The Weekly Discourse: The Phoebe Bridgers Discourse Catastrophe

Phoebe Bridgers smashed her guitar on Saturday Night Live last weekend. Well, "smashed" is the wrong word. She went through the proper guitar-smashing movements, but the thing didn't break, so she dropped it and walked back towards her skeleton-clad bandmates.

As guitar smashes go, it seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, if a bit forced. Bridgers was playing her song "I Know The End," which is a gently beautiful indie-folk song for much of its run before ramping up to the horn-driven climax. The performance goes into a discordant jam at the end, during which Bridgers screams and begins banging her guitar on a stage monitor. Check it out for yourself:

You may not think there's anything all that remarkable about the performance, but if you're a part of Music Twitter, you'd think Bridgers urinated on a picture of Mother Teresa for all the controversy it inspired.

Bridgers is a little bit of a polarizing figure in the indie rock community. While her music is generally well-liked, she's also cultivated a cult of infallibility among her supporters. She's quite active on Twitter and people criticizing her music or social media presence tend to type her name with asterisks (i.e. "Ph**b* Br*dg*rs") in order to avoid the headache of having her fans (or even Bridgers herself) swarm their mentions. Her performance on Saturday Night Live was bound to be the talk of music fans online before Sunday's Super Bowl, and sure enough, when someone who wasn't aware of the Bridgers fandom took to Twitter to make a snide joke about her performance, it lit the match that caused one of the worst firestorms of Music Twitter in years. That man was #Resistance Twitter goober "BrooklynDad_Defiant!"

Why did this woman, Phoebe Bridgers, destroy her guitar on SNL?I mean, I didn't care much for the song either, but that seemed extra. pic.twitter.com/ayXgFXtex4

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) February 7, 2021

BrooklynDad (Defiant!) has developed a reputation on Twitter for being one of Trump's most notable and cringeworthy reply guys, and his tweet came to represent a supposedly massive audience of pearl-clutching, misogynist boomers shocked by Bridgers smashing her guitar while fawning over their London Calling album cover.

Or at least, that's how the narrative went: on Consequence of Sound, writer Lindsay Teske wrote, "A simple search of 'Phoebe Bridgers guitar' on Twitter brings up a litany of comments wondering why 'that woman' had the nerve to 'damage expensive property,'" her point being that Bridgers was getting mocked for something men like Pete Townsend, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, etc. had been doing in rock for decades. The thing with the piece, and others like it, is that searching "Phoebe Bridgers Guitar" on Twitter actually brings up a litany of people defending the act and joking about an unseen mass of critics that never materializes. Here's a smattering of the most popular tweets that come up when searching "Phoebe Bridgers guitar" at the time of writing:

if phoebe bridgers lightly denting a cheap guitar on SNL can provoke this level of discourse, we absolutely need to make rock music scary again. bring back the blood and snakes. bring back the music videos where a businessman’s head explodes because he hears a guitar solo

— carl (@NightlifeMingus) February 7, 2021

wishing i was phoebe bridgers’ guitar on snl so that she would smash me

— tea (@teakingley) February 7, 2021

“i’m not going to listen to phoebe bridgers because she smashed a guitar on SNL.” say you hate women and move on.

— addie (@iamaddie) February 9, 2021

men are so bored they’re getting mad at phoebe bridgers smashing a guitar

— ilana kaplan (@lanikaps) February 7, 2021

The people that are upset Phoebe Bridgers smashed a guitar on SNL are the same ones who are happy when Pete Townshend or Jimi Hendrix or Kurt Cobain did it. pic.twitter.com/44LsAKc9cs

— Eric Alper 🎧 (@ThatEricAlper) February 7, 2021

It seems, by Teske's own metric, that the litany of people complaining about Bridgers with phrases like "That Woman" is just BrooklynDad and some people in his replies. There were also whispers of a backlash against Bridgers because smashing a guitar is "wasteful," particularly in the current economic crisis. Critic Matthew Perpetua screenshot an anonymous tweet of a "Gen Z" user saying the smash was "rude" and "wasteful," which in turn led to a wave of tweets defending the act with more jokes.

It is kinda hilarious that a rock move as old and banal as theatrically smashing a guitar can inspire this sort of scoldy pearl-clutching from very young people in the year 2021 pic.twitter.com/u0gQ3UiIgy

— Matthew Perpetua (@perpetua) February 7, 2021

Only, Bridgers wasn't "wasting" a guitar—not an expensive one anyway. As the discourse ball got rolling, Bridgers told country singer Jason Isbell that she had told the company that made the guitar, Danelectro, about her plan to smash the guitar, which according to Isbell ran about $85. She also said that SNL gave her a "fake" monitor to smash, so she wasn't ruining their equipment either. In essence, she had planned a theatrical display of punk rock badassery and gotten permission from all parties involved to make it happen, which generally seems antithetical to the point of guitar-smashing, but in terms of the discourse, that's neither here nor there.

I told danelectro I was going to do it and they wished me luck and told me they’re hard to break

— traitor joe (@phoebe_bridgers) February 7, 2021

The whole thing unfolded like a textbook Nontroversy, a "controversy" drummed up by amplifying few negative voices in order to get a community to rally around a certain idea. In this case, it appears Bridgers-gate was mostly amplified by fans in the service of giving Bridgers an underdog narrative against sexist older men in the industry. For a while, it seemed there wasn't much to that narrative until David Crosby of The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young chimed in, saying the guitar-smash was "pathetic," to which Bridgers replied, "little bitch."

little bitch.

— traitor joe (@phoebe_bridgers) February 9, 2021

From a PR perspective, this was the best thing Bridgers could have done: she'd nabbed a disapproving boomer musician and brushed him off with a near-literal "OK Boomer," sending her defenders, particularly in the press, absolutely gaga over her. Consequence of Sound wrote an op-ed that completely took the piss out of Crosby, painting him like a cantankerous old kook with nothing to do but explain why he didn't like the young woman who smashed her guitar. Stereogum used Bridgers words in their tweet describing the incident, writing, "'Little bitch' David Crosby explains why Phoebe Bridgers smashing her guitar on SNL was 'pathetic.'"

For the record, Crosby explained his rationale further, tweeting, "Guitars are for playing ..making music …..not stupidly bashing them on a fake monitor for childish stage drama …..I really do NOT give a flying F if others have done it before. It’s still STUPID." He later added that it was less about the guitar and more about the "staged part" that bothered him.

Now four days removed from Phoebe Bridgers bumping her guitar on a fake monitor, it's clear that her calculated guitar-smash worked even better than she planned. Not only did she give one of the most talked-about musical performances on SNL in years, but she also rallied the press and a legion of fans to her defense for half a week and turned them against a rock music legend who didn't like her performance. With the permission of NBC and a cheap electric guitar company, she became a trending topic on Twitter. What could be more rock and roll than that?

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The Weekly Discourse is a look at some of the spiciest hot takes on Twitter from the past week that may not have generated memes but were definitely bonkers.