Zach Bryan, & Listening to Difficult Men

On the painful, necessary process of weighing art with artist

I want to talk about Zach Bryan, who recently broke up with a social media influencer. That influencer, Brianna Chickenfry (not a typo), has since come out with a laundry list of plausible allegations that paint Bryan as an abusive boyfriend prone to drunken verbal outbursts and a wide array of toxic and threatening - if not physically abusive - behaviors. What are we to do with that? What should we do with that? Should we stop listening to Zach Bryan? Should we try to get others to stop listening to Zach Bryan?

What about Fleetwood Mac, some of whose best songs were recorded in a haze of sexually-charged domestic violence? What about David Bowie, who appears to have dated an adolescent? What about Townes Van Zandt, or David Foster-Wallace, or Philip Roth, all of whom were fucked up and behaved in various shitty ways?

From the standpoint of consequentialist ethics, it doesn’t actually matter. A single person’s streams are too infinitesimal to constitute meaningful support or protest. The weight that we attach to these choices, then, is more likely to be about personal conscience than moral impact. I would take it one step further, even - it’s not about your conscience. It is about something very simple, or purely aesthetic: do you still enjoy the music?

Up until about two years ago, I considered myself a huge fan of Kanye West, the inimitable rap bard, a genius who has reinvented himself and the genre several times over. I number at least two of his albums among the greatest recorded works in rap history. But I don’t listen to Kanye West anymore. The old stuff goes unplayed, and the new stuff gets ignored.

Kanye West on Alex Jones

I didn’t expect this. When Kanye came out and declared himself some sort of edgelord Neo-Nazi, I enjoyed telling my friends that it didn’t change anything for me. The songs were the songs, I said, and the songs were still great. You’d have to kill me before I stopped listening to “Devil In a New Dress” ten times a week, or so I thought.

But something shifted for me as Kanye continued to say stupid, hateful stuff. It became harder to engage with his artistic point of view. While he was always boisterous, always crazy, Kanye’s musical personae always felt grounded in a deeply human self that kept him relatable even at the peaks of his braggadocio/psychosis.

These days it feels like I can’t locate the human in Kanye’s music anymore, and the music has become vacuous to my ears. Recently, the tabloids reported that Kanye West had become addicted to nitrous oxide, and it felt right, this news of obsessive and constant dissociation from Planet Earth. Lana Del Rey said it best, I think: Kanye West is blonde and gone.

As for Zach Bryan, I’m not there yet. While the behavior Brianna described was viscerally upsetting, I still listen to Zach Bryan’s music. And it doesn’t come from a place of fanboy denialism. In fact, it’s precisely because I believe the allegations - because the allegations are the furthest thing from incongruous with the art that Bryan has made, which grapples openly with his issues.

Take “From A Lover’s Point of View,” one of Bryan’s most underrated and touching songs from earlier in his career. The title is self-explanatory, as Bryan documents his alcoholism from his girlfriend’s perspective.

You don't have to drink tonight, why don't we just get some sleep?

'Cause I'm tired of crying in driveways

As you slur the words you speak

Bryan’s standard stripped-back, acoustic arrangement pairs nicely with his unadorned vocal delivery here, and this verse will rip your heart out:

And I'll pick you up downtown when you're grinning with a busted lip

'Cause you're not known for backing down

And those boys are known for talking shit

But now's about the time, look, you really got to decide

Are you gonna be a good man to me or die the way your mother died?

For context, Bryan’s mother died from complications related to alcohol abuse. It is safe to say that most songwriters will go their entire lives without writing a song this direct and incisive about their own nature.

Do you see where I’m going with this? This song doesn’t exonerate Zach Bryan. If anything, it heavily implies that he’s a bad guy who struggles with alcohol abuse, as the song’s narrator begs Bryan to get his life together and stop mistreating her. And there are other hints, scattered like nasty autobiographical Easter Eggs across his discography.

Take the song “Deep Satin” - delightful in its lyrical density and wordplay - which is about (more or less) doing Ecstasy, the devilish draw of bad behavior, and the hallucinatory nature of overnight fame.

Is that song stuck in your head?

"Friend of the Devil, " by the Dead

Or is that just what your friends want me to be?

'Cause if that's the case, then that's just what I'll be

“Deep Satin,” which darkens to pitch-black in the shadow of Bryan’s alleged behavior, features an artist who knows that he is demonized by his partner’s friends, and decides to go ahead and earn that negative characterization. You can also listen to “Condemned,” or “Mine Again,” and you’ll get the same idea. This is an artist who has constantly struggled with his demons through public art.

This particular thing - a brilliant singer-songwriter who writes and rewrites his life - is catnip for me, a lifetime Leonard Cohen and Elliott Smith obsessive. It leads to weird, fascinating bits of artistic context, like the background information that Brianna provided for the Zach Bryan song “Pink Skies,” which forgoes the easy melody of most Zach Bryan music for a talky, near-stumbling lyrical approach as Bryan tells a story centered around a funeral.

The kids are in town for a funeral

And the grass all smells the same as the day you broke your arm swingin'

On that kid out on the river

You bailed him out, never said a thing about Jesus or the way he's livin'

Shortly after releasing the song (which went viral on TikTok and peaked at #6 on the Billboard Hot 100), Bryan clarified via Twitter that it was not about his own life. This is where Brianna’s side of the story comes in. Apparently, she attended the funeral of her former friend/podcast co-host (it’s complicated) Grace O’Malley’s grandmother and brought Bryan along. He was a huge dick to her about this, and complained incessantly about having to leave tour for the funeral. Bryan and O’Malley didn’t like each other, and barely spoke at the funeral.

So you bring your alcoholic douchebag of a boyfriend to your best friend’s grandmother’s funeral. He doesn’t behave himself at the funeral and continues to have a weird, frosty relationship with your best friend. Then he goes home and writes this, his voice going higher and louder as he breaks into the final, Godly affirmation:

If you could see 'em now, you'd be proud

But you'd think they's yuppies

Your funeral was beautiful

I bet God heard you comin'

What a strange, public life Zach Bryan leads. Art that imitates life, life that imitates the art in unfortunate and painful ways. A messy, abusive alcoholic whose behavior spills into the public eye and makes itself available for the worst kind of scrolly, obsessive, Tiktok-mediated public consumption.

But here I am, consuming. I can’t stop listening to his songs, and I don’t see it happening anytime soon. His biography - however pockmarked - deepens and complexifies his art, sharpens its meanings.

As to your comfort level with listening to Zach Bryan, or any number of other bad men who make good art...I’ll leave that to you.