Read This: Shitty Mark Kozelek still shitty, said a writer “totally wants to fuck” him
Breaking News: Mark Kozelek is still a pretty shitty person. At a show in London this past weekend, the Sun Kil Moon singer called out Guardian writer Laura Snapes from the stage, saying she “totally wants to fuck” him, and telling her to “get in line.” Unfortunately to both Snapes and the 1900 people in attendance, Snapes did no such thing and had, as she writes in a piece for the Guardian today, just been trying to get in touch with him for an interview.
In the piece—which is surprisingly even-handed, considering how shitty Kozelek was to her—Snapes concludes that Kozelek must have been irked that she reached out to some of his contemporaries for thoughts about him, though as the quotes included in the piece—from Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Run The Jewels’ El-P, and more—are nothing but flattering. Snapes also suggests that Kozelek might have been thrown off by her initial request to interview him in person, as he typically prefers to do email interviews (which, for the record, most journalists hate.) Snapes eventually gave in to that request, only to have him berate her via email, saying that if she ever met him, she’d “probably want to have [his] baby” and suggesting that, if she came to his London show, she’d “be like a cat in heat.”
Democratically, Snapes ends the article by comparing Kozelek—who had a much-publicized internet battle with The War On Drugs last year—to one of the boxers he so admires. (He spent $17,000 on tickets to the Mayweather/Pacquiao fight recently.) After saying he “trades in sucker punches,” Snapes elaborates:
He impugns online “bitching and whining”, but hides behind one-way email exchanges, balks at the idea of his peers speaking about him and issues tirades (and sometimes, sexual advances) from the cowardly remove of the stage, with the get-out clause that it’s a performance. He can use sexually violent language to reduce female critics to the status of groupies, knowing that while male musicians’ misogynist acts are examined for nuance and defended as traits of “difficult” artists, women and those who call them out are treated as hysterics who don’t understand art. “The world don’t owe us shit, I learned that real fuckin’ young,” he sings on Universal Themes’ Little Rascals. If anything remains to separate Kozelek from his work, it’s that his music preaches that the least we owe one another is decency.
The entire piece is more than worth a read, especially if you’re still hanging on as a fan of either Kozelek or his music.