Jack Antonoff Is Controversial…

Jack Antonoff is big. His name is way too polarizing to be lost behind the credits of the songs he produces. “He has traveled through pop with extreme Main Character Energy” pitchfork writes. And Main characters tend to be judged.

Twice ‘Producer of the year’ Grammy winner does receive his share of hate. The hate even comes for his working relationships with Taylor Swift, the one that paved Antonoff’s way to his stardom by letting him produce ‘Out Of The Woods’ for her first pop album ‘1989’.

In 2021, in celebration of Taylor Swift winning ‘best album of the year’ grammy for ‘Folklore’, their fourth album together, Jack wrote on his Instagram: “You are the one who let me produce records first, Before you I just ‘wasn’t a producer’ according to the herbs. I just wasn’t let in that room. then I met you, we made ‘out of the woods’ and you said, ‘that’s the version’ and that changed my life right there.”

Then he embarked on his first full-length collaboration, Lorde’s 2017 record Melodrama. Then was Swift’s ‘Reputation’ , Lana Del Rey’s ‘NFR’ and soon enough Antonoff’s sound became inescapable.

So what do haters have against Antonoff, and do they have a point?

He Is Repetitive.

A TikTok user suggested sending Antonoff to federal prison when they posted this video. There is absolutely the same beat used in Swift’s 2022 ‘Lavender Haze’ and Lorde’s 2017 ‘Hard Feelings/Loveless’. Courtney Love reposted a meme that likened Antonoff to a shopper browsing for new ideas on comically empty shelves. Antonoff’s repetitiveness is his famous trait.

Antonoff has a recognizable sound. His affection for the 1980s — both the karaoke-ready rock of Bon Jovi and the campy roboticism of Depeche Mode — comes through in vintage gear he uses, and in his fondness for putting bold, reverberating vocals at the center of the mix. These components are on the list of signatures deconstructed by Caleb Gamman, a video producer who went viral for snarking on ‘Midnights’ production.

The more he works with high-profile musicians, the more his sound spreads in our playlists. As pitchfork summed up: “The creeping sentiment online about our favorite pop stars’ favorite producer is that he’s annoyingly, inescapably, maddeningly…. Everywhere.”

Let’s go back to ‘Midnights’ where Jack produced all of the songs. “Antonoff’s extensive credits mean he has a hard time preventing musical ideas from bleeding into each other,” says BuzzFeed and kinda has a point.

The album opener “Lavender Haze,” sounds too similar to “I Think He Knows” from Lover, “Labyrinth” hues closely to Lover’s “The Archer.” “Maroon” is a more confident version of Reputation’s “Dress”; “Snow on the Beach” borrows heavily from Evermore’s “Gold Rush.” And “Question…?” samples 1989’s “Out of the Woods.”

Needless to say, All of these songs are produced by Jack Antonoff.

That repetitiveness makes some think Antonoff is stopping pop music from evolution. Swift per say is famous for her style evolution — she changes, her music develops with each album and era. In ‘Midnights’ though, she takes a massive u-turn back to reflect her previous records.

But the best example of Antonoff’s spiral sound is Lorde’s ‘Solar Power’. The album has been criticized for the songs being barely distinguishable and even boring.

Sometimes songs sound similar to other artist’s songs, for example people pointed out the similarities between Lana Del Rey’s Antonoff-produced “Wild At Heart” and Solar Power’s “Stoned At The Nail Salon.”

Another Male Producer.

Interesting fact: No woman has ever won a Grammy for Producer of the Year. Linda Perry was the last female producer nominated in 2019, and before her was Lauren Christy, in 2004.

“He’s still writing Jack Antonoff songs — they just happen to be sung by people like Lorde now,” wrote GQ in 2018 on her 2nd LP Melodrama, like her songs don’t carry her soul in them, like they belonged solely to Antonoff.

Though Mass-market music is mainly collaborative, Taylor Swift for example was always considered to be the solo author. Shaky assumptions about the creative process, like the one about Lorde, hold the threat of ascribing her authorship and thus success to another male producer.

The stardom of Antonoff as a music producer is something new: for a behind the scenes collaborator to be so central is not usual at all. Given the headlines about how he does not want to take up space, Antonoff can’t help his Main Character Energy.

And that guy is known to be especially good at working with women. “I write a full octave above where I sing … There’s just a lot of melodic DNA that works better for women than men,” he told Pitchfork in 2017.

In her article for Pitchfork, writer Quinn Moreland wonders: “And isn’t it strange that the past two Bleachers albums have arrived roughly two weeks before that of Lorde’s?” And then she goes on saying something that really got me thinking: “While there’s something icky about aggressively presenting yourself as a man empathetic to women’s emotions.”

Haters Are Wrong

Sexism:

Yes, there is a possibility Jack Antonoff is exploiting the fame of pop divas he works with and probably capitalizes on their success. But we mustn’t forget that show business, and especially pop music, is a form of business, just like it is a form of art. Collaborations have to be simply profitable for all sides to be successful. Lana Del Rey, Lorde and Taylor Swift and other stars got their share of profit out of their work relationships with Antonoff. Why is it wrong for Jack to enjoy his share of fame and recognition? Just because he is a man?

It has been already said there is an excess of male producers in the industry. But I wouldn’t consider Jack simply “another one” of them. Thing is that he establishes a new standard of relationship towards his mostly female creative partners.

A 2022 New Yorker profile depicted Antonoff’s speciality for turning hanging out into an art form: Casual banter in the studio leads to deeper conversations, which bleed into jam sessions, which coalesce into tracks. The supposed point is to make musicians sound more like themselves.

As Antonoff tells it, recording sessions seem to resemble a more symbiotic version of psychotherapy: “When I work with other people, I’m always trying to find out: Where can we go even further?” he once told Pitchfork. “In the second verse, can you fire out a few lines about something that happened to you when you were 9?”

Antonoff inspires artists to explore their own character and put it in a record. That kind of curiosity and respect for the personal struggles of a pop star is pretty rare in a “Dr. Luke dominated” environment.

And if you don’t remember, Dr. Luke is the music producer Kesha accused of rape. It’s worth mentioning that Jack Antonoff was among the first celebrities to support Kesha, offered her to work together and even called Dr. Luke a “creep”.

The bigger Antonoff gets, and the more impact he has on the industry, it’s more likely to solve the reigning toxic masculinity. When being ‘Nice Guy’ who connects to female emotions takes someone to work with the biggest names in the industry, it’s worth considering putting energy in your communication skills along with songwriting. Jack Antonoff is the cure for collective Dr. Luke.

Reviewing St. Vincent’s album for Stereogum, Gabriela Tully Claymore wrote that Antonoff has “proven himself to be very good at working with women who have a strong point of view, who will always sound like themselves regardless of who’s assisting them. Antonoff has built his career on being a friend; he’s the kind of man people feel OK sharing their feelings with.”

Repetitiveness:

And even an accusation of repetitiveness can be seen in the realm of sexism: critics easily picked up on the ultimate male creator that makes “pop girlies” sound the same. First of all, if Lana Del Rey sounds like Lorde at some point, it is because she simply chooses to. It’s not like she received ready-made songs she has to sing.

We mustn’t forget: Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde and saint Vincent were all established songwriters before they started working with Jack.

And before speaking of repetitiveness, compare two classic albums he almost entirely produced and co-wrote: Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! in 2019 and Lorde’s Melodrama in 2017. Del Rey’s album channeled Baby Boomer rock into a 21st-century masterpiece. Melodrama, by contrast, was a futuristic cityscape rendered in synth pop. Though hugely different, the albums both contain some of the best pop songs of the past decade.

Let’s not forget Antonoff-produced Taylor Swift’s “August,” “Mirrorball,” and “Gold Rush” rank among her greatest, and most distinctive, tracks ever.

Antonoff’s style is a sharp change from the dynamic that has governed the last decade of pop hit-making, which has been largely defined by the so-called “track-and-hook” method favored by producers like Max Martin and Dr. Luke. “A track is almost a canvas with some background painted into it,” Billboard noted in 2015, describing this method, “and different people add hooks and a bridge and a chorus and slowly it becomes a song.”

Track-and-hook production is more concerned with chart-tested formulas than the messy variability of human emotions. Also, it’s hierarchical and decidedly male. “The track-and-hook method makes the producer the undisputed king of the song-making process,” writes John Seabrook in The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.

By putting artists’ emotions in the center of the creative process Antonoff lets his collaborators take the lead.