Give Up
God Hates You and Owl City Is Proof
Pamela Littky
OWL CITY More like Foul Shitty, amirite?
Tools
Theodicy is the branch of theology that attempts to offer up rationalizations for the Problem of Evil—that is, how a supposedly omnipotent, benevolent God could allow really, really bad shit to happen. There's the idea that evil is a necessary result of free will, or that we perceive evil merely due to imperfect knowledge of God's perfect plan, or that suffering tests us and that judgment will be meted out in an afterlife. Saint Augustine of Hippo, around the turn of the fifth century, proposed that natural disasters were caused by fallen angels and man's evil by original sin. Earlier still, Saint Irenaeus basically suggested that suffering builds good character (he was like the dad from The Wonder Years of his day). Safe to say neither of these guys ever had to listen to Owl City.
Nor did they have to account for a world in which an abomination like the Owl City song "Fireflies" could go to number one on the Billboard charts. For the uninitiated: Owl City is the drippy, egregiously derivative synth-pop project of one Adam Young—picture the Postal Service if that act had been founded not as a side project for Death Cab for Cutie's songwriter during a creative peak but instead by a preening, proselytizing prat from small-town Minnesota.
Stranger Personals
Young began recording music in his parent's basement in 2007, releasing an EP of songs online. In early 2008, he was scouted and then signed by Universal Republic Records, which opted not to announce the signing so as to maintain Young's image of independence while they began work on a marketing campaign. Owl City's debut full-length, Maybe I'm Dreaming, was released independently in March of 2008, then officially rereleased by Universal in December of that year. Young didn't start performing live until February of 2009. In July of 2009, Universal released Owl City's second full-length, Ocean Eyes, via iTunes; a physical release followed in September. The next month, the now double-platinum-certified "Fireflies" went to number one on the Billboard singles chart, while Ocean Eyes reached number eight on the albums chart. The band comes to Seattle this week to a sold-out show at the Paramount.
For all its success, Ocean Eyes is an utterly execrable record. It begins, on "Cave In," with the first of many couplets that make Young Money's "Bed Rock" read like Leaves of Grass: "Please take a long hard look through your textbook/'Cause I'm history." If you can make it past that hurdle (and the filtered guitar riff it rests on), you'll find production polished to an obscene sheen, all bright fluttering synth chirps and gently skipping drum-machine beats, with Young's Auto-Tuned vocals as cold and saccharine as a Diet Coke, every affected/effected breath stretched out for extra emotional emphasis.
"The Bird and the Worm" starts with an imbecilely jaunty acoustic-guitar strum—and a typically confused metaphor (the bird and the worm are having a romance?)—before adding toy piano and crunched hand claps, all building toward a chorus that's as mindless as it is wordless.
Then there's "Hello Seattle," which originally appeared on 2007's Of June EP, and which inexplicably became an early online hit for Owl City. In the song, Young, who has said he'd never been to Seattle at the time he wrote it, showers the city with yet more terribly mixed non sequitur metaphors ("Hello Seattle/I am a mountaineer/In the hills and highlands/I fall asleep in hospital parking lots/And awake in your mouth")—not to mention nonnative species ("I am a manta ray... I'll crawl the sandy bottom of Puget Sound/And construct a summer home"). This, over stuttering drums and soft-edged synth blips that sound stolen from a cell-phone commercial. Our city should be more ashamed of this tribute than Denton, Texas, deserves to be about that damning Mountain Goats song.
It's not like Young's musically inept, exactly. "Umbrella Beach," for all its Euro-trash trance twinkle, has a fairly catchy chorus if you can manage to ignore the words and focus on the sweeping synthetic strings and propulsive beat. Despite its mushy, mind-numbing midtempo verse, "The Saltwater Room" (one of two songs here that also appeared on Dreaming) delivers a decent chorus, a duet between Young and a helium-pitched female foil. Singles "Hello Seattle" and "Fireflies" both contain terminally sticky melodies. It's just that this stuff has all the soulfulness of data entry.
Oh, and that it's totally insipid. On "Dental Care," over another zippy melody and hand-clap motif, Young drops the following face-palmers: "I've been to the dentist a thousand times/So I know the drill," "When hygienists leave on long vacations/That's when dentists scream and lose their patients," "Golf and alcohol don't mix/And that's why I don't drink and drive." Jesus, your teeth rot out just listening to this drivel.
"Meteor Shower" is another slow jam that culminates with another big, banal, pitch-corrected chorus—this time of the kind that sounds like it could be a declaration of love for a girl, but which is quite obviously about Jesus: "I can finally see/That you're right there beside me/I am not my own/For I have been made new/Please don't let me go/I desperately need you!" To call it thinly veiled would be an insult to veils. Not that Young has ever hidden his Christian zeal; on the contrary, he's put it front and center on his MySpace page, posting, "I follow Jesus Christ wholeheartedly. He is my life, my strength, my all," beneath a picture of fluffy white clouds in a deep blue sky—because, you know, Jesus lives on an actual cloud.
At this point, let's just skip ahead a song to "Fireflies" and be done with this album. There's more ringtone beeps and bloops, some chimes, a rounded bass synth line, a piano, some strings, all building up to a bombastic super-compressed chorus over which Young sighs out yet more naggingly catchy, glossy nonsense—worst of all the line "I'd get a thousand hugs/From ten thousand lightning bugs/As they tried to teach me how to dance." Whether that's a multiplied total of 10 million hugs (1,000 hugs from 10,000 bugs each) or if 9,000 bugs just miss out on the cuddling action isn't exactly clear. Either way, it's a lesser song than the Magnetic Fields' "100,000 Fireflies" by an order of magnitude.
All of this is odious enough on its own, but then there's the matter of Owl City being a wholly artless rip-off of the Postal Service, from the frippy electronics to Young's damn near impersonation of Ben Gibbard's voice. Young is often evasive in interviews, alternating between vague platitudes and precise nonsense, but he's repeatedly denied drawing any influence from the Postal Service. In a September 2009 interview with the Onion's A.V. Club, he said he'd "never heard of the Postal Service"; a month later, he told Entertainment Weekly that he'd heard them "a little bit" and that "they are pretty similar," but that he was always really more of a Death Cab fan. Death Cab musician/producer Chris Walla put it rather more bluntly on his Twitter: "Owl City should really consider buying Ben [Gibbard] a pony." (He might want to sacrifice a goat to Savage Garden while he's at it.)
Still, he's all too happy to take the comparison, telling the New York Times, "[The Postal Service] released a record in 2003, and that was it. There was really nothing to compare it to until someone else came along and wrote the next chapter. Maybe that's this record. Maybe that's this band."
So who's buying this crap? It's impossible to know exactly, but if my recollections from Christian summer camp are any indication, kids in cloistered religious communities are desperately eager for anything that looks and sounds like "cool" secular youth culture yet still makes it through parental approval. (Owl City might be drawn to Seattle as much for Mars Hill's captive flock as by our bodies of water.) Then again, no one ever really went broke in America by catering to plain old bad taste, secular or otherwise. God help us. 
I'm pretty sure no one from a first world country that has watched television or a movie in the 7 years since that album was released can claim to not have heard the Postal Service.
That falls firmly out of its "Neumo's/ChopSuey/Crocodile" advertising base.
Weird.
*sigh*
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I believe the vitriol directed at Owl city is a result of 5 things:
1. He sounds a lot like Postal Service and Ben Gibbard, someone who is royalty in indie circles.
2. No one likes to hear their favorite music co-opted by Christian Rock (see, digs in article about this guys' fondness for Jesus...as opposed to say, U2?)
3. He came from nowhere, so there's general jealousy that he didn't earn his success.
4. If you pitch correct anything that much, 50% of the population will think you a hack using a bandaid to cover lack of vocal talent.
5. Resentment that the Postal Service, after making one near perfect album, chose to give up and not continue. This record isn't as good. Boo Hoo.
So, all that said, while I yearn for a real Postal Service album too with depth & intrigue, O.C.'s pretty catchy stuff and the kids like it. Get over it.
Couple of points:
Nearly every single show on his current tour is sold out, including the KeyArena show.
Mainstream music fans are buying it. Let them have it.
Why waste space in an alternative weekly telling people something is shit, when your entire readership already knows it?
Ignore it and it will go away faster. When you shine a light on a turd it becomes an illuminated turd.
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as to who's buying it, i can tell you: fourth-graders. they are lapping it up. i was up at my kids' school in the gym a few weeks back and this came on and all the fourth grade girls peed their pants at once.
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Then I asked my middle school aged son who was like, "Only girls like that. He sucks."
So apparently he's ridden a wave of middle school girl crushes.....
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Who do you think actually BUYS music these days?
Owl City is shit. But half of music has been shit. Forever. If a music journalist wants to tear into something, let them. They're critics. That's what they do. If you're ambivalent about something as a music critic, you're not doing it right.
Maybe the record does get a little preachy...knowing Young's background, this isn't surprising, and it would be easy to read religion into these lyrics if you know that... however, the lyrics are... ambiguous at best, you can take them to mean just about whatever you want them to mean.
as for the music... this is electronica style.. honestly, WTF do you expect besides "chirpy ring-tone sounds" and rampant, wanton use of Auto-Tune?
lighten up... for Christ's sake.
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Note to above: Eric wrote this because Owl City is in town, hence local
PS: so all the Eric trolls are Mars Hill members in disguise? Woah!
Seriously. I want my five minutes back. I never heard of Owl City and never would have seen the show. I came here to read about who I should I go see.
So? Who?
That band is vastly more important than Owl City and far more relevant to local music.
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So yeah, between the "I'd get a thousand hugs/ From ten thousand lightning bugs" line to the fact that he looks like he was created in the Disney Labs from the DNA combination of a Jonas brother and Aaron Eckhart, and that he's apparently trying to be both indy rocker and Christian rocker (because we always need more douches like Creed, right?), I can see why he's so reviled.
And as someone who grew up in a "christian household" where anything more edgy than Audio Adrenaline was destroyed, I can agree with Grandy's assumption that the christian kids alone will help propel this moron's career forward, at least for the foreseeable future.
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-nick
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(I looked up that Fireflies video last week not knowing I would waste 2 minutes of my life. God awful.)
And who knew there were so many 14-year-old girls who post on The Stranger's boards?
First time I heard this song I was kind of half listening skeptically until the lightning bugs hugs line.
"Ohhhhh noooooooo."
I am in no way condoning the "music" of Owl City, but NeverShoutNever is even more grating and even more sticky (and shtick-y) and even more deserving of some Grandyisms.
"everything you do/is super duper cute/and I can't stand it" being an example of their poetic, sweeping lyricism
Was the actions of Adolf Hitler "evil" because it was not in accord with the majority outside of his culture and society?
Or was it evil because there is an universal transcendental objective standard for good and evil?
If the majority of a society are in disagreement with "X" does that make "X" evil?
And what rights does one country have to impose its cultural standard of good and evil on another?
Maybe genocide is wrong for Americans, but not for Germans.
The so called "problem of evil" isn't "Why does God allow evil to exist?" but rather, apart from God and His revealed Will how can we epistemologically be sure that anything is good or evil and not merely a matter of personal or societal preference of one act over another?
SEATTLE HIPHOP4 LYFE.
STAY HI BROS
Go suck a fuck, Grandy.
Give me a break. One man is not a band. I don't care what the fuck he wants to call himself. Go ahead, let him change his goddamn real name to Owl City if that's his poison, but that doesn't mean he's suddenly any more a band just because he picked a name. But you know, honestly, it makes perfect sense coming from him that he considers himself a band. Aww, isn't that cute. Junior thinks he can play because he has autotune and a drum machine!
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