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.
Watching the Powder Blue trailer and reading the description of "one of those montage previews full of quick erotic cuts set to a familiar indie-centric score" makes me think a little harder about the way indie music is used in TV and films. Its use here is striking because the placid, comfortable sound of the music is in sharp contrast with the scenes of strippers, poverty, liquor stores, hospitals, age, and black people, if that makes sense. To put it another way: indie is so firmly aligned with white, middle-class values, lives, and concerns, and the small stakes of everyday living, that to see it paired with these images makes them rise above their possible association with a Cops sorta thing. Either they're being used to suspend disbelief by pairing realistic scenes with unrelated music, or they're being used to connect the likely middle-class audience with the concerns of these characters and assuring us that they will be placed in a context familiar to us, or--and this is the point here, so you know--there is actually something about indie music that really is connected to scenes of high drama and hard living.
And this prompts the question: when is indie going to start writing about the sort of things that it's used to soundtrack? When are there going to be songs about teenagers overdosing in Mexico, people dying in hospitals of obscure diseases, sad strippers, moments of revelation after a physical and spiritual trial, etc.? Sure, there are some songs about these topics, but judging by the genre's televisual use, these should be the dominant themes. And given how much of a boost these televisual uses can give to the market share of an indie song, there's a strong possibility that the iTunes bump happens not just because of the wider exposure, but because the coupling of sound and image brings out something in the song that wasn't previously obvious, some connection between the sounds being made and the themes onscreen. The continued use of indie songs on soundtracks seems like a market opportunity not just through the adaptation of existing product but through the creation of new product that can work in this way without the outside influence. I've argued before that The OC's use of a particular sound made other people pursue that sound, and I've no doubt that people are having an emotional experience in interacting with these records not entirely unlike what they have by watching the TV show they might be used in. But there still seems to be more room for expansion.
I'm sure everyone's discussed this already, but I'm just now hearing Taylor Swift's "Love Story," which is absolutely fantastic. And, of course, there is the twist ending: Romeo and Juliet live! And this was intentional:
I used to be in high school where you see [a boyfriend] every day. Then I was in a situation where it wasn't so easy for me, and I wrote this song because I could relate to the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. I was really inspired by that story. Except for the ending. I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other. And if that had just gone a little bit differently, it could have been the best love story ever told. And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it's a tragedy. I thought, why can't you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?
I love this, of course, but it also sounded weirdly familiar. And then I remembered that it's sorta how I ended my piece on Hamlet 2. To quote myself, if I may:
That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself.
It seems disrespectful to make a sad ending happy. But if art is really important to you, if you really love it, then it should feel real to you, it should feel like it's part of your life, because you are so intimately engaged with it. Part of the power of these made-up stories is that they seem believable, and when weighted with the kind of aesthetic power that a great artist can conjure, they take on the feeling of prophecy. Change the story and change your destiny, or that's how it feels. And it feels that way because the tragedy of the situation speaks to you a little too strongly. That Steve Coogan's character in Hamlet 2 was able to change his life is the happy ending, but the sad part is that he identified with Hamlet in the first place, in all his emotionally disturbed, hallucinatory, father-issue-having glory. Sure, he was eventually redeemed, but that's just a story too. When you get to that key change at the end of "Love Story" it really does kill; as manipulative and base a move as it is, it really fucking tugs at something. And when it's over, and you look back, you have to think about why Swift is identifying with Romeo and Juliet at all. It's not actually that great of a love story; it's much more a story of infatuation and manufactured drama. But that's what feels real to teenagers. By enacting a happy version of the play, Swift is admitting her own enmeshment in the original Romeo and Juliet story, and that's sad, in a way.
These sort of fantasies are all over pop (see also Twilight), and they tend to get dismissed as escapist or illusory. That seems unfair to teenagers. Few, if any, really think they live in these worlds pop creates, and while I'll certainly admit there's danger in their very real assimilation of some of that world's attitudes (see also Twilight), I think there's also value in the way they actually use them. Life for teenagers already is a Shakespearean tragedy, at least to them, and to pursue art that took on that worldview would simply be to strengthen their own self-image in a not particularly salutary way. If a kid can do this--can take something that reflects their life and reimagine it into something good--that seems like a remarkable act. Just as we have fantasies of the bright-eyed kids turning dark, it seems worth wondering what would happen if an angsty teen (and no teen worth knowing isn't angsty) were able to imagine transcendence.
The thing is: there's an angsty teenager inside all of us, a grumbling undercurrent insisting that the world is shitty and we are all diseased and there's no one you can trust. To that inner goth, pop screeches and wails with dissonance. But it doesn't have to. Cultural critics worry that things distract us from reality, help us avoid reality, obscure reality. But sometimes reality, as they say, bites, and to take that tragedy and turn it into a comedy would not be the worst thing. Pop's power is, in no small part, its ability to imagine a world much like this one, but shinier--and to make it, whether you submit to its charms or not, believable.
I wrote a post for Idolator this week about "the BoingBoing effect." It attracted some attention and caused a bit of a kerfuffle[1], but the post didn't really get across the theory so well, so let me take to this wonderful place of no word limits and indulgent readers to try and hash it out a little better.
First off, I like BoingBoing. It's a great place to kill time, because they're very good at what they (mainly) do, which is finding "wonderful things."[2] But I've seen this happen to people. They already have tastes and opinions that are somewhat similar to BB's. (So do I, for that matter.) They start reading BB, and because it aligns so strongly with their tastes--and because it's updated so frequently--it becomes one of their primary internet sources. Once your primary filter of information becomes a group of people who mainly agree on things, you start to pick up on what they think. Now, again, these people (and, again, me for that matter) already have somewhat similar opinions to those of BB's writers, particularly the main writers, Cory Doctorow[3] and Xeni Jardin, so it's not like the site is magically inculcating a worldview in people who have no exposure to it otherwise. But when you mainly get the world through people who share your filter, it strengthens and hardens. Heavy BB readers become much more sure of their anti-copyright opinions and think they are much more important. And they become much less tolerant of opposing opinions, because so is BB.
(I want to make clear here that I'm not exempting myself from this phenomenon. I have most certainly had my nascent opinions confirmed, strengthened, and made shrill by my reading habits in the past, whether it be my opinions about music, or politics, or...I dunno, TV? This just hasn't happened with me and BB, for reasons that will be clear shortly.)
This is a somewhat different phenomenon than we've become familiar with on the internet in general. People like Cass Sunstein talk about the problem the internet being so filtered that you can go just to the sites that agree with you for news. This is something slightly different. People don't go to BB to have their opinions about copyright confirmed. Most likely, they go because someone's sent them a link about a robot made of Legos that eats cheese or something. People aren't going to BB, or sites like it, for a filtered set of opinions, but a filtered set of tastes. And that kind of filtering is absolutely crucial to the internet. But when a taste-filtering site gains enough authority and cohesion for its overall message to seem convincing to its readers, it can become the other kind of site. I'd argue this happened with a lot of the liberal politics blogs. I used to be able to read Daily Kos, for instance, because it was a good source of news that I might not find otherwise, especially during the first term of the current administration. And their takes on these stories seemed somewhat reasonable and obvious. But over time, as they gathered together a certain argument about politics, everything they posted tended to be interpreted through that particular filter. And this itself acted as a sorting device: it drove out people like me, who had different opinions, but it drew in more extreme people, who liked (as Sunstein has warned of) seeing their opinion confirmed. And by banding these people together, and giving them comment boxes and diaries to write to each other in, it made them feel not only that their opinions were right, but that their opinions were important.
And that's really the problem with all this. You will get absolutely no argument from me that the DMCA is a horrible piece of policy and bad law, and I've studied it enough (I actually read the damn thing) to tell you why and how. I absolutely think it should be overturned. But you know what? I also think there are way more pressing problems, and when copyfighters like BB couch their arguments in the apocalyptic terms that a self-selected ideologically focused userbase breeds, it makes them seem ridiculous, and it makes the whole argument less effective. The DMCA and associated rulings and laws are bad because a) they contradict existing copyright law, b) they have no relation to the realities of technology as they currently exist, and c) they stop people from doing stuff that there's no reason for them not to be doing. Those are three fantastic reasons to overturn a law. But BB--like a lot of monomaniacal (holla!) sites--have taken their legitimate arguments and turned it into an all-encompassing worldview. Somehow this is all tied up with "corporate culture" and people making art and all like that. None of which most people care about. People barely care about copyright issues in the first place; bringing up street artists and fucking Burning Man only makes the issue seem less relevant. Nerds (again, which includes me) have a real problem with thinking that they, and people who think like them, are right about everything, and everyone else is wrong. The reality of BB is that nerds are an interest group like any other interest group, and their interests are probably less important to the health of our democracy right now than a long list of other policy issues. That may seem unjust somehow, but it's simply a reality that you have to accept. That's not to say that they shouldn't keep working to overturn the DMCA or bringing to light the many negative consequences of the law. But you have to stop painting this as somehow a failure of American society and culture. It's not. It's just that no one cares, and rightfully so. We're going to work on the economy and health care first, if that's all right with you guys. Talk to us in six years.
And then, of course, there is their stance on the music business.
As happens a lot with my writing, when I criticize something, this tends to get taken as an endorsement of what the people I'm criticizing see as the opposite side. (Criticize liberal bloggers, for instance, and it's assumed you're either a Republican or a Clintonian shill.) So when I ragged on copyfighters, this was seen by certain commenters as an endorsement of the major labels and the RIAA and so forth and so on. This has happened a few times now, and well, I'm kinda sick of it. I do have a take on the whole end-of-the-music-biz issue, but it's too complex to fit in most posts. Here, though, I can go nuts. So if you'll indulge me.
The bottom line of all this is that everyone is going to have to accept that things are going to get a little worse. Everyone--the music biz, music listeners, and musicians. The music biz is going to have to accept, just as the copyfighters say, that their practices are driving away consumers. They are also going to have to accept--and this may be the real problem--that the glamorous good times of the music biz are at an end, maybe forever. No more parties in sex clubs. No more expensing cocaine. No more being a "cool" marketing executive. The industry is going to have to become a lot more financially efficient. This is, of course, already the case for the workers in the trenches, who are doubling up on duties and getting laid off and receiving no raises for years on end. The people that are going to have to accept this, unfortunately, are the executives. And they have no real reason to except the survival of their business. Compared to free cocaine, keeping your company profitable seems less important.
Bands have probably made the adjustment already. Sure, they get rockstar perks if they can, but the fact that there are so many songs about acting like a rockstar means that most people aren't living like rockstars anymore. Bands know what's up, and while they don't like it, they've largely learned to live with it. They've cut costs, become more efficient, and downgraded their expectations. They've had to in order to survive.
Listeners, though, need to make an adjustment too. They have to--have to--accept that they can't not pay for music and expect it to still be around, at least not in the same form. We have to remember that the current situation has only arisen in the last few years. That means that there's still funding out there, that bands are still hoping things will blow over. But if the music biz continues to be unprofitable, then companies simply won't be able to get funding or credit anymore, which means they won't be able to pay for the things necessary to distribute even free music, like mastering, server space, bandwidth, and so forth. And while bands never expect to make a living making music, if it becomes clear that making music is becoming a hobby--something you put lots of your own money into without any hope of return--then a lot fewer people are going to be able to make music at all. Just like with the music biz, it's not in the self-interest of individual listeners to accept this. Indeed, it's a fantastic example of the tragedy of the commons. Which means, duh, that government's going to have to step in and do something about it. The DMCA isn't working because it's unreasonable. So someone will have to convince them and help them to craft a common-sense solution that fucks over everyone a little so the whole thing can keep rolling. And the shrill BB ideologues aren't helping with that.[4]
The people in this debate need to recognize that the people in the middle, ultimately, are the bands. People in bands want to make money from music, but they also want to get music for free, because they like music and are broke. Musicians are the ones actively navigating this landscape every day. The other two sides are pulling from opposite sides of the spectrum, and that makes them extremists. Yes, record companies use over-the-top language, unfairly recruit the government for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that's slipping away from their grasp. But copyfighters are also using over-the-top language, recruit the masses of self-interested listeners for their side, and are clinging desperately to something that I think they know, in their heart of hearts, fundamentally isn't sustainable.
BoingBoing's music coverage consists almost entirely of articles about how musicians that are giving their music away for free are still successful. What they don't cover are the many musicians who give their music away for free that aren't successful, or how much less money musicians that give their music away for free are making than they would have otherwise, which seems a little unfair given that they were the ones who put in the labor to make the product in the first place, not to get all Marxist or anything. The idea is constantly brought up that you don't need money to make music anymore, that it's not costing anyone anything, and so why shouldn't it be free? To which I say: bullshit.
I suspect that the people promoting this idea are mainly writers, since writers are one of the few groups who can make art without any up-front money.[5] But almost every other artistic genre requires money to do, from a little to a lot. Visual art is fundamentally impossible without money, since you have to buy materials. Movies are impossible without money, at least if you want to make a good movie and have lighting and sets and like that. Classical music and opera are certainly impossible without money, at least if you want to actually perform them. And dancers need costumes!
The key caveat here is "if you want to make a good" whatever. It is possible to make music totally for free (assuming you are middle-class and have a computer already). But it's very limiting in terms of what you're going to do. Maybe one of the key problems with music no longer coming to listeners as a physical object is that they tend to think the production of the music involved no physical objects either. But most music does, at least if it's going to be good, and physical objects, regrettably, cost a lot. Sure, Girl Talk's music can be made with nothing but a laptop. But do we really want all our music to sound like Girl Talk?
Look, as I hope I've made clear here, record companies are odious, odious things, and I've worked for them; I've had enough friends summarily fired by major labels to not have a particularly bright view of them, either. But one of the harsh realities of art is that bad people and things can create great art as well as good people and things. This applies to major labels as surely as it does to alcoholics. Major labels, for all their flaws, are very good at giving artists money to make art (even if they're bad at giving artists money they are owed after they make the art). The vast majority of great pop music was made under the auspices of major labels, and that's not an accident. Money is necessary for music to sound good. Artistic visions should not have to be cheap to be realized. We would be much poorer off as a culture if that were the case.
So what are we going to do about all this? Nothing, I suspect. Everything will implode in a few years, and everyone will freak out and finally come to a solution. It would be better for everyone if that didn't happen, because it's going to make pop music a much different beast than it is now. But hey, what can you do? In the meantime, there are always pictures of inflatable yetis.
[1] Ending, as these things always do, with me telling someone they look like a douchebag. [2] I don't get the whole pro-Disney obsession, especially given their stance on corporate culture otherwise--it seems really contradictory, but whatever. [3] If your first exposure to the site is through this post, this might seem slightly off, since Doctorow no longer contributes too much content. But he was, and is, a guiding force. Check out the archives for 2006 and before if you're curious. [4] I mean, for fuck's sake, this is industry regulation at this point. It's like mining policy. Who cares if you're not a miner? [5] Aside from the money it takes to feed and house them while they're writing, but that doesn't count, I guess.
I'm with Rich--Hamlet 2 is really, really, really good. He's saving his take for the DVD, but here's mine. (I'll go light on the spoilers, but I am going to talk about plot points. This shouldn't be too big of a problem, but come back after you've seen it, if you'd rather.)
If you want to know what Hamlet 2 is about, just check the structure. Sure, it's got a standard overall arc, which the movie itself makes fun of with Mr. Marsch's (the drama teacher and main character, played by Steve Coogan) repeated references to inspirational-teacher flicks like Mr. Holland's Opus, Dead Poets Society, and Dangerous Minds. Yes, there's a setup, a period of trouble, and then a successful resolution. But how does it resolve? After what amounts to a really long build-up, we get to see the performance of the titular play--and that's it. After the performance, there's a brief (and fantastic) epilogue, but it's only a couple minutes long. The thing the movie was leading up to was not the resolution of various emotional and character arcs--the kids don't learn any lessons, and Marschz's romantic interest exists purely as a gag--but the actual performance of the play itself. What matters is not the journey the characters went through, but the journey the play itself went through. The movie, in other words, is about the unpredictable and ignoble nature of the creative process.
As any critic can tell you, creative types are rarely what we want them to be. Sure, every once in a while there's a David Byrne who's as culturally literate, thoughtful, and intentional as we critics are (or, at least, like to think of ourselves as being). In the main, though, artists, writers, and musicians are the kind of people who we'd be embarassed to know if they weren't geniuses. They're boorish, dickish, passive-aggressive, fickle, emotionally stunted, alcoholic, abusive, and/or pathetic. They have an extremely difficult time maintaining healthy relationships, with any friendships or marriages characterized by neediness, selfishness, leechiness, and sulking. They are, in short, losers--jobless wrecks of humanity who are so pathetic that you can't engage them in a conversation without feeling kinda guilty that you're a normal, together person. Worst of all, at least from the critic's standpoint, they are generally incapable of talking about their creations, either coming up with simplistic explanations revolving around their own personal issues or refusing to explain them at all.
And this is exactly what Marschz is for almost the entire movie--in fact, that's where the humor comes from. He has to roller-skate everywhere because of a past DUI, and he's not very good at roller-skating. When he breaks his sobriety, he ends up pantsless on a couch in the middle of a field. After getting him to wear a caftan so that his testicles are at room temperature, his wife leaves him with their roomate, who it turns out is the one who actually impregnated her. Marschz says it himself: "My life is a parody of a tragedy." And yet, after a life as a loser, his last-ditch effort succeeds wildly. In the world of the film, whether or not we think so, his play is a masterpiece both creatively and commercially. How does he do this?
The movie's explanation, in a memorable line, is this: "It doesn't matter if you have talent as long as you have enthusiasm." This is a funny little epigraph for the current generation, but it's also true. Marschz has enthusiasm in spades, and it's that enthusiasm that allows the play to be a success. His enthusiasm draws talented people to him, and this pathetic loser is at the center of a group of very successful people: a great actor, a great lighting designer, great security guys, a great lawyer. And when they all work together and deploy their talents in service of Marschz's enthusiasm, they produce something that is well and truly moving.
What's funny about this is that the creative process depicted in the rest of the movie gives no indication that this will be the case. A sequal to Hamlet is, as many people point out over the course of the film, a horrible idea, and Marschz has given no indication at any point that he's a good enough writer or director to make up for that questionable decision. And at no point does he suddenly develop a full artistic sensibility, complete with taste, thematic complexity, and nuance. It works because he pours all those loser qualities out in such a charming way that, when surrounded with an aura of success and competence, it seems to glow with meaning. None of which, it becomes clear, he actually intended. When one character argues with her mother that "Rock Me Sexy Jesus" is intended as a critique of celebrity, Marschz interjects, "That's an oversimplification." The Christians who come to the foot of the stage to protest change their minds when they come up with their own interpretation, that "Jesus kicks the devil's ass!" All the while, the play, in which Marschz is simply working out his own issues with his father, continues on its merry way, oblivious to the storms of meaning being kicked up on its periphery. That, indeed, is why it works. Because people are able to pin their own meaning to it, it speaks to them on a personal level. Marschz's "parody of a tragedy" life is ultimately so knowable that it forges a multitude of connections with otherwise disperate identities. The restraint that taste imposes is generally crucial. When absent, it is almost always embarassing and cringe-inducing. But sometimes--when surrounded by talent--tastelessness allows for such an openness that beauty can rush through.
That idea of a "parody of a tragedy" points toward the play's ultimate character arc. Marschz's idea for a sequel to Hamlet is to have Hamlet travel back in time in order to stop all the tragedy from happening, ending it not with a bloodbath but with a marriage. He has, in short, turned a tragedy into a comedy. In the process, Marschz does the same thing to his life. But that doesn't happen through him becoming a better person--he does not change at all. What changes is the play. Hamlet starts as sadness and dissolusion and becomes happiness and connectedness. In our traditional understanding of art, that itself should be a tragedy: a great work of meaningful-core should be ruined by the inclusion of happiness. That it's not is an argument for comedy itself--and a pretty powerful one, I might add. Don't get me wrong: this is a deserved cult classic in the making, and there are a lot of hilarious testicle jokes that I was a bit Shue about. But it's also a really smart and, I think, important piece of art.
1) Kronos Quartet - Marquee Moon 2) David Byrne - Glass Concrete and Stone 3)Tangoterje - Diamonds Dub 4) Mazzy Star - Fade Into You 5) Blur - This is a Low 6) Boris - Farewell 7) Glenn Branca - Lesson No. 1 8) LCD Soundsystem - Great Release 9) Scott Walker - Such A Small Love 10) Nina Nastasia - Ocean 11) Carla Bozulich - Medley: Time Of The Preacher, Blue Rock Montana, Red Headed Stranger 12) Dirty Three - Sue's Last Ride
(click on any song to start it streaming)
In my entry about John Luther Adams and hugeness from a while back, I didn't give a whole lot of musical examples of what I was talking about, so here's a muxtape that does the job fairly well. I'll talk about these a little bit later, but now I want to approach the subject using another example--a visual one.
This is a scene from HayaoMiyazaki'sSpirited Away:
In this sequence, the main character, Sen, is traveling on a train from one end of the spirit realm to the other, from a city to the country. Her companions are three former villains that she has converted into friends: a spirit called No-Face who almost destroyed the bathhouse where she worked, a giant baby who tried to kill her (now transformed into a tiny but rotund cat), and the witch Yubaba's henchmen (transformed into a small bird, which carries the cat around). In terms of pacing, it's a significant break in the film. Previously, Sen has been going almost every minute, either working or collapsing from exhaustion, in a very urban environment populated by many people in a small space working frantically. Now, she simply sits, nearly wordless, for around two minutes, as we watch the train travel through the landscape. The lack of words signals pretty clearly that we're going to see an animator's showcase, and Miyazaki delivers with a perfect evocation of hugeness.
The subject has already come up in the film. Sen's clients at the bathhouse are larger-than-human scale, not only physically, but because they are incarnations of various natural phenomenons (rivers, turnips) that are much vaster than anything in our direct experience. The bathhouse, too, is so huge that we never get a clear picture of its layout; Sen seems to be constantly finding new rooms. And the plot itself is a kind of hugeness, with Sen pursuing not a single goal, but a series of goals suddenly thrust upon her, all under a rules system that she never really understands.
Two of these aspects are represented in the train sequence. The train travels on top of a body of water whose edges we never see, and the distance covered is so large that night falls over the course of the trip. But what's really interesting here is that she passes through a kind of city of ghosts, or maybe even an echo of a real city, as small signs of a recognizable reality are visible just at the edge of the tracks, even though beyond is only more water. Neon signs fly by the train's windows, disconnected from any building but still very real; as on a real train journey, we might wonder what's going on in the areas we're not disembarking. Shadow people wait at a train crossing, and a real house sits on a small island. This sense of whole stories being missed, unusual for a work of fiction, is most explicitly brought up when the train pulls away from a platform. Shadow people get off the train, and stream into an exit, but a shadow girl watches the train leave, seeming somehow dismayed. Was she waiting for someone on the train? Who is she? For that matter, what is she? Is she a spirit, a real person, or what?
Many have commented about the great feeling you get in a city of being alone in a crowd, but it's also true that even when you're alone, there's this almost physical knowledge of all the people just out of view, the people in the buildings you're walking between, even if there's no one on the street, and this is a lovely feeling. This is the effect fog emulates; it takes a crowd and divides it into cells that know how many other cells there are in close proximity, but have no sightlines into them.
This is the feeling being evoked here. Traveling through suburban and rural areas you feel, rightly or wrongly, that you have a pretty good idea going on with the people you pass. But cities are so dense and so heterogeneous that, even when you're alone, you can look up at offices and apartment buildings and get a sense that there must be a thousand things going on there that you can't even guess at--stories being told, lives being lived, activities taking place that you've never even heard of. This density of unknowingness is a kind of hugeness to me, because it is essentially unknowable: too many people, not enough time. The crowd becomes a mystery, as perplexing in its individuation as bugs or stars.
The tendency when talking about art these days is to talk about its social significance, its expression of issues of identity or power relations or cultural conflicts. This happens everywhere, whether in the academy or among critics or just people talking. Is a movie too violent? Is an album fake? Does a TV show present negative portrayals of women? Does media attention to celebrities send the wrong message? That's fine, but it causes us to overlook perhaps the oldest purpose of art: to give some expression to our experience of the unknowable. Music, especially instrumental music, is perfect for this, because it is almost never literal. It's always abstract, and when it "means" something, it's because it's expressed a particular feeling or idea without actually saying anything about that particular feeling or idea. This is a pretty incredible thing. How does that happen? Why does that happen? Why do some things do it better than others?
Don't worry, I'm not going to get all fucking spiritual here. But if God is shorthand for "we don't know, but it's pretty impressive," then it's no accident that so many religions use music as part of their worship. Music can express that sentiment better than anything. And that's why musical expressions of hugeness are so affecting, I think. When a hundred-plus piece orchestra plays together, it's a model of that mammoth complexity that we look at with awe--urban populations and the vast variety of insects and the distance to the moon. And it's not a possibility being much explored these days, either in music or in the writing about it. This is not to say that it's never done, of course. In terms of writing, Said the Gramophone has been doing it for five years now, and doing it really well. Sean, Dan, and Jordan write about music not (just) in terms of how it sounds but in terms of how it makes them feel and what images it evokes. But as Sean and I have discussed on many occasions, the STG aesthetic is slightly different than what I'm talking about. I may be misreading him, but his interests seem more in small beauty, the wonder of the everyday. I like that. But that's not what we're talking about here.
To get at that, let me return to the train scene. The thing I haven't talked about are the two small things, the bird and the cat. They are, to use the Japanese term that I think would be appropriate here, kawaii--cute and innocent. They're funny, with their jumping and sleeping. But don't let the humor fool you. Without smallness, hugeness is meaningless. We need something to place it against as a comparison. Hugeness on its own seems fake, like an airbrushed drawing of mountains on the side of a van. Even hugeness accompanied by an expression of awe doesn't help us grasp it. But put against something cute, something innocent, something that accepts the unknown for what it is because there is so much else unknown in a kawaii life--then we, as viewers and listeners, feel like we have some sort of control over that hugeness, some understanding of the mystery. If a single composer can understand that feeling enough to write it down, if a conductor or performer can grasp it enough to draw it out in sound, then maybe we, too, can handle it. We turn to music not for a depiction of the unknown, because we can experience that any time we like. We turn to music for an ordering of the unknown, an abstract explanation of vastness beyond our comprehension. The low end rumbles and one hundred people slowly build up a roar, controlled precisely by a person with a small stick. On a giant screen, one hundred people have worked for months to create a sequence that takes our breath away. That order rubs off and stays with us. And it's not just limited to that. Let me leave you with one more self-quote:
The OC is important as social history because of its compact evocation of the decade it helped soundtrack, but important as art in the same way opera is: ridiculous in its scope and occasionally breathtaking in its beauty.
I can be heard in this week's edition of the BBC show Songlines, which is about "Halellujah." Go here and scroll down to "Monday." The version about the football player is pretty awesome. My riff around the 21 minute mark will hopefully become a post here shortly.
(Only available for a week--I'll try and upload a copy later.)
