Phoebe Bridgers concluded she Saturday Night Live on February 6, trying to break his guitar on stage – a fitting ending to an apocalyptically intense folk-rock song called “I Know the End”. There were Bridgers making their own London callingtrying to break his Danelectro Dano ’56 baritone guitar into pieces as the mist surrounded his feet and the skeleton pearls on his dress swayed chaotically back and forth. She proved that destroying a guitar is much more difficult than it looks, as she continually banged the instrument into an amplifier before throwing it on the floor virtually intact. It was dramatic, unexpected and incredible. So, of course, the Internet got mad.
“Why did this woman, Phoebe Bridgers, destroy her guitar on SNL?” read the tweet that sparked a heated Twitter discussion over the weekend. “I mean, I didn’t really care about the music either, but it seemed extra.” Many people quickly came to Bridgers’ defense, including Jason Isbell, who pointed out that the guitar was a relatively cheap model that was worth about $ 85. (“I told Danelectro I was going to do this”, the singer answered for Isbell. “And they wished me luck and told me that they are hard to break.”)
The online furor was obviously exaggerated – especially considering that it was unleashed by a musician following the example of many, Many men who broke their instruments in front of her. Pete Townshend did this by accident in the early 1960s and then became his trademark, even giving Rolling Stone a step-by-step tutorial on how to destroy a guitar. Jimi Hendrix was famous for setting his Monterey Pop Stratocaster on fire in 1967, while Kurt Cobain broke guitars almost as often as he ate his usual Kraft macaroni and cheese meal. It is possible that these guys received some negative reaction at the time, but it is hard to imagine anyone asking, “Why did this man, Eddie Van Halen, destroy his guitar?” with the same condescending tone.
All Bridgers did was take a tribe of familiar classic rock and make it their own – something she has done frequently throughout her career. The skeleton outfit she wore during her previous “Kyoto” performance, a look she signed last year, was first popularized by Who bassist John Entwistle. When Bridgers formed the indie supergroup Boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus in 2018, the trio’s EP cover reproduced the debut of Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1969, with the three musicians posed together on a couch. (Bridgers is more of a Neil Young, but considering he hadn’t joined CSN at the time of this album, let’s give Graham Nash’s pose a chance)
Bridgers has a complicated relationship with the genre outside of these references to his iconography. She didn’t beat around the bush on her last album, Punisher, where she drops Eric Clapton in “Moon Song” (“We hate ‘Tears in Heaven’ / But it’s sad that her baby died”) while changing the name of her favorite Beatle (“We fought for John Lennon / Until I cried ”) – and write the kind of passionate funeral song that makes her one of the smartest songwriters of her generation. There are genuinely mixed feelings behind those lines: “I, most of the time, hate classic rock,” she admitted to me last year. “But where the Neil Youngs of the world come in, I love it.”
For Bridgers fans, see it SNL performance was our version of the Super Bowl. This was her moment, where she could bring her dark indie gems and clever and irreverent personality to a larger audience than ever on national television. His attack on the $ 85 guitar made perfect sense in this context: it was a blatant and funny act that incorporated some of the oldest rock traditions, although it subverted them in style. In a monotonous episode (an incredible presenter like Dan Levy deserved better sketches), that moment was something to be celebrated, not mocked in an openly sexist way.