Titus Andronicus Takes Car Seat Headrest to Task Over 13 Reasons Why Comments
Photo by Beth Dubber/Netflix Music News 13 Reasons Why
Over the weekend, Car Seat Headrest’s de-facto leader Will Toledo took to Twitter to criticize Netflix’s new teen drama 13 Reasons Why, which focuses on what happens after a high school student dies by suicide.
Toledo essentially said that people shouldn’t watch the show because it tells kids “how to turn their miserable lives into a thrilling and cathartic suicide mission,” this despite the fact that Car Seat Headrest’s own song “Oh! Starving” appears in the show.
as someone who contributed to the soundtrack for “13 Reasons Why”, I am obliged to tell you all that it’s kind of fucked
— car seat headrest (@carseatheadrest) April 30, 2017
writers: please don’t tell kids how to turn their miserable and hopeless lives into a thrilling and cathartic suicide mission
— car seat headrest (@carseatheadrest) April 30, 2017
kids: this is not a narrative you need to subscribe to. go watch ‘spring breakers’ instead
— car seat headrest (@carseatheadrest) April 30, 2017
Well, Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles (who lives with manic depression) took issue with that and took Toledo to task for taking the money, as well as for appearing to tell people how to contextualize mental health issues and suicide.
In a lengthy series of tweets that started last night and have continued through the day, Stickles said the following:
At least sixty people want to know what happened to the money from the ‘kind of f*cked’ show to which you contributed yr song and I am one. Pretending that suicide isn’t real, and keeping it out of the art so it doesn’t give anybody ideas, is the opposite of art’s purpose. And just because one depiction of suicide doesn’t ‘help’ one particular indie rock singer doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help someone like me. And just because a depiction of a real thing doesn’t give YOU the help YOU need, well, YOU are not the entire world.
The world isn’t yr private safe space, okay? Real sh*t is going on out here and the real artists don’t wanna be censored bc y’all can’t deal. If you don’t like what you see on the screen, then turn it off and watch something else. Don’t try to take away something that helps someone else just cuz it doesn’t help you — that’s just plain selfish and typically millennial. And don’t talk sh*t on the ‘bad guys’ while you ‘add value’ to their project and spend their money because THAT is ‘kind of f*cked.’
Not surprisingly, Toledo responded to Stickles’ charge by saying that he shared his opinion about the show because he doesn’t believe the world to be a “private safe space,” and that while he doesn’t like the show’s handling of the narrative, Toledo doesn’t think the show is “devoid of merit.”
Hi, not sure what’s going on here but the reason I tweeted my opinion instead of doing something ‘real’ is bc I don’t consider the world my ‘private safe space’. I’m not petitioning that the show be pulled out of circulation, or saying it’s devoid of merit. I’m saying that I personally don’t endorse the way that it handled the narrative. That’s all I can do! As for the money, I spent it all on hard drugs.
Stickles then responded by telling Toledo to “slide up in my DMs” to further discuss the issue, which is just sort of great to see in such a weighty convo. As of 20 minutes ago (at the time of this writing), Toledo tweeted to Stickles that he had emailed him and there haven’t been any more tweets. So it would appear there’s a detente now.
Paste recently wrote about the music of 13 Reasons Why and you can read that article here. Find Paste Cloud audio from Titus Andronicus’ 2008 Daytrotter Session below.