

Part of the problem is that Ryan Adams belongs to an older model of songwriting — the kind where the emotional life of the artist is inseparable from the work. The songs are confessional without being literal, personal without being autobiographical in any simple way. From the early Whiskeytown albums, to his solo debut Heartbreaker, on to today, Adams has always written like someone sitting in the wreckage of his own choices and trying to understand what just happened. That voice — raw, impulsive, often heartbroken, sometimes self-pitying, often painfully perceptive — was never tidy. It wasn’t supposed to be. The appeal of Adams at his best has always been that the songs arrive before the moral cleanup crew.

When the accusations against him surfaced in 2019, the cultural machinery moved quickly. Adams’s shows were cancelled for a while, he was dropped from projects, and reclassified overnight as an artist whose work had become morally contaminated. Some listeners stopped listening immediately. Others quietly kept listening but stopped talking about it in public. The silence that followed was oddly complete. In a culture that usually thrives on argument, the Ryan Adams conversation simply evaporated.

That disappearance is revealing. It suggests that many people were less interested in wrestling with the complexity of the situation than in resolving it as quickly as possible. Once the story had a clear villain, the cultural instinct was to move on.

But the songs remain.

Listen again to Come Pick Me Up, and you hear a man cataloguing his own emotional incompetence with surgical clarity. Oh My Sweet Carolina still carries that strange mixture of homesickness and resignation that only a handful of songwriters ever capture. Later work — Ashes & Fire, Prisoner, Chris, the better moments of the sprawling archive that followed — continues the same project: the slow documentation of a person trying, often unsuccessfully, to live with himself.

None of this absolves Adams of anything. It doesn’t erase the accounts of people who describe him as manipulative, volatile, or worse. If anything, the songs themselves suggest that those accounts are not entirely surprising. Adams has been writing about his own volatility for decades. The records are full of it — jealousy, insecurity, emotional chaos, the constant sense of someone struggling to regulate the intensity of his own personality.

What the songs also reveal, though, is a rare level of self-awareness about his own condition. Adams’ best work doesn’t present him as a romantic hero. It presents him as part of the problem.

And that distinction matters.

One of the stranger habits of contemporary cultural criticism is the belief that the value of a work of art should track the moral cleanliness of the person who made it. This is a comforting idea, but it collapses under the slightest historical pressure. Much of the art people still revere emerged from personalities that were messy, selfish, unstable, or worse. Songwriters, perhaps more than most artists, tend to write directly from the fault lines of their own lives.

If we demanded perfect character from every songwriter whose music we admire, the history of popular music would shrink dramatically.

The more interesting question is not whether Ryan Adams deserves redemption. That is not something critics or listeners are qualified to grant. The question is whether the songs themselves still carry meaning once the mythology surrounding the artist has been stripped away.

In Adams’ case, the answer seems to be yes.

The songs are still precise. The emotional details still land. Lines that once felt like romantic exaggeration now sound more like documentation — the sound of a man who understands, perhaps too late, the patterns that keep repeating in his life.

There is something oddly honest about that.

The best Ryan Adams songs have always sounded like dispatches from someone who knows he is partly responsible for the wreckage he is describing. They are not pleas for sympathy so much as attempts at recognition — moments where the singer steps outside himself long enough to see the pattern clearly.

That is why the music persists even when the cultural narrative surrounding it has hardened.

The songs were never about innocence. They were about self-knowledge.

And self-knowledge, even when it comes from flawed people, is still one of the things art is uniquely good at revealing.

Dedication

For Ryan, one of the five greatest songwriters ever and the motherfucking man. I love you baby.

Note: If you like this essay, you may like these others in the same “In Defense Of” series.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Mark Kozelek