Phoebe Bridgers shut her down Saturday Night Live performance on February 6 by beating her guitar on stage – a fitting finale to an apocalyptically intense folk-rock song called ‘I Know the End’. There was Bridgers doing her own thing London Callingtrying to smash her Danelectro Dano ’56 baritone guitar while fog surrounds her feet and the skeletal pearls on her dress swing chaotically back and forth. She proved that the destruction of a guitar is much more difficult than it seems, because she constantly hit the instrument on an amplifier before it was thrown largely intact on the ground. It was dramatic, unexpected and wonderful. The internet has obviously gotten angry.
“Why did this woman, Phoebe Bridgers, destroy her guitar on SNL?” read the tweet that sparked a heated discussion over Twitter over the weekend. “I mean, I didn’t care much for the song either, but it looks extra.” Many people quickly came to Bridgers’ defense, including Jason Isbell, who pointed out that the guitar was a relatively inexpensive model for about $ 85. (“I told Danelectro I’m going to do it,” the singer said answer to Isbell. “And they congratulated me and said it’s hard to break.”
The online rage is, of course, overwhelming – especially when a female musician ignores it following the example of the many, very men breaking their instruments in front of her. Pete Townshend accidentally did this in the early sixties and then even made it his trademark. Rolling clip a step-by-step tutorial on how to destroy a guitar. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix set fire to his Stratocaster at Monterey Pop, while Kurt Cobain smashed guitars almost as often as he ate his meal of Kraft macaroni and cheese. It is possible that these guys had a bit of a setback at the time, but it’s hard to imagine anyone asking, ‘Why did this guy, Eddie Van Halen, destroy his guitar?’ with quite the same condescending tone.
All Bridgers did was take a well-known classic rock troupe and make it her own – something she has done regularly throughout her career. The skeletal suit she wore during her earlier performance of ‘Kyoto’, an appearance she signed her last year, was first popularized by Who bassist John Entwistle. When Bridgers launched the indie supergroup Boygenius with Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus in 2018, the trio’s EP cover repeated the debut of Crosby, Stills and Nash in 1969, with the three musicians posing together on a bench is. (Bridgers is more of a Neil Young, but if he did not join CSN at the time of this album, we’ll give her Graham Nash a pass.)
Bridgers has a complicated relationship with the genre beyond the nod for its iconography. She’s not keeping up with her latest album, Punisher, where she takes down Eric Clapton on ‘Moon Song’ (‘We Hate’ Tears in Heaven ‘/ But it’s sad that his baby is dead’) while leaving her favorite Beatle (“We cried over John Lennon / Until I Cried”) falling and writing the kind of love urge that makes her one of the sharpest songwriters of her generation. There are really mixed feelings behind these lines: ‘I mostly hate classic rock’, she admitted to me last year. “But wherever Neil Youngs of the world comes in, I love it.”
For Bridgers fans to see her SNL performance was our version of the Super Bowl. It was her moment, where she was able to bring her gloomy indie gems and witty, disrespectful persona to a larger audience than ever on national television. Her attack on the $ 85 guitar made sense in that context: it was a rude, funny act that embodied some of the oldest traditions of rock, even if it undermined their style. In an otherwise awkward event (an incredible host like Dan Levy deserved better sketches), that moment was something to celebrate, not mocked in a naked sexist way.