With “Nameless, Faceless”, the first glimpse of her upcoming sophomore album Tell Me How You Really Feel (May 18, 2018), Grammy-nominated Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett joins the “woke pop” train in an inspired yet apparently effortless manner. True to form, she achieves a relatable balance between the profound and the mundane (and notes that the album title “should be interpreted both as an earnest request and a sarcastic denouement”). Barnett has always drawn from her everyday life in her work, and one does not have to look too hard these days to find instances of misogyny and microaggressions targeted at the fairer sex.
The song is mainly directed at the male cyber-haters who spew vicious criticism behind the cloak of anonymity (‘He said "I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup/ And spit out better words than you"’), but Barnett responds with empathy and sympathy instead of rage: ‘Must be lonely/ Being angry/ Feeling over-looked/ You sit alone at home in the darkness/ With all the pent-up rage that you harness/ I'm real sorry/ 'Bout whatever happened to you’. She even insists that they can achieve better things in life than trying to tear her down: ‘You know you got lots to give/ And so many options’.
Her anger and frustration at the sexist status quo find its way into the grunge-inflected chorus, which skillfully sandwiches Barnett’s low-key gender equality goal into a famed Margaret Atwood quote: “I want to take a walk in the park at night/ Men are afraid that women will laugh at them/ I want to walk in the park at night/ Women are afraid that men will kill them.” One should be careful to conflate the slacker rock aesthetic with the musician’s work ethic, but in this instance, Barnett seems to offhandedly discredit any notion that she intentionally set out to be a well-read, well-researched feminist activist-musician:
“I actually lifted it from an article, not knowing it was her quote. I didn’t know who she was until I saw “The Handmaid’s Tale,” and I didn’t make the connection until I was getting the album credits together. But I’d seen it a couple times in things I was reading, and I remember being like, “That is the strongest point.” Because it’s so dumbed-down, it’s kind of funny—the way it flips is funny—even though it’s not a funny thing at all.”
Courtney Barnett, Pitchfork
