There's Nothing Ironic About Glee Club

It's been a weird last half of the decade, though maybe "weird" doesn't cover it--awful and dark and mean and petty would be better, probably. And yet most of our popular art has not really dealt with modern culture in any significant way over the past five years. This was not the case of the first half of the decade, when popular culture, and particularly music, seemed caught up in an eternal present tense. The iconic pop of that period, along with major TV shows like Sex and the City and The Sopranos, relentlessly engaged with the now. The moment might have been created by a SATC episode or a Destiny's Child video, commented on by Britney or David Chase, and pushed forward by Justin Timberlake or Survivor.

But somewhere around 2004, the present tense became too fraught, too full of importance and horrors, for pop to find any way in. In a political moment when change was largely decentered, with one-party rule requiring us to wait for a self-hoisting even once the petard was clearly visible, pop could play no leadership or rally role even if it wanted to, and was left instead with a moment it had a hard time figuring out what to do with. To ignore it, as most pop did, simply made you look out-of-touch and past your prime, but short of the kind of direct engagement with current that allowed some of the decade's most significant artistic products (e.g. The Colbert Report) to flourish, it was hard to deal with our particular times in any real way.
Those aside, what we got mainly looked backward, whether for comfort and resonance with the present, like Amy Winehouse and Mad Men, or entered innovative continuations in established realms, like Gossip Girl and 30 Rock and, uh, pretty much everything else in pop music that wasn't Amy Winehouse. Those things that did offer something new, like Lost, didn't seem to have any necessary connection to outside events, but registered instead as regular old artistic innovation, not in dialogue with anything but itself.

And so it's nice that we've had such a clear historic and chronological break here. The election of Obama and the economic crisis, which are essentially simultaneous in the longview, make it very hard to continue as we were before. So much of the culture of the 00s was and is tied up with the particular kind of economic prosperity that we can now mark as part of the past, and while the destruction of that culture does not negate the good things that came out of it, such desctruction does make it very hard for pop creators to regard it as normal. Almost every single significant piece of pop culture from the previous part of this decade would, if it were created today, either look very different or much less relevent. Almost everyone on television was affluent--not even middle class, but affluent--and the shiny bliss that 00s pop does so well reeks, as it was intended to do, of money money money. While there are undeniably artistic creations that were forward-looking enough to see this coming, it's likely that there's a slow but major change coming, and it would be really great if we could finish off the decade with a little bit of forward-looking pop.

Which is why I liked the first episode of Glee so much: it is the first TV series that's about this decade rather than a part of this decade. How the rest of the series will go remains to be seen, but for now it has definitively staked out its position on the 00s truth and reconciliation committee. For one thing, it's the first show I can think of to draw from a form firmly situated in the current decade, rather than drawing from 80s and 90s forms as even the best current series do (with, again, the exception of brand new things). Bring It On came out in 2000, and the show is clearly working in the tradition of that movie (and maybe 1999's Election as well), a form old enough now that the Wayans brothers have gotten around to parodying it. The genre is obviously indebted to some old forms (sports movies, 80s b-movie ensemble comedies) but makes something new by taking a minor thing and portraying it in precisely the terms its most dedicated participants see it in. This shit was serious, and because image was serious to the participants, the movies took image seriously, too. This did all sorts of good things for a visual form that ultimately requires you to believe things that aren't true anyway, and Glee plays that forward.

The characters, too, are products of the decade. Rachel, the main female singer, is essentially a fameball, which is not something we're used to seeing. Usually, the pretty girl who wants to be famous is either hilariously untalented or actually destined for stardom. But Rachel doesn't seem to be either. She's good at singing, but not great, and her personality is too self-conscious to take her to easy success. She's a scrabbler and a striver, ambitious for the sake of being ambitious, trying and trying without really having a project to tie it to. She uses modern technology just because it seems to be what the kids to or as a way of furthering the plot, but as an integral part of her personality: she puts herself out to the world beyond her peer group through digital media as a way of seizing success. Mercedes, meanwhile (who I hope gets developed more!), is the daughter of ANTM, embracing that weird Beyonce feminism that I guess is what Girl Power turned into. And, of course, the girlfriend of Finn, the main male singer, is the head of the celebacy club, and as such the representative of cultural conservativism, another high point of the decade. She's an obvious one, but Rachel and Mercedes strike me as believable characters that I know lots of in real life but would not expect to see on TV, and kudos to the show's creators for catching that.

But this isn't just Bring It On: The Series. A key moment in the pilot is where Finn confronts his fellow football players and gives a great little speech which starts like this: "We're all losers. Everyone in this school. Hell, everyone in this town. Out of all the kids that graduate from this school, maybe half will graduate college and two will leave the state to do it." This is true, but it would have been unthinkable to express such a thing earlier in the decade. It would have violated the ethos of total committment that dominated the 00s--one which produced some great results for pop, if not so much for government. While the glee club is maybe just another competitive activity, the show is clear that it's a pretty stupid one, and all the characters except Rachel seem to know that. They do it, then, because they like it, because they get something out of it. It's smaller than cheerleading but bigger than just being a quiet nerd trying not to be noticed. I like that, even without the football player, the characters aren't just a clique to themselves, but are individuals from different circumstances doing something for the pleasure of it. What the show endorses, then, is not victory or social stasis but mastery. When Mr. Schuester takes over, his goal is for the club to win a championship, but that motivation on its own fails to sustain the club's momentum. What propels them to some kind of unitity is, rather, a committment to excellence, to artistic acheivement beyond the validation of others but simply to know for yourself that you and others have done something good, and the moment at the end of the episode captures precisely that. And it captures, moreover, joy, the other thing Mr. Schuester says he was interested in. While that emotion was certainly conjured by many of this decade's best pop products, it's hard to say it was a concern of them. Success always seemed to matter more than happiness. Glee seems interested in asking what it would be like if that evaluation was reversed.

Then, of course, there is "Don't Stop Believin'," the song that the group sings at the end. My thoughts went not to the finale of the aforementioned Sopranos, which also ended with that song, but to the pilot of Freaks and Geeks, which ended with "Come Sail Away" by Styx. The final moment of The Sopranos struck me as being essentially the same as the final moment of Seinfeld, and its use of the Journey song had less to do with pop music than with TV and with audience expectations, a sort of forced "let's go out on a high note!" kind of thing. But in Freaks and Geeks, it was all about the song and its resonance to the particular characters. That's sort of the mirror image of what's happening in Glee. Here, Journey is being celebrated for its universal appeal, for the freakish and essentially inexplicable ability of that song to appeal to everyone everywhere at least a little bit, and the metaphor being drawn is not the any of the characters' situations but to the enterprise on which they have mutually embarked. The experience of pop is an unavoidably collective one, made eternally in the context of others, and while that opens up all kinds of great possibilities, it also means you have to go wherever pop goes, and you might not always like it. When you find yourself in that situation, the trick may be to find that one sweet spot, the thing that everyone can agree on that turns the momentum back toward you, tacking the ship gradually back to the course you would prefer. Glee is most certainly a part of that effort, and I am excited to see where it goes.

Labels: 00s, glee, pop, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 8:08 PM