How Courtney Barnett turned online troll aggression into a song
Sadly, part and parcel of making it big is inevitably being hit with critique. Anyone who is talented enough to become well known is subject to the scrutiny and cruelness of the general public as a million voices seem to rise to bring them down. In Courtney Barnett’s case, she turned their voice back on them, turning judgment of her art into art itself.
There was something about Barnett that quickly gained attention. Her debut EP, I’ve Got a Friend, called Emily Ferris, released on her own label in 2012, was an unlikely critical hit. Despite her DIY approach, Barnett’s deadpan lyricism and slacker rock sound scratched an itch that the 2010s were desperate to scratch. In the same wave that brought the world Mac DeMarco and Kurt Vile, they were a perfect antidote to the overexcitement of more typical indie bands.
By the time she dropped ‘Avant Gardener’ as the lead single to The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas in 2013, it seemed like the world was paying attention to the Aussie musician. Barnett was the favoured new face of the alternative-indie world, and she deserved the accolade with music that good.
But naturally, hype breeds hate. As Barnett became more successful, the vitriol directed towards her only seemed to get worse and worse. In particular, it was coming from men.
That’s a feeling almost all women know well: a sense of constantly being discredited or overlooked by male peers. Part of the broader issue of gender inequality and global patriarchy, it’s another tool in which men benefit from women feeling less than at best and completely unsafe at worst. While Barnett’s lyrics have always had a feminist lens, on her track ‘Nameless, Faceless’, she’d had enough. The songwriter decided to finally say it all outright and direct it back at her critics.
“Men are scared that women will laugh at them / Women are scared that men will kill them,” Barnett sings, adapting a Margaret Atwood quote and using the classic imagery of women walking home with their keys between their fingers, just in case. “A lot of my guy friends didn’t understand the reference,” Barnett told the BBC.
But while ‘Nameless, Faceless’ can be viewed as a broader look at women’s safety and feminism, it is also a specific call out to those who criticise her online. “Don’t you have anything better to do,” she sings to men who “sit alone at home in the darkness / With all the pent-up rage that you harness.”
Quoting one hate comment word for word, Barnett recounts, “He said “I could eat a bowl of alphabet soup / And spit out better words than you.” Punctuating it with the simple and savage comeback of “but you didn’t,” she’s turning the critique and doubt back on the people firing it at her.
Even the title of the track, ‘Nameless, Faceless’, is a hit at the cowardice of trolls. Sat anonymously behind their computer screens, directing violent hate at successful female artists; it really is the most pathetic practice.
