Robin Pecknold

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>Speaking as a Straight White Male music listener, I'd say, generally speaking, that the Straight White Male is the last voice of "cultural relevance” that I'm actively looking to, or sympathetic to, in this particular cultural moment. Just, who cares, you know? This obviously creates a problem for the Straight White Male artist who still desires to make relevant art - do you attempt to gentrify the landscape, White Savior yourself, and demand through inference or testimony that your voice is that of a leader for these times, when your phenotype is culturally inert if not malignant, and that even presuming to have something genuinely important to add is arguably an invocation of privilege? This approach seems like a fool’s errand to me. I instead mostly took the tack that I was using my particular set of cultivated talents to make a Use Object, something useful, a balm, something experientially or aesthetically moving, a reprieve. If you think I should be trying to muscle my way into a position of cultural relevance that I don't deserve, in a culture that is currently filled with far more interesting and sympathetic perspectives than that of the Straight White Male, then I can't really help you, because I am a little too self aware to have tried to do that. I can still comfortably and with a clear conscience make music that is beautiful and useful to people who are receptive, but I don’t do so from a sage-like position at all. You obviously care enough about music to place musicians in positions of veneration, and I do too, but I’m sooner doing so with Frank and Kendrick and Solange at the moment than I am with any straight white male artist currently in the landscape, and obviously (duh) I’m not alone in that, as they are enormously successful, beloved, and influential artists.