Filed under: art, economics, music, Social Media, technology | Tags: Adventurous, algorithms, Elvis Costello, Indigo Girls, International TV, music, Netlfix, playlist, popular, shuffle, songs, spotify, Top Artist, Top Song
At the end of the year, Spotify sends everyone (with an account) a summary of their year on the app/website. They’ll tell you your Top Song and your Top Artist – that is, the stuff you listened to the most. Sometimes it’ll assign you a personality based on this information. One year they told me I was Adventurous because I “listen to non-mainstream artists 100% more than the average Spotify listener”. Aside from the suspect percentage, I liked this personality assignment. I like to be seen as adventurous. (Handily, this year, Spotify told me that the personality of my podcast listeners was The Adventurer, so I guess we all have something in common.)
But I’ve realized that this yearly accounting of my listening habits is only an effect of the algorithm that runs the thing. It’s given me some insight into how a lot of algorithms work and, given how dominated our lives have become by algorithms, how our cultural moment tends to work. I’ll explain.
The last couple of years, I’ve been creating a playlist at the start of the year into which I put all the music I want to make sure I remember to listen to. I called last year’s playlist “New Moment” – probably because I called the playlist the year before “The Moment.” “New Moment,” by the end of 2022, had 42 hours and 30 minutes of music in it. (I was a little overly liberal with the “Add to Playlist” button in 2022.) I generally just hit shuffle and let it make me a randomized radio station full of things I was interested in hearing. The 2022 list began with four Lake Street Dive albums, three Stromae albums and a LOT of bossa nova. It also featured seven Indigo Girls albums because I realized I wasn’t really up to date with their catalogue so I wanted to catch up. Sprinkled around all these albums were single songs I wanted to get to know.
However, even with 42+ hours of music, I noticed that the shuffle function tended to play me the same handful of Indigo Girls songs. I found it odd, though I did appreciate that it got me to learn the lyrics of some of their more recent songs. But I did wonder why this supposedly random shuffle function returned again and again to similar material, especially given how much there was to choose from.
It wasn’t that I had more Indigo Girls on that list with those seven albums. There were nine Elvis Costello albums (for similar reasons) and in my year-end sum-up, he didn’t even make the top five artists. Who was number one? The Indigo Girls, of course. Now, I love the Indigo Girls and have done since I first heard “Closer to Fine” in 1989 but in 2022, I hardly ever purposefully pushed play on their music. (Exception: “Prince of Darkness” because I was learning it for the podcast.) The fact of the matter is, Spotify chose to play me the Indigo Girls over and over, even when I started skipping them, and then Spotify told me they were my #1 Artist in 2022. Did Spotify select them, purposefully, to be my top artist? I doubt it. I suspect the algorithm, which, like most algorithms, privileges popular content, played some Indigo Girls and played it again because it had been played before and before we knew it, these songs were the most popular on my list. Spotify created that popularity, probably out of the algorithm’s formula that continuously weights popularity. Meanwhile there are so many songs that I would like to have heard in this playlist, songs by people who never had a top 100 hit or a top ten album. And those songs that Spotify never played me might never become popular since they weren’t popular in the first place. Spotify is unlikely to be promoting those unpopular songs anywhere else, given how “adventurous” I am. Spotify likes popular music and makes it more popular.
Our social media posts work this way, too. The way to have your post be a hit (be it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and beyond) is to have it already have a high number of clicks. The way to have more people see your news is to have had people see your news before. Those algorithms weigh previous engagement more heavily than anything else.
I think this makes for an increasingly less interesting world. If we can only see what is popular, we are missing some of the most interesting songs, people or art. It’s how we end up with a highly polarized art world. It’s why there’s no middle class left in music (or art, or theatre, or film, or dance or…). You’re either Taylor Swift or no one. Bands who had hit songs years ago, who get a million listens on Spotify don’t make any real money for those million listens – because to get real money for Spotify, you need at least ten million listens. 300k listens is about $80. And the system encourages the imbalance. I feel fairly confident that if I’d had Taylor Swift on my New Moment playlist, the algorithm, leaning toward its most popular songs, would have quickly made her my number one artist in 2022. These algorithms are actually pretty stupid, even though they seem smart.
For example, Netlfix’s algorithm has worked out that it can get me to watch its International TV programming without much effort. They flash me a group of older women doing heists in Poland and I don’t need to be advertised to twice, no sir. But despite its having figured that out, it’s only ever as smart as the previous show I watched so if I’m watching a Korean romantic comedy, it’ll show me nothing but Korean romantic comedies for a while. I like to switch around to try and confuse it but it never works. And, of course, it’s only showing me the most popular of its offerings, thereby reinforcing its own patterns and hits. I don’t have another way of finding International TV so my viewing is entirely dominated by what Netflix has already found to be popular. It’s essentially self-canceling its unpopular shows by only pushing forward what’s already popular. And the thing is – I’d love to watch some unpopular stuff. I’d love to see something from countries that I don’t know a lot about. I want to see things that are beloved by small handfuls of people – not just the megahits of wealthy nations. But the algorithms aren’t built that way and over and over again, they show us the things that other people like, leaving interesting beautiful things to languish in obscurity. A world of only popular things is very dull and I think a little dangerous. Please, technologists, if you can’t break us out of the popular stuff, can you at least make a setting where we could choose to try less popular stuff? I think it would help tip things back to a more reasonable world. Next year, I want my top artist to be someone none of us has ever heard of before.
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Filed under: art, movies, music | Tags: Amy Taubin, Cate Blanchett, conductor, film, film criticism, music, stupidity, Tár
Can anyone introduce me to film critic, Amy Taubin? I discovered her awesomeness when I went searching for some sensible criticism about the much lauded film, Tár, and found her on a podcast talking a great deal of sense. She said, “It has to be one of the stupidest movies I’ve seen in many a long year” and I could not have agreed more. I said something similar, out loud, multiple times, as we watched it (at home, don’t worry. I wasn’t exclaiming in public!). It was a very stupid movie, which was all the more irritating given how smart it thinks it was.
I have a long list of things I found exceptionally stupid – but I feel like I should mostly focus on one because I’m worried that it’s a bit of stupidity that might become extremely popular, given the accolades this stupid film is receiving.
The trick at the heart of this movie is that the writer wrote a pretty bog standard story about a man abusing his power and then just cast a woman in the part instead, suddenly making his dumb story about a man getting his #MeToo comeuppance seem like it might be interesting. It isn’t. But because it’s a woman doing stuff we usually see men doing, it seems like it might be edgy or compelling. There’s been virtually no attempt to make this a believable story about a woman. It would be a somewhat believable story about a man, but as it is, it feels like they just kept the story as it was, changed some pronouns and added a line or two about gender and called it a day.
Writers. My friends, my fellow creative folks, please don’t do this. I fully support all the changing of Baggage Handler # 1 from Glen to Glenda. This gives a lot of women jobs that weren’t available before! I’m all for it! But to attempt to tell a man’s story with a woman in the role, just to make it interesting, is egregiously transparent. This guy wrote a story about a man falling apart due to his abuses of power and then realized it would never get made so he gave it to Cate Blanchett to play – and now they’re all waiting for the awards to roll in.
And you know, I get it. I’ve done it. In high school, my friend and I put on a fairly banal play called Businessman’s Lunch – but we gender reversed it so we cast girls to play the sexist businessmen and a boy to play the waitress that the men harass. It DID turn a sexist story into an interesting look at gender. I’m pretty proud of that piece we made. But it was pretty sophomoric. I think we were literal high school sophomores. I guess I hoped for more from Oscar Nominated people than something like what I came up with at age fifteen. You know?
But this is all bonkers. The credits that begin the film (not the end credits that roll relentlessly at the beginning for some pretentious reason. I’m talking about the accomplishments that New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik reads that supposedly belong to Cate Blanchett’s character) that are supposed to help us believe that this character is immensely successful – are all impossibly enormous. (As my friend said, “They might as well have said she was an astronaut, given the realm of reality those credits were living in.”) Like, those are credits no one could have. No one. Not a man and definitely not a woman. As I learned from my friend, there is currently literally only one woman who has a reasonably successful conducting career and she had never led even one of the four major orchestras this character is supposed to have led all of. It is a fantasy within a fantasy. No one’s career involves leading four major orchestras – but in a field where there is literally only one woman, a woman could CERTAINLY not be in that position. And the character is blasé about it. She says she believes she has had no special challenges as a woman in the field.
This would be impossible. In a field that requires getting large groups of people to work together, there is no way, in this current world we live in, a woman conducting could believe she’s had no challenges. Now – maybe she just SAYS these things – there are women who say such things as a strategy to avoid having to discuss gender 24/7 but none of the obstacles that this character runs into are anything like what women actually come up against. This character is only accidentally a woman.
It all just feels like an excuse to rail against “all this woke business” in a slightly more palatable form. Like, if it’s beautiful Cate Blanchett abusing power, we don’t mind so much. We sympathize with her bad deeds! She’s a lady genius so we don’t mind her shaky ethics!
Am I saying women wouldn’t abuse their power should they, by some chance, get some? Not at all. Surely some would and it would be interesting to watch a film about how women actually abuse power when they get it. It just wouldn’t be like this. It isn’t even a little bit believable.
My favorite absolutely absurd moment was when a horde of protestors gathered to harangue the conductor at her book signing. I’m sorry. No one – not even the biggest classical music nerds – would get a bunch of hand painted signs and a shouting squad together to yell at a conductor. First, few people care that much, about sexual harassment or music, and second, those that did care about music would be worried about messing up an opportunity that the disgraced conductor might be able to get them in the future. And it for sure wouldn’t be covered in the news.
I feel like this writer has no idea how classical musicians behave nor how women behave and it’s all so off the norm that people found it edgy or something?
I don’t know why people like this movie. It’s just so silly. And it takes itself so SERIOUSLY. The only thing to do is to just throw up our hands and hope that this trick of putting a woman in a part written for men does not become a trend. And to quote Amy Taubin, who I really hope to take out for drinks one day, “It’s a ridiculous movie. And why don’t people see that? People don’t understand anything at all about the art world and these people are in the art world. They make movies so…. Fuck it. I don’t care. I just don’t care.”
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Filed under: Acting, art, Creative Process, music | Tags: art, Artist, arts and crafts, Bisa Butler, craft, crochet, embroidery, hobbies, money, quilt
My artist friend was in artistic crisis. We all of us have them and the crises are so clever, they seem to always give us new takes on the theme. There seems to be an endless variety of artistic crises to be had. Knock one down, another, slightly re-framed one, will pop up to take its place.
This one my friend was in was a hobby crisis. It’s one where she asked herself something like, “Is my work just a hobby? Other people seem to see it that way.”
From the outside, I can tell her, “No, your artwork isn’t a hobby. It’s fucking art and all the people who don’t know the difference can fuck all the way off!” But I’ve been there and I know that some further unpacking might help all of us deal with this concept that is many artists’ least favorite word to hear about our work – hobby.
First, whether or not your art is a hobby has nothing to do with whether or not you get paid for it. Money isn’t fairy dust that transforms hobbyists into artists. An artwork is an artwork because it is an artwork, not because someone paid for it. People buy things with money that aren’t art all the time. Money doesn’t turn your couch into art when you hand over the cash. People buy stuff from hobbyists too. Money does not legitimize or create art. Artists create art.
So what makes it different from a hobby then, if it isn’t the professionalism of receiving money for it? How do I distinguish between a hobbyist and an artist if it isn’t money?
It’s actually really simple. It’s intention. If someone makes things with the intention of creating art, of creating something meaningful, with layers and craft, that is art. If they make things because they are called to it and follow a kind of internal aesthetic compass – that person is making art. If they sacrifice things and money and maybe even relationships for it – it’s even more likely that it’s art. If they broke open their heart to give it to us – it is certainly art.
Hobbies are often activities that people enjoy. Some of them are even the same medium as art. There are people who paint as a hobby or act (let’s not forget what Uta Hagen said about these folks) or sing or any number of things that are artistic but still not necessarily art, even if they’re doing arty things. The activity is not the art part. The art part is what it’s for and the spirit with which it is made.
This is not to denigrate hobbies in any way. I’m an artist. I make art. But I also have some hobbies which I enjoy and which enrich my life significantly – but I know the difference between the things that are my art and those that are my hobbies. Let’s take quilting. I’ve made some nice baby quilts for my friends in the past. I enjoyed making them and they are (I hope) attractive objects – but they aren’t art. Are there some quilts that are art? Hell yeah. I have seen some amazing quilted artworks. But I know what I’m doing when I stitch squares together is nothing like what Bisa Butler is doing when she makes a quilt. We may be using the same tools and doing similar activities but our intentions are wildly divergent. Calling my quilting a hobby isn’t an insult. It’s accurate to what I’m up to when I do it. It WOULD be insulting, however to call Bisa Butler’s artwork her hobby, even if she’d never sold a piece in her life. But anyone who has dedicated their life to art – at some point has experienced this kind of dismissal.
Mixing up art and hobbies is also problematic for hobbyists, I think. I follow the crochet subreddit and I think most of us would agree that crochet is most often a hobby. Could an artist make art using crochet? Absolutely – but you don’t see a lot of them. One thing I’ve learned from observing the posts from this community over the years is how even the hobbyists are not permitted to just enjoy their hobby and let it be a hobby and that’s it. So many people talk about being pressured to sell the things that they make – that few people can let them just make what they make without encouraging them to capitalize on their skill. Crochet a cute hat for yourself and the next thing you know, everyone wants you to start a hat business. It feels as though our capitalist society cannot let anyone just enjoy the things they make, be they hobby or art, without worrying about how we’re going to profit from it.
Honestly, I want respect for both art and hobbies. Arts and crafts have inherent value. (I think it’s important that these words are separate, even if they once meant more or less the same thing.) Nor arts nor crafts magically gain more value when someone pays for them. Trying to clarify the difference between hobbies and art has nothing to do with devaluing hobbies and everything to do with just understanding how to distinguish between them. To know art from craft.
Sure, I’m an artist, so I bring my artist brain to everything I do and sometimes I can make things outside of my mediums with an artistic sensibility but I promise you, I am not a quilt artist. I am not a gingerbread cookie artist. I am not an embroidery artist. Some things are arts and some things are hobbies. When you confuse an artist’s art for their hobby, you hurt their feelings because you have failed to understand their intentions. And when you say, “You should sell this.” It’s not always the compliment you think it is.
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Filed under: age, art, feminism, Gen X, music, TV, writing | Tags: feminism, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Free Bird, Generation X, Millennial, Once in a Lifetime, Same as it ever was
This is going to be a regular thing now, isn’t it? This thing where Millennials play Gen X-ers now? This is going to happen a lot from here on out, I’m starting to realize.
I’d already watched seven episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble but it hadn’t been bothering me much. I was too pre-occupied with how it compared to the book and what had changed and wondering if I felt differently about it as a TV show. But then, Lizzy Caplan’s character went to a barbeque in New Jersey and the scene was just chock full of model gorgeous young Millennials and then she walked past four Millennials (or maybe Gen Z?) men, playing “Free Bird” in the backyard and suddenly the generational stuff was all I could think about.
You all are familiar with the song “Free Bird,” right? It’s a Leonard Skynyrd song from 1973. For Gen X, “Free Bird” was a joke. A literal joke. You probably could not have gone to a concert in the 80s without some joker yelling, “Free Bird” to the band in any moment of silence. And it was very clear that no one actually WANTED to hear “Free Bird.” When a band got tired of this joke and learned “Free Bird” so they could play it when someone shouted it, people laughed after the first few chords but only a sadistic band would play the whole thing. And I will confess something to you. I understood this as a joke long before I ever actually heard the song “Free Bird.” I was really surprised when I finally listened to it, honestly. “That’s Free Bird?!?” It was not at all what I expected. I was imagining an epic like “Stairway to Heaven” and it was this thin, maudlin thing instead.
Anyway, to see a bunch of young people singing “Free Bird” at a backyard barbeque in a completely unironic and earnest manner really confused me. People like this song now? This character is supposed to be 41 in the show, so she is technically an elder Millennial as the eldest Millennials are turning 42 this year but the show is set in 2016, so she’s actually Gen X, just like in the book. This Gen X character is having a fully earnest moment with the joke song of the 80s? What the hell is going on?!
So I looked up Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the writer of this book, as well as the showrunner of the show and yes, she’s Gen X. She’s 47. But – and this will be significant for cultural signifiers – she spent a lot of her youth in an Hasidic community. My girl probably had very little exposure to Gen X youth culture in the moment – which may be how this “Free Bird” situation occurred. And it may be why there’s a lot of confusing cultural and generational issues in this show. I suspect the delay in entering the pop cultural landscape might mean that she may be more Millennial than Gen X in her cultural influences.
Like, she’s telling a Gen X story about aging using iconic Millennial actors. Jesse Eisenberg is the epitome of a Millennial leading man. I’m not sure you could get a more representative actor for his generation. Maybe Daniel Radcliffe? But for American Millennial angst? Top of the list. I saw a Tweet about this show suggesting that Jesse Eisenberg grappling with middle age meant that the Tweeter, too, was facing down middle age. It becomes a Millennial middle age story in a Gen X outfit. I found the whole experience disorienting.
I wasn’t crazy about the book, as you may recall. But I hated the TV show. I’m not sure why I felt compelled to watch it. Maybe because a lot of the reviews I read suggested the TV show was better than the book? Regardless, I stuck with it, maybe just out of morbid curiosity. I suppose the curiosity was largely about my own response to it. Why do I hate it so much? And so much more than the book, too? Why am I so alienated by a show by someone, who is more or less my age, taking place in the city I live in? Shouldn’t I relate to this somehow? Is it just the bizarre intermeshing of Millennial actors and styles with Gen X dialogue and t-shirts? I don’t think so.
One of the major differences between the book and the show is that we see a lot more of the narrator in the show. We get her story. We understand that the divorce she’s telling us about is just a way for her to understand her own dissatisfaction with her own life. And the thing of it is, she’s roiling with dissatisfaction. Like a lot of recent Gen X mother narratives, she’s trying out abandoning her family and fascinated with another woman who has abandoned hers. But, like, of course she’s dissatisfied. She gave up her writing career to become a stay at home mom. And when people say to her, “Maybe you should go back to work?” She somehow doesn’t think that’s the answer. It’s a whole crisis about how she doesn’t know who she is anymore but like – she’s changed her name, given up her career and moved to the suburbs. It’s not rocket science.
And weirdly, the TV show is even further removed from the feminist movement than the book was. There’s a reference to “the Future is Female” t-shirts but no one wants to talk about it. The narrator not only works at a men’s magazine (as she did in the book) but also idealizes a super sexist male writer and often re-reads his super sexist books for fun. In the journey from the book to the screen, she’s become one of those women who only like and hang out with men. (More about this later.) There is no sisterhood, only shared trauma. (If this was true for the character in the book, it wasn’t obvious.)
And everyone is just so shockingly unaware of their privilege. But also, they’re aching for meaning and searching for it desperately. The show seems to be trying to say something about “middle age” and “getting older” for our generation and yet I can relate to none of it. The narrator doesn’t recognize herself, doesn’t know who she is anymore and instead of doing stuff to help her find herself, she just shrugs and says, “I guess that’s what getting old means!”
No. Sorry. No. It’s the choices you made, you silly rabbit. You gave up your last name (as does every married woman in this show, another generational disconnect – Millennial women are statistically much more likely to do that. Such a weird backslide. And also weird coming from a writer with a hyphenated name.) You gave up your career. Like – what is this? 1955? Are you struggling with the “problem that has no name”? Read some feminist theory, goddamnit!
I guess that’s the issue. Like, it’s 2022. It should not be a mystery why a woman who has surrendered every aspect of herself (her name, her city, her work, her identity) might not be happy living with shallow people in the suburbs. It’s not some existential conundrum. Like, of course. Of fucking course. Put down the Philip Roth novels and go get yourself some Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or, like, Liz Plank? Maybe some Virginia Woolf if you’re stuck on literary fiction.
It reminds me of this woman I knew in my touring days who confessed to us (the other women on the tour) that she’d never really liked other women. She’d always hung out exclusively with men and allied herself with only men. Eight months into the tour, she got pretty sick of the men’s shit and realized we, the other women on the tour, might be some support, hence the confession. It is a strategic choice to ally with men and not a crazy one in any business run by men (which is most of them). But sooner or later you’re going to run into some sexism that those men will either be unwilling to look at or deal with and you’re going to need some women to help you. This TV show and book seem like a dramatization of that moment and but with no awareness that that is what’s happening. If any of the women in this show had had just one good woman friend, it would have made a world of difference.
This show is hard for me to sympathize with because I have many women friends I can turn to and have turned to all these years. I have been in the feminist movement this whole time. I don’t need to try and figure out who I am now because I haven’t made any choices outside of my own integrity and intention. I haven’t surrendered any of myself and I have trouble relating to these characters who just pushed themselves aside and called it a day. But I guess this is true for a lot of people who follow more conventional paths. Maybe you do find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?” In the case of the people in this book, I can guess how you got there.
But then, this reference to Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” might just go right over the head of the writer of this book/show because it was a hit in 1980 and a Gen X cultural touchstone. Come to think of it, it’s probably the song the band at that barbeque ought to have been playing instead of “Free Bird.” “Free Bird”?! Did they really use “Free Bird”? Was “Once in a Lifetime” too on the nose? I mean, we’ve known since we were kids that adults might be struggling with their beautiful houses and beautiful wives and the large automobiles or even the shotgun shacks. We’ve heard that it was the “same as it ever was” since 1980. We can even do the dance that goes along with it. “Once in a Lifetime” does a better job of summing up this show than the show does. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it. Or the rights were just too expensive and so they just went with “Free Bird,” joke or no joke. In this case, it wasn’t funny.
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Filed under: Acting, advice, art, clown, comedy, community, Creative Process, dance, music, musicals, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: effort, failure, Love, pride, process, terrible, theatre
Sometimes someone you love makes a work of art of which you are not a fan. You wish you liked it but really, you think it stinks. If it’s a piece of performing art work, like some theatre or some dance or some music, you might sit through it trying to understand why this person you love has worked so hard on something so terrible. This feels bad. Sometimes we don’t go and see the work of people that we love just to avoid the feeling. It’s not so much that we’re afraid to have to talk to them about their terrible work afterwards – it’s just that we don’t want to sit in the theatre or stand in the gallery or in the concert hall wondering how our loved one could make such a thing.
I’m sure a lot of my friends have had this experience with my work, too. I don’t like to think about it but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost friends because they just hated my show and they didn’t want to deal with me later. I have a fairly long list of people who came to see a show of mine and never spoke to me or saw me again. This shit is personal.
But what are we supposed to do?
We all have our own taste and if we really care about art, we have our opinions that rarely align fully with others. That’s how we create original stuff! We all have our own aesthetics and sometimes people who love us personally hate what we make. I wish it weren’t true but all evidence points to a complicated mess of love and art and hate all mixed up.
Unfortunately, I’ve often found the way to deal with this is to just not see (or read or listen to) things. I don’t have to feel bad about how I feel about someone’s work if I don’t see it. The problem with this strategy is that I pull myself out of community by doing this. Theatre, for example, runs on reciprocity. I go see your show, you come to see mine. If I don’t go to shows, where is my audience going to come from? If I don’t go see your show that I’m definitely going to hate, how can I expect you to see mine? That you will, likewise, hate? This is a problem I have been wrestling with for decades.
I think I have cracked it for myself now. Watching the show of someone who I love and respect, trying to figure out why they thought this was a good idea, I realized that it was beautiful. The show itself did nothing for me, I promise, and I wish it had and I’m sorry. But the FACT of it? The FACT that all these people came together and worked so hard, with such diligence and passion and belief in their purpose? That fact is gorgeous. It is tremendously difficult to do and the fact that people do it, typically for very little reward, is fucking beautiful. It doesn’t matter if I like it. I don’t like most things. I wish I were more catholic in my taste but I’m not. So – what I feel like I’m going to lean in to is just the joy of watching people make things, to celebrate bad art as good in the larger sense.
I’d like to approach the work I see in the future with the grace that I give youth and community theatre productions. A lot of people I knew in my theatre-soaked youth, who made fun of my obsession, who thought I was a weirdo, now have kids who are in school plays, who’ve become dancers, musicians, actors, singers and these parents are so PROUD of them, bless their hearts. And I’m sure all those school plays are awful. I feel like I need to tap into a parent’s pride when I experience bad art. Because I am proud of everyone who fights through the forest of challenges to actually make something. I wish I liked what they make but maybe pride is enough. Maybe loving their love is enough.
If you’re someone I love whose work I’ve seen, this post is not about you. YOUR work, I love. And I love that you made it. And I’m proud of you.
We want people to love our work, of course we do. We want them to think we are brilliant and we only make marvelous things. We want to believe all that work leads to stellar shows. We want our work to be so good no one could hate it. But – sometimes, especially in the trenches of underfunded art, we don’t achieve the masterwork status we were aiming at. And if you feel bad that I might not be crazy about that artwork you made, just know I’m not crazy about Hamilton, either, okay? You’re in good company. Most people really love it. I don’t. But – I’m still proud of them for making it! And I’m proud of you too.
Photo by Jason Vail
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Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: Gen X, music | Tags: Atomic Bombs, doom, Indigo Girls, Prince of Darkness
You will likely not be surprised to learn I was crazy for the Indigo Girls in my youth. When I learned to play guitar, it was Indigo Girls’ songs that I particularly focused on. I didn’t learn the entire Nomads, Indians and Saints songbook but I got pretty close. In those days, we bought songbooks. There were no chords on the internet since there wasn’t much internet.
Somehow in the last couple of decades, I’d lost track of what the Indigo Girls were making (along with almost every other band I used to be into – I don’t know what happened. I blame digital music and aging, I guess.) so I thought I should catch up. I added all of their albums from the last era to my “New Moment” playlist on Spotify, which is where I put all the music I want to make sure I listen to. Since there’s a live album in that mix, I’ve been hearing some old favorites in addition to new songs. Some of them I’m hearing differently now. “Prince of Darkness” popped up and I thought, “Damn if this song doesn’t sum up the Gen X experience!”
The Indigo Girls themselves are not (technically) Gen X. They’re both Gen Jones, the OG X-ers by a couple of years, but this all makes sense somehow. They’re who we looked up to growing up. The Indigo Girls first major label album came out when I was in high school and “Prince of Darkness” wasn’t on the radio but it was a favorite for me and many of my friends.
My place is of the sun and
This place is of the dark
And I do not feel the romance
I do not catch the spark.
And the real Gen X kicker:
Someone’s got his finger on the button in some room
No one can convince me
We aren’t gluttons for our doom.
This line was always meaningful to me. It was always THAT moment in the song – the one you’d wait for.
But it strikes me now that while this concern was meaningful to my peers, this idea was not ever present in EVERYONE’s youth. There was a lot of doom talk in those days. Movies, TV shows, TV movies. There was a very popular poster of the mushroom cloud over Japan that folks hung up everywhere. As a kind of memento mori, I guess?
War Games is a fun movie about possible nuclear annihilation and we were so convinced the Russians were going to come for us that Sting had to write a song about the Russians loving their children, too. The world seemed full of people who were greedy for doom. That’s how it felt in the late 80s – and damned if it hasn’t come back around. The nihilistic Supreme Court has rolled back Roe v Wade and gun restrictions and many other things that helped keep doom at bay – but here it comes.
For the first time, the generations behind us are worried about nuclear annihilation and Russia is a serious threat again.
Are we gluttons for our doom?
The thing of it is – and I think this is the thing other generations don’t understand about Gen X – that song is actually about finding ways to live in a dark world. We may be gluttons for our doom but we “try to make this place (our) place” and our “place is of the sun and this place is of the dark.”
But our place is still of the sun. I think that’s what people miss about us as a generation. We seem cynical and nihilistic but we’re actually weirdly hopeful. We know our place is of the sun, even as no one can convince us we aren’t gluttons for our doom. We will not be a pawn for the Prince of Darkness. We try real hard not to be a pawn for anyone, when it comes down to it.
I think most Gen X-ers can handle the contradiction of living in a world hungry for its doom and still seek grace and light wherever we can find it. We’re practiced at that double vision. Over on the Gen X subreddit a few months ago, a younger person asked us how we dealt with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation in our youth. They were starting to panic about what Putin might do as the war in Ukraine heated up so they asked us, the generation who has some practice at threats like this, what we did to not go off the deep end. It was a weirdly hopeful thread. There was some snark, of course. But also lots of earnest words of advice for someone stuck in an anxiety that was new to them and old for us. We may be gluttons for our doom but we’ll help someone out of the darkness if we can.
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Filed under: music, podcasting | Tags: 300 episodes, celebration, horns, podcasting
As I surely have said before, I am not fond of tooting my own horn but only a handful of others will toot their horns for me so if my horn needs tooting, the task generally falls to me. I have to seek out the milestones, keep the markers in sight and just generally seek out opportunities for self horn tooting. It’s tooting time again. I’m writing this in anticipation of my Three Hundredth Episode of the podcast version of this blog.
The blog is almost 14 years old. The podcast turned six this month.
I don’t have any special episode planned for this nice round number. It’s not an interview podcast so there’s no bringing on very special guests. I could edit together some clips but I feel like listening to me talk about 300 different things really quickly, one right after the other might not be a fun listen and it would be a hell of a lot of work.
This blog, this podcast, is about a lot of things but I always return to the source in the title. It is always grounded in the challenges we artists face in this artist unfriendly world.
In the six years I’ve been doing the podcast, I’ve recorded 226 covers, pulled 35 songs from my archives, recorded 10 old songs I’d never recorded before and 12 new originals. It’s a lot!
There’s been drama. There have been surprises. There was cake for the 100th episode.
The practice I got from all this podcasting led directly to my being able to make the leap into Audio Drama. Having made one season of The Dragoning, I’m now making a second, with actors on three continents.
And the thing is – 300 is actually a lot of episodes. One of the most famous successful (and lucrative) podcasts of all time has only 185 episodes still. I have done significantly more episodes than Reply All. Granted, their shows are a lot more complex than mine. But they also have a staff with salaries and Spotify money to back them up.
I do this for free. Sure, my patrons help support me doing it for free but it is not a money making endeavor. I tried an advertising scheme a few years back and in the two weeks I had it going on, I made $1.38 so…you know. There’s no profit in this work. The company that makes Reply All, however, was sold for $230 million. It also pretty much imploded last year. I mean – I think a lot of people aspired to be Reply All but sometimes just steadily working at something, year after year yields results too. I’ve got 115 more episodes and no major reckonings.
When I started the podcast, it was really an experiment with the form. I know it seems like everyone has a podcast these days but in 2016, it was still a little bit new. I started on Soundcloud. Some episodes are still there. One of them because more popular there than any other episode before or since. That episode (Art, Entertainment and SpongeBob SquarePants) is also the most popular on my current podcast platform, though it is not even in the top 150 of the blog. The second most popular episode is the Harry Potter/Hangover which has even fewer views on the blog than SpongeBob. I guess this says to me that in podcasts, people like popular things that are already popular, especially when they are things Millennials grew up with. (Pssst – Millennials, what else are you into? Maybe I should do more podcasts about stuff you like!)
I’m on all the podcast apps now. I’m available on the podcast apps you’ve heard of and many, around the world, that I’m guessing you have not. I love increasing the possibility that something I say, or sing, might speak to someone thousands of miles away.
When people say “Everyone has a podcast these days,” it can really make me feel like these three hundred episodes are not such a big deal. This isn’t really horn tooting material when any old schmo can record a podcast! But it’s more than Reply All! And recording something once a week like this does add up to something eventually. It adds up to three hundred!
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, economics, movies, music, musicals, theatre, writing | Tags: 90s, computer nerds, computers, Jonathan Larson, Lin Manuel Miranda, Mac Classic, Macintosh, Macintosh Plus, movie, Musical Theatre, Musical Theatre Nerds, production design, rent, set design, struggling artist, tick tick boom!
In the first couple of minutes of the film, the character of famous theatre writer, Jonathan Larson, introduces us to the year (a pan shot of a Calvin and Hobbes calendar that reveals it is January 1990) and a lot of his stuff. He tells us about his two keyboards, his music collection and his Macintosh computer. My brain did a little record scratch of “Huh?” at this but I had a movie to watch so I watched it, occasionally squinting my eyes at his machine when he’d type a single word on that computer, throughout the film. Then I went to bed. And I started thinking about the Macintosh computer. I thought about how odd it was for a struggling musical theatre writer to own a computer at all in 1990 and how extra odd it would be if he had one that was new like that. I mean, I didn’t know the exact dates, but I knew most people didn’t start really getting these things for another couple of years.
So this computer in his apartment in 1990 could only mean two things. One – Jonathan Larson was also a computer nerd, in addition to being a musical theatre nerd. And in 1990, this was just highly unlikely. Like, it’s like a computer nerd and musical theatre nerd could not have been the same person. They might meet at a party and make out but those two circles of being were probably closed at that time. I knew both of those types of people then and they were not the same. You could find one now, no problem. But in 1990? No way. So – given that this musical theatre nerd was not likely to also be a computer nerd, the only other reason a man who cannot afford to pay his electric bill would have a fancy new computer was that his parents bought it for him. This would mean that his parents had some cash to burn and the other evidence for the privilege his family must have returned to me as I went over some facts I learned from the film. His family lived in White Plains (a wealthy suburb of NYC) and they have a summer place on Rhode Island. This would mean that this composer cannot pay his electric bill, not because he has no access to money but because, very likely, mostly others had taken care of those things for him before. (Again, there is evidence for this in the film when it is suggested that his friend and former roommate, who had only recently moved out, used to take care of these things.) Suddenly a story about a struggling artist becomes the story of a man with a certain amount of privilege, carelessness and entitlement. I have a feeling this is not the myth the filmmakers wanted to make.
Anyway – the next morning I looked up when the Mac Classic came out because the (two second long) shots of it made me think it was like the computer in the 90s I knew best. I wanted to find out how weird a choice it would be for a musical theatre guy to get a Mac and when I saw that the Mac Classic came out in October of 1990, when the movie takes place in January of 1990, well, now I had a THIRD explanation for how Jonathan Larson, a musical theatre writer, had a Macintosh computer in his struggling artist apartment so many months before they came out. He’s a time traveler. He went to the future, not super far, just far enough to pick up one of the first Macs and brought it back to his present moment in January 1990. I’m sure he could have probably done some more useful stuff than picking up a computer a year before other people got them – but that’s like, a whole other movie.
I sort of liked this explanation best, fantasist that I am, but then I looked at the film again to grab a little screen shot of the computer and it turns out the model in the film is NOT the Mac Classic but the earlier, more expensive model, the Macintosh Plus. So at least it’s clear that this character is not a time traveler. (Alas!) But now I know that someone spent $2,599 on this computer in 1990 or before. And that’s almost six grand in today dollars. This becomes an even more unlikely item for a struggling composer to have in his apartment.
What is he using it for? Ain’t no internet on that thing. He’s not emailing his agent from it. He COULD be using FINALE, the music software, which was invented in 1988, but if so, he’s a really early adopter. Like – is a waiter at a diner likely to be using cutting edge software to write his rock musical? In 1990? I’m gonna guess no.
I know what those 90s Macs were like. It’s not a thing you want to write a song on. Not in the early 90s anyway. I can say that as a person who was starting to write songs at about the same time as I got my hands on a Mac. You can check my floppy discs; I didn’t do my songwriting on the Mac.
Based on the screens on the Mac in the film, he’s not using any kind of music software. He’s using that Mac as a word processor. Just like I did at the time. He’s using it to type “Your” and “You’re.” This movie did not need a computer of any kind. Pen and paper would have done the same job.
I’m trying like hell to understand why this Mac is in this movie. Like, was this in Larson’s original show? Did HE want us to know he had a Macintosh in 1990? If so, why? Well, I looked at the script for the 2001 version of this thing (This is the version that’s available to the public. It’s adapted by another playwright.) and there’s no mention of the Macintosh. It’s possible that in earlier editions that the screenwriter had access to, Larson mentioned his computer but I think it’s most likely that the screenwriter made this call. The screenwriter (Steven Levenson, writer of Dear Evan Hanson) was born the same year as the Macintosh, 1984. He has never known a Mac-less world. Perhaps he cannot imagine a world where someone could write a musical without one. So maybe he’s added this Macintosh without realizing. It’s understandable. It’s just a mistake then. That gave me a kind of peace.
I thought I’d hit the bottom of this rabbit hole and just found a mistake but then I happened to see some production research for Larson’s apartment and there is a photo of Larson’s actual desk from the 90s. There IS a computer on that desk. It’s not a Macintosh Plus, though. It’s not even clear that it’s a Mac. But the actual person had a computer. It was not just added by a young contemporary screenwriter who hadn’t done historical research.
Emily, you seem really worked up about this tiny detail in a sweet little movie about a fellow struggling artist theatre guy. What’s your problem? Are you trying to get a job as an historian for films or something?
Meanwhile, I know there are several among you who would like to know my thoughts about this film. I would like to know my thoughts about this film but all I can focus on is that Macintosh and why they thought they needed it. Did Lin Manuel Miranda get a Mac as a young theatre dude and he wrote his stuff on it, so it’s like, meaningful for him in tying his own legacy to the legacy of Jonathan Larson? I’m making stuff up here because that little Mac is just sitting in the middle of this whole experience for me.
Did this movie give me some feelings I might be just funneling into this silly prop and I’m making a big deal of nothing? Possibly. Maybe I’m just reeling from some nostalgia for the period? Could be. But I also think that details like this ARE important because of all the side stories they tell that we, as storytellers, might not be aware that we are telling. Others might have seen a loving tribute of a bio pic musical. I saw a confusing movie about a Macintosh.
Oh why do I care about this? I guess I know something about being a struggling theatre artist. I’ve done it a long ass time. The lesson he learns in the movie is that he should write what he knows and the stuff he knows, I know, too. Having watched the rise and fall of many struggling theatre artists, my eye is pretty finely focused for spotting the secret advantage someone has. The reality is that this guy is not doing nearly as badly as this movie would like us to believe. Sure, he forgets to pay his electric bill but he clearly has a financial safety net, he has the phone numbers for fancy famous people and they take his calls. He has an agent, two keyboards, a mixer, a microphone and, I’m sure you haven’t forgotten, a Macintosh computer. The actual person has, at the point that this play takes place, won an extremely prestigious award, though the film NEVER mentions it. For a 29 year old, he’s actually doing amazing. Like, really super well. The film wants to make us think it’s a super sad struggling difficult life and from this struggling artist’s perspective, his “terrible life” is actually as good as it gets for some folks. To see a film romanticizing the struggle, made by a bunch of guys who are multi-millionaires, is just a little hard to swallow when their vision of the hard life is way better than my actual life.
I mean, sure, I currently have a Macintosh computer, too. It’s nicer than any computer Larson ever had his hands on – but that’s because technology gets cheaper and better as time goes by. A Macintosh in 2022 means something very different than it did in 1990.
We now live in a world where a computer is a necessity to do most any job but particularly any job in freelancing arts. In Larson’s time, it was still a rarity. You might find one in a family’s house, with parents trying to give their kids a leg up in the coming computer age. But struggling artists would mostly have had other priorities then.
I’m still confused by the discrepancy in the computer from the research photo and the set they came up with. I watched a video interview with the set design team and I gotta tell you, these folks cared about the details. They got the sag in the bookshelf. They searched for just the right model of Yamaha keyboard. Why would the computer be any different? I mean – these people got their hands on Larson’s cassette tapes and they didn’t put the actual tapes on the set, no, they scanned the covers so they wouldn’t lose, or damage, his originals. They cared about getting his exact copy of Led Zeppelin IV.
And maybe this is part of what gets under my skin about all this. Like, we all had that Led Zeppelin tape in 1990. I’m pretty sure I still have mine in a box in my mom’s house somewhere. To watch a dude, who is basically like a lot of people I know, get canonized like this is super disconcerting. I have known many musical theatre writers more skilled than this guy who will never have their tapes lovingly scanned by a set decoration team. Nor would they like to, really – they’d just like to have gotten even a hint of some of the opportunities that Larson got, or to have started out with some of his privileges. Obviously, this Macintosh in the movie is standing in for more than just a computer. I know it. You know it. But I really do want to know what it’s doing there.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: art, music, TV, Witchery | Tags: Italian, Italy, Jovanotti, Luna Nera, Luna Park, music, Netflix, Penso Positivo, radio, RAI, resources, Silvio Berlusconi, TV
Back in 1993, I got my first passport and moved to Italy for my junior year abroad. One of the things I was most excited about was getting to see the culture and art of an entirely different country. The internet was in its infancy then, so going places was really the only way to see what other nations were making. I was hungry for Italian pop, Italian TV, Italian cinema, Italian theatre, whatever I could get my eyes and ears on. I understood, too, that watching and listening to these things would help me improve my language skills. I listened to the radio but the pop music was pretty lousy. I watched TV and the shows all seemed to be tacky variety shows full of show girls. I went to Italian theatre and mostly found translations of works in English. Only the cinema managed to deliver high quality contemporary art.
Meanwhile, I was studying the old stuff, too. I learned incisione (metal engraving), solfeggio and read incredible works from Italy’s past. In 1993, the great works were the old works, the Renaissance works, the great art of the past. I don’t regret a moment of it. I’m built for the classics.
However, I was baffled by how a people who were raised at the feet of such classical greatness could be inclined to make such trashy art. I found it very confusing.
Recently, I learned a lot more about Berlusconi, who was not yet in charge of the country when I moved there, but who WAS in charge of the media. I suspect there were a lot of tits on TV because Berlusconi was a fan of tits on TV. There was a lot of trashy pop on the radio because Berlusconi was pretty trashy and he had tremendous broadcast power. I mean, imagine if Trump were in charge of every single TV station and most of the radio. Now imagine what he’d put on those stations. That’s what Italian media was like in 1993 – 1994.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been watching Italian TV shows lately and they are a world away from what I saw while I was there. They are artful. They are thoughtful and some of them feature really good Italian pop, which I’m delighted to discover has also radically improved in the last few decades.
I watched my first current Italian show by accident. Honestly, if I’d known it was Italian at the start, I’d have been a little wary. However, Netflix has worked out that I love a show about witches so it was selling me pretty hard on Luna Nera, which featured gorgeous production design in the trailer and was very thoroughly witchy. As I watched the opening scene, I realized that the sound was not matching their mouths and so I clicked around to see about turning off dubbing and – ecco – non ci credo – it’s in Italian. And it was great. It’s like a medieval Charmed with a power-hungry, witch-hunting bishop and a witch-hunting club. The design was glorious. The performances were excellent. The premise and the writing were very engaging. They left us on a cliffhanger and there is still no word on a Season 2. It may be cancelled? Or not? Anyway, I would like to see more Italian witches.
And then my friend wrote an article about another Italian show – one I’d put on my list and forgotten about – called Zero. You should, for sure, read her piece about it. It places the show in context and lays out why it’s so innovative. I’m generally a sucker for a show where someone has powers of some kind but the fact that this one is also about the real estate take-over of a poor immigrant community makes it all the more powerful. There were immigrants from Senegal living in Florence when I was there but most Italians and tourists behaved as though they weren’t there, as if they were invisible – except when it rained and you needed an umbrella, as they were often on the street selling them then. It’s telling that this show is about a young Senegalese immigrant who can turn invisible.
I feel like this show makes the best argument for why diversity in the arts matters. It’s not just that we get to see a story about a community we rarely get to hear stories about – but the immigrant influence feeds all strands of the artistic experience. The Italian music in the show seems to have an African influence and it makes for the best Italian pop I’ve ever heard. Also, it’s just really well done. Beautifully shot, engagingly written, surprising and exciting. This show, by the way, also ended in a cliffhanger and is also, as yet, not renewed.
And now that Netflix has my Italian TV number, they sold me immediately on Luna Park, which just came out. It’s a fun period drama that owes a lot to Italy’s Fellini past. I mean, you can’t watch a show about a carnival in Italy and not think of La Strada or even I Clown. I enjoyed so much of this show (aside from the contemporary music moments. Whyyyyyyyyy?!?!) and could feel my language skills seeping back into my brain as I watched my third Italian drama. And then, for the third time, the show ended on a cliffhanger, almost literally. The show only just came out, so it has not been renewed. But it’s good, you know? All three of these shows that Netflix has made happen, are good. They’re not in the least bit trashy. There were some boobs but they were in good taste, in that they weren’t on showgirls and they made sense in context.
So why am I telling you about all this Italian media? Do I just want you to watch these shows so Netflix will make more? Sure. Maybe. But really, I am not here to pat Netflix on the back. (This is definitely not the moment for that.) The cultural skill was clearly already there in the people who made these shows. Italian cinema is evidence of that. Italian artists know how to tell a story – it’s just that the media landscape was controlled by a buffoon and so they got buffoon art, for years. They needed the resources to make better art. Diversity matters, not just in the stories we tell but in the places we get to tell them. When you only have RAI 1, 2, 3 and so on and they’re all the same network, run by the same guy, it is very hard to get any interesting variety going.
I’m thrilled by the way Netflix is opening storytelling doors for Italian TV but I also worry, that as time goes by and Netflix begins to dominate the world’s watching experience, will it also lose the incredible global diversity that it’s currently tapping into? Will it become one of only a handful of places we can watch something? Will they control the narrative? Will they cancel all these shows that they left on a cliffhanger? And will they make any more or is it just these three and then they’re done investing in Italy?
Italian pop was terrible in the 90s in part because it was controlled by the same powers that controlled TV. It created a same-i-ness of sound and quality. Italians in the 90s mostly listened to pop in English. My Italian friends found my affection for Italian rapper, Jovanotti, kind of hilarious. I can still sing/rap along to large swaths of “Penso, Positivo” and “Serenata Rap.” So you know, I enjoyed some Italian pop but we couldn’t call it good, really. Now, here in the US, we have just three record companies and so much of American pop sounds the same. I fear we are headed toward an Italy in the 90s kind of world and I’m here to tell you that was not a good time for music or TV there.
But it is an exciting time for Italian TV and music now – diversity is coming in and making things cool and interesting. Though, there are way too many cliffhangers.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
They also bring you the podcast version of the blog.
It’s also called Songs for the Struggling Artist
You can find the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every podcast features a song at the end. Some of those songs are on Spotify, my website, ReverbNation, Deezer and iTunes
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Filed under: art, movies, music, TV | Tags: 1962, 45 Revoluciones, 45 rpm, Grammys, Let Her Go, music, pop, revolution, Rio, rock n roll, Rolling Stones, Spanish TV, Stand By Me, The Beatles, Time Machine, TV
Music can be a time machine. Play Duran Duran’s “Rio” and I am instantly transported to a carpeted spot in front of the Barbie doll mansion I’d created in my closet in the mid 80s. Put on Primus’ “Nature Boy” and I’m in a cargo van in 1997 with several Shakespeare dudes who are wildly flinging themselves around, while the Shakespeare dude driver nods his head in time. I did not like this song at the time but now I do, not just because I’m angrier these days, but because of how quickly it can return me to the past.
Music can evoke a time and place more directly and precisely than just about anything. (Smell can be a direct line to the past. It’s maybe more immediate but, it’s also often less specific about time.) Music is an incredibly powerful tool – which is why I’m entirely flabbergasted at a trend I’m noticing on television. Why would you use music from a different era than the one you’re trying to evoke?
The otherwise delightful Pursuit of Love mini-series used 80s and 90s tunes throughout, despite the fact that this show takes place in the 30s and 40s. I enjoyed hearing that Joan Armatrading song after so many years but I couldn’t tell you what happened in the show during it as I was pulled into the late 80s for its duration. (It’s from 1977 but it was much later that I discovered it.)
Then there’s the show that got me all fired up about this. 45 Revoluciones or 45 rpm. It’s a Spanish show (surprise!) about a pop music business in 1962. I enjoy a lot of things about it, like the way the woman music producer and her assistant deal with some overt sexism from her tech crew or the way it models a male boss fighting for his female “mano derecho.” But…the music is a disaster. The pop star’s hit song, the one we hear over and over again, is not a song from 1962, nor is it a contemporary song written to sound like it’s from 1962. It is, instead a song from 2012 that went to number one in 24 countries. It is a hit song from 7 years before this show was aired and 50 years after the show is meant to take place. Where exactly do they want to take us in that music time machine?
I hate this song choice so hard. I think they’re trying to say “This artist is so ahead of his time he sings songs from the future!” Or they’re trying to connect contemporary music listeners with this period drama? Or they’re trying to evoke some kind of blend of time periods? I don’t know. But the story of the show is a singer who nobody’s seen the likes of before playing fresh new music that blows everyone’s minds. Then to represent him, the creators choose some of the most middle of the road music from the last couple of decades. “Let her go” may have gone number one around the world (Number 3 in Spain) but it is a song so banal that I only recognized it from hearing it in the grocery store on occasion and found it entirely unremarkable. No disrespect to lovers of this song but it does not represent a stunning innovation in pop music.
Similarly, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” which also makes an appearance on this fictional Spanish rock star’s album from 1962 is not a pop revolution in any way. Lady Gaga is glorious but she’s not out here busting up pop norms. She IS pop norms, albeit with wild costume and style innovations.
As I continued to watch 45 rpm, it got even more ridiculous with its music, careening wildly through time, moving from “Total Eclipse of the Heart” to “Shiny Happy People.” I shouted at the screen more than once.
I’ve learned that this show had the lowest viewer ratings EVER on that channel – and I don’t know if the music was what tanked it but I feel pretty confident it didn’t help.
Here’s the thing. All of that music featured in the show must have been VERY EXPENSIVE. With the money they spent to clear several worldwide hit songs, they could have hired multiple songwriters and composers who could have written them songs that evoked the period and ALSO felt a little modern. They could have had a soundtrack of new and exciting music that might have been a hit and might have drawn people to their show. Look at “That Thing You Do” which is a movie about a hit song from a similar period. The title song that Adam Schlesinger wrote for it became a hit and was nominated for both a Golden Globe and an Oscar. Hit movie. Hit song. Could have been you, 45 Revoluciones!
Or alternatively, they could have used actual music from 1962. They name checked Los Pekenikes – which is such a great band name, I had to look them up and listen to them and apparently, a band called Los Brincos was an inspiration for the story. They’re really fun to listen to! Is there some belief that the youth won’t respond to old music? I’d like to direct you to the soundtrack of Stand By Me (which I played relentlessly as a teen) which came out in the mid 80s and was filled with mostly old 50s tunes. Because of that film, the title song (from 1961) made another journey to the top ten in 1986. All that music placed that film firmly in its period and it was a giant hit. It’s happened before that contemporary youth get super into music of the past.
But maybe the youth of today are different from the youth of yesteryear and somehow can only tolerate banal contemporary pop? Somehow I don’t think so. I do think they’re being fed an unusually dull music diet, though. There is a flattening of sound, of genre, of time that has been happening over the last 20 years and it can’t be good for us. As Jaron Lanier has pointed out, there hasn’t been an innovation in pop music since Hip Hop and Grunge – several decades ago. Can you distinguish the sound of something from the first decade of this century from this last decade? I sure can’t. It has a timelessness in its consistency and conformity. This is weird, folks. Can you imagine not being able to distinguish music from the 70s from music of the 60s? Or the 40s from the 50s? There’s a little crossover, sure, but you can make a kind of generalization about pop sound decade by decade until you get to this century. I suspect that one of the reasons this weird time bleed is happening on TV has to do with that strange sameiness of music: Who cares when music is from, when you have no way to tell any of it apart?
I start to wonder if this is connected to the conglomeration of the music business. There are currently really only three music companies. Warner, Sony and Universal own pretty much everything. Things like the Grammys are company celebrations of those three corporations. With a distinct lack of diversity in the business end, is it any wonder the music has had all its edges smoothed over? (The same thing is happening in publishing, btw. There are three major players who just eat up the little guys.) I suspect all this leads to an ahistorical music business which bleeds into an ahistorical film and TV business and now we have TV shows where the music time machine takes us to all the wrong places. You set it for 1962 and half of you ends up in 2012. That is a problematic time machine.
And it may extend beyond just the music in the shows. 45 Revoluciones, which, I’ll remind you, is set in 1962, made casual references to both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the dialogue. Now – I was not yet born in 1962 but even I know that neither of these bands was a worldwide sensation yet in 1962. You know how long it took me to confirm that fact? Less than a minute. I didn’t even have to go to the library. The Rolling Stones hadn’t even heard of the Rolling Stones until July of 1962 so there’s just no way a Spanish rocker would be excited to open for a band that did not yet even have a single recorded. (This sort of error, btw, is a great example of why it’s important to have age diversity on a team. I cannot believe NO ONE on this show flagged this highly irritating detail.)
I think being cavalier about music’s role in time is a huge mistake. It’s a mistake for broken time machine purposes in that you might take your audience to a different place than you were aiming and it’s also a huge mistake in making it harder for all the other elements in a scene to establish the era. The costumes can’t do all the work. Neither can the props or the production design.
If you want to pull the audience in two directions time-wise, okay, but if you choose only really popular songs, then your audience will inevitably have prior associations with that music. The odds that something bad has happened while listening to that song for any of the millions of people who have heard it many times before are very strong. Just…you know – triggering someone’s memories of their assault is one reason why you might not want to use super popular songs in your TV show. Hire a composer! The average song on Spotify has 8 listens. Maybe use one of those?
I don’t mean to pick on 45 rpm – everyone is doing this dumb music flattening – but there’s something particularly ironic about a show that has the word revolution in its title that shows us music neither historical nor revolutionary. The show takes place in a moment in Spain where pop music was creating some interesting cracks in the regime of the fascist dictator. The show gives us glimpses of what the collision of rock n roll and Franco’s Spain was like. It shows us the big dilemma of being obliged to sell out to a dictator and how people resisted, either directly or covertly. (Ironically, this show has literally sold out to an entirely different sort of regime by virtue of the flagrant Coca Cola product placement.) The regime creates real problems in the lives of artists and record execs alike. Apparently, instrumental music, as well as music in French and English, escaped the censors in those early years or rock n roll just because the regime didn’t take any of it seriously. I’ve been listening to the actual music from that era in Spain and sure, it doesn’t sound revolutionary now, because we’ve had 50+ years with things that sound like it.
But since no one’s invented a new genre in decades, since we can’t experience a current music revolution, why can’t we take a trip in a musical time machine and discover, at least, what a revolution sounded like in the past? When The Rite of Spring was first performed, it was so new, so revolutionary, people rioted. We’ve lived in a world with that music in it for over a century, so it’s not a revolution for us, but if you make a show set in the early 20th century about modernism and you don’t use The Rite of Spring, you better play us something that sounds like a modern riot. Maybe you’ll even find us our modern Stravinsky. But why not take us on a trip in your music time machine? It’s a mellifluous way to travel.
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I reference a lot of music in this post so I made a playlist of it so if you’re curious to hear any of it, it’s here.
It’s not technically a time machine but wouldn’t it be cool if it was?
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