Sympathy For The Devils — npr.org

Josh Tillman's latest album as Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear, is a sincere and shocking catalog of the main character's adventures in sex and love. Emma Tillman/Courtesy of the artist hide caption Josh Tillman's latest album as Father John Misty, I Love You, Honeybear, is a sincere and shocking catalog of the main character's adventures in sex and love. It's been five years since Kanye West raised his glass to "the a—holes" in the song "Runaway," a poetic taxonomy of bad behavior that formed the emotional center of his masterwork My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It's a sad song about romantic failure, but also a strong statement connecting West to popular music's longstanding practice of being dangerously outrageous. From Jim Morrison to James Brown to Morrissey to Courtney Love, rock and soul has housed huge personalities who upended and offended the bourgeoisie within performances that melded messily with larger-than-life personal styles. Today, however, the big bad personality in pop has mostly receded. Troublemaking characters still ruffle feathers — the men's right's poster boy Ariel Pink, the often problematically frank rapper Azealia Banks — but these Twitter warriors don't really register as major figures. Today's pop elite tends to be much more careful, tamping out feuds as soon as they erupt and dancing together at music industry pseudo events to dissipate any real tension. A few stars inhabit the pose of the bad girl or boy in ways that resonate: Rihanna's made it the center of her complex and distanced choreography, and in those realms of rock that appeal to the youngest fans, bands like Falling in Reverse (whose latest single, "Just Like You," has a lyric that echoes West's) tout impudence as a self-esteem booster. But civility seems more marketable today, and therefore it's favored. Even West might be wondering if he had the wrong mentality as he sits down to a West Village bistro bite with his former scorn victim, Taylor Swift.

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