The Nu-Normal #04: Phoebe Bridgers, SNL, and 'The Smashening'
Go ahead, smash the patriarchy (but make sure you do it politely).
Last month, on a recent episode of Saturday Night Live, hosted by Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek fame, indie rock artist Phoebe Bridgers stepped up to perform the closing track from her spectacular 2020 album Punisher, the near-six-minute opus “I Know The End.” The house lights dimmed, shining a red spotlight on Bridgers, mirroring the cover of her quadruple Grammy-nominated record.
In the track’s extended bridge, Bridgers and bandmate Harrison Whitford—both on guitar and clad in matching skeleton onesies—started to riff back and forth, intensity sparking between them like electric nodes.
Suddenly, Bridgers gave in to the sonic catharsis of live performance, letting forth a primal scream into the mic before smashing her Danelectro guitar into a fake sound monitor. The monitor promptly burst into sparks, confusing the transfixed live audience, who didn’t know whether to cheer or be deeply concerned, and Bridgers continued to wield the instrument like a bloody club of war.
Watch the incendiary performance below:
This event, what I’m now dubbing ‘The Smashening,’ set the Internet ablaze. Those with vocal opinions (most of them dudes, because, what a shocker) expressed how they didn’t really ‘get’ or understand what had compelled Bridgers—a woman you see—in that very moment to smash a perfectly good guitar, and, albeit fake, monitor.
Here’s a collection of some of the fair and balanced online discourse:
To her credit, Bridgers wasn’t having any of it and hit back with enough wry reply-guy energy to power a small country:
So, what are we to make of The Smashening? Well, for a start, anyone who’s actually listened to “I Know The End” would understand that the scream Bridgers utters is part of the track itself, arriving at roughly 5 minutes into the album track and its accompanying music video:
So, the scream itself is canon. But what about the guitar smash? Are the two instances linked? Surprisingly, the best take on The Smashening comes from none other than the Foo Fighter himself, Mr Dave Grohl. As reported by Alternative Press, during a taping of The Howard Stern Show, Grohl was asked to comment on the discourse surrounding Bridgers’ SNL performance:
“First of all, you have to understand that for the last [ten] years, every interview I do I’m asked, ‘Is rock and roll dead? There’s no guitars anymore.’ So, in the last year, there’s been this return to guitar rock music in popular music like, Miley Cyrus is becoming Joan Jett…. You’re starting to see, people are realizing rock and roll is cool.
I saw that performance, I actually talked to my mom about [it]. [She asked] ‘did you see Saturday Night Live?’ I said, ‘yeah.’ She goes, ‘What did you think about that girl Phoebe?’ I’m like, ‘She’s got a beautiful voice, she can really sing.’ My mother was like, ‘I loved it, I thought she was great!’
When you watch us [Nirvana, Foo Fighters] jam and freak out and do our thing… I think that’s what they [Bridgers and her band] did. It was every fucking night. My drums had holes in them from Kurt [Cobain] fucking chopping my drums… I’ve seen enough smashed guitars, it feels fucking good to do it.”
What Grohl’s comments here allude to is the phenomenological element of The Smashening so easily overlooked by the Internet Twitterazzi. Simply put, sometimes it just feels good to smash shit.
If you’ve ever been to a punk show, or even the livelier end of a traditional rock gig, there’s a persistent live-wire energy present that’s not easily contained. The best artists will wilfully act as a conduit for this energy, channelling and expressing it as viscerally as humanly possible—both sonically and physically. Often times, musical objects cease being purely tools for instrumentation, transforming into vessels for the venting of physical frustrations and pent-up rage, anxiety, and discontent.
Listening to Bridgers’ music, the lyrical content of Punisher, and watching her incendiary SNL performance, it’s easy to see what she was trying to convey with ‘The Smashening.’ In my review of Punisher, I described the tone of “I Know The End” as apocryphal, with lyrical nods to lightning and tornadoes, acts of God and government surveillance, slot machines and UFOs.
It’s a song about our contemporary sense of doom and gloom, framing our current moment as a struggle against The End Times. And considering the year we’ve had, that’s a feeling that’s both instantly relatable and patently absurd. But it’s also a song about pushing through that darkness. It’s a song about the confidence that can come from truly knowing your end and its final destination, how that awareness can help to shape your personal journey and its outcome.
Ultimately, what the discourse around ‘The Smashening’ reveals is that the music industry is still populated by sexist and misogynistic viewpoints. For Bridgers to be criticised for actions that have been a staple of the rock genre for many decades, repeated ad infinitum by countless male artists, famous or otherwise, highlights a double standard that will surely shock no one (especially women). But it’s an important lesson to remember and one that should not be easily forgotten or dismissed.
The Internet told Bridgers that it’s fine to smash the patriarchy, but please, do so quietly and politely, so as not to offend anyone while doing it. In response, and in her own endearing way, Bridgers told them all to eat shit, and I’m more proud of her for that simple act of defiance than any act of musical destruction.
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