As a woman in the music industry, Bethany Cosentino knows what it’s like to be surrounded by men who think they’re smarter than they are. Maybe that’s why she has been glued to The Idol, the unintentionally hilarious prestige-television collaboration between the pop star The Weeknd and the Euphoria producer Sam Levinson.
“I feel like they were sitting around going, ‘Oh my God, I have this genius concept.’ I was watching it thinking, You guys think you’re smart, but this is just a horrible TV show,” she says, laughing about the series, which chronicles the misadventures of a Britney Spears-style pop star. “I couldn’t look away. I was one of those people that hate-watched it.”
The Idol, with its bizarre sleazy-bro energy, has provided much-needed light relief as Cosentino navigates the stress and excitement of opening the next chapter of her career. After 14 years fronting the indie duo Best Coast she is going solo with her wonderful new album, Natural Disaster.
The record is an engaging reset by an artist best known for scuzzy alternative anthems and a lo-fi aesthetic. It draws on her love of more “mainstream” musicians, such as Sheryl Crow and Kacey Musgraves, while also channelling her anxieties about the state of the world.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
That hell-in-a-handbasket nature of modern life is something she has first-hand experience of. She lives in Los Angeles, a city ravaged by wildfires, devastated by Covid and in 2020 rocked to its core by the Black Lives Matter protests and a long-overdue reckoning with centuries of institutionalised racism and trigger-happy policing.
“Every day I was waking up to sincerely feeling today is the last day. It was a palpable feeling of utter chaos and confusion,” says Cosentino. “I was sitting with the feeling of trying my hardest not to go down a deep dark spiral of, ‘Oh my God, we’re all doomed.’”
Cosentino has been indie-rock royalty for much of her adult life. With Best Coast, which she began with the drummer Bobb Bruno, she became acclaimed for songs that married the soft-pop yearning of Fleetwood Mac with the 1990s riffage of Nirvana. The group’s success made her an icon of millennial indiedom. Now she’s ripping it up and starting over.
“Some fans were, like, how could you do this to Bobb?” she says. “And there was no drama. He was very supportive. There doesn’t always have to be drama.”
“Natural disaster” can refer to many things these days: for Cosentino it all goes back to that summer three years when LA felt as if it was sliding into oblivion. “This is the hottest summer I can ever remember/ cos the world is on fire,” she sings on the title track, a zippy act of bearing witness that finds the singer reckoning with global warming and the United States’ culture wars.
What makes the song interesting is that, for all the angst, it’s ultimately uplifting. Cosentino is worried about the state of the world, but she isn’t giving up. Even in dark times, she argues, there is an opportunity for self-discovery and renewal.
“This record, I would say, is filled with hope. The landscape of the album, the background noise of what was happening in the world, was dark. Making this record was my response to the anxiety and dread I was living through in the last few years. A huge realisation that I had is that all of this could be gone at any moment. And why am I spending my life ruminating on things that maybe don’t matter?
In her 20s, Cosentino was the “biggest cynic”. The sensibility filtered through to Best Coast, whose music, for all its shimmer, had a hipster archness.
That was, to a degree, a defence mechanism; as Cosentino and Bruno achieved success, the music press turned on them. Which is to say, they turned on Cosentino. She looks back now at the way journalists wrote about her and is shocked. The sexism was breathtaking. (One example: a review that described her as “sexier and badder than any rock star I’ve seen in years”.)
“It is insane to think that not long ago people were writing stuff [like that] not just about me but about a lot of my peers as well. I remember meeting girls in bands touring all over the world and them also saying, ‘Yeah, I get ridiculed for the way that I play guitar, but my male counterpart, everybody calls him a shredder and says he’s so fantastic at what he does.’ It was the Wild West.”
Cosentino tried not to let it get to her. Still, the criticism had a way of burrowing under the skin and beneath the fingernails. All these years later she still carries it with her. “My feeling from that is an ongoing process. You can have a strong sense of self and be a person that is committed to working on yourself. But it’s still tough not to grab on to things an absolute stranger says about you.”
She also had her share of encounters with abusive males. She wrote about the experience in a Billboard opinion piece headlined “Consider 2017 the Year of Male Consequence”.
“I am a woman who was harassed and assaulted by a man she employed, only to be told his ‘bad behaviour’ was just ‘who he was’ or something he did when he ‘got too drunk’. I am a woman that experienced assault by a member of my own family as a child, a story I have only recently – at 31 years old – felt brave enough to discuss with the people closest to me.”
Seven years later, #MeToo has managed to hold some abusers to account, but the underlying power imbalances that allowed predators such as Harvey Weinstein to operate with impunity endure, she says.
“There’s been some change. The way we talk about female and femme-identifying people is wildly different. So I see that and I’m, like, ‘Okay, well, there’s some progress there.’ I do think that after I started speaking out about things that I had experienced, a lot of other people started to speak out about things. I know that I witnessed promoters or record labels get called out.”
The issue, she says, is the “disease” at the root of the problem. “That diseased root is the patriarchy, and it’s the idea that our society operates in a way where men get their slate wiped clean a little bit more. Whereas women can be more demonised. I think of an artist like Morgan Wallen, who was, quote unquote, cancelled [for using a racial slur] and now, suddenly, is back at the top of the Billboard charts.
As an appetite whetter for Natural Disaster, Cosentino has put together a streaming playlist of music that influenced the album. Alongside Bonnie Raitt, Lucinda Williams and Fleetwood Mac is Taylor Swift, with the ballad Back to December, from her album Speak Now.
“I love Taylor Swift. She is incredibly talented. When you’re a superstar of that capacity, everybody will have a take on you. Taylor is such a master songwriter. Look at her. She’s playing these football arenas. And she’s standing on stage singing songs about her life and experiences, and people connect to them. At the end of the day, our job as songwriters is to create art that resonates with other people – that helps us tell our stories and our lived experiences as humans, and also to make something that people out in the world can listen to and help them feel seen and heard. I think that she is so fantastic at that. I look up to her and think she is an incredibly talented human being.”
Cosentino is speaking the day after Hollywood was rocked by the news that actors are going on strike, effectively shuttering movie production. In Los Angeles it’s all that anyone can talk about. In an industry town, the aftershocks of the shutdown are to be felt everywhere, even in music. For artists such as Cosentino, film and TV provided another market for their songs. But now the opportunity for musical “syncs” has dried up.
“I’m in solidarity. I wish we had some sort of union in music where we could strike. If you’re not a massive artist it’s very difficult to have a livelihood. It’s not the way that it used to be even when Best Coast started. Back then there was a lot more money and resources for marketing. And right now, with music, there’s no film or TV world to have songs synced. So the strike is affecting the music industry at large. At the same time I’m not angry about that. I’m all for you fighting for what you believe in. I am a person that will die on the hill of saying this world could be better if we all just f**king pushed together.”
Natural Disaster is released on Friday, July 28th
