Media – HystericallyBored

2024-12-21

UnChosen

Here we go again. Every ten years or so the Evangelical Christian Establishment (I call them the ECE because having an acronym for it makes it real) reboots the Christ franchise and comes out with some new version of the gospel that is supposed to be free of those stodgy suffocating embellishments foisted on it by previous generations making it newly relevant to the young folk out there who are unchurched. This Jesus is realistic. He is vibrant. He is young. Maybe someday, he’ll actually look Jewish.

Remember “Blue Like Jazz”? Yeah, fooled me too. Donald Miller with his allegedly enlightened intellectually credible version of the gospel. It turned out to be orthodoxy 2.0. Nothing that Billy Graham would not have happily endorsed in 1965. Remember “The Late Great Planet Earth”? “Jesus Freaks”?

Everything just comes and goes.

Remember “Jesus of Nazareth”? Back in 1977, it was considered a daring, unusually authentic version of the gospel. Starring Anne Bancroft and Ernest Borgnine, among others. Yes, with an all-star cast. I don’t think you need to say any more than that to know where it went.

And so we now have “The Chosen”. And once again, the hype tells us that this one will be different. This one is special. This one speaks to the younger generation. All bad signs.

The most important fact about “The Chosen” is this: the claims of giving you a more authentic depiction of Jesus in his time and culture is utter hogwash. It is clear from the very beginning that “The Chosen” is carefully calibrated to slavishly present what American evangelical Christians think Jesus and his culture sounded and looked like according to their literalistic perception as shaped by English language Bibles (reflecting the bias of various historical church establishments) and their own church culture of Americanized banality. Thus, if the NIV (New International Version) of the bible says that Jesus fed 5,000 people from one basket of fish and bread, then that is damn well what happened and will be depicted as such. We’ll even have the crowd shout, “Jesus of Nazareth has done a miracle!” to make sure they get it. And, of course, reflecting what passes for theology in the modern church, when a leper appears, the disciples act exactly like a ten-year-old white boy from Tennessee would imagine from the story he heard in Sunday school. “Horrors! A leper! Run!” The leper himself acts like the ten-year-old boy, giggling embarrassingly for Jesus. Does Jenkins even know that this is embarrassing or why?

The most damning indication of this flaw in “The Chosen” is so obvious and so fatal that I can hardly believe the decision to do it: the actors speak in English with vaguely middle eastern accents.

Are you kidding me?

Well, wait a minute. It may not actually be the most damning indication. Take a look at Jesus (Jonathan Roumie). Roumie is allegedly half Egyptian, but he is clearly more than half Irish. Half Egyptian, I guess, is as far as Jenkins is willing to go knowing that American audiences don’t want a Jesus that looks too Jewish.

The Chosen Season 3 Release Date, Cast & Storyline

Look at those faces. Come on now– it could be the starting line-up from a football team from Missouri. Oh, wait. Maybe from Utah.

Is it necessary to explain why this is stupid? Firstly, I accept that having the characters talk to each other in Galilean Aramaic with English subtitles– while the best solution– is not on the table for Jenkins. Assuming he is sincere– and I never assume that about anyone who belongs to any American religion that claims to be modelled on Christ but overwhelmingly supports Donald Trump for president– Jenkins will undoubtedly judge the success of “The Chosen” not based on awards or money but on how many people he can claim to have brought to Christ.

Okay, yes, I am cynical about American evangelical Christians, but you can’t get much more cynical than to vote for Donald Trump.

Dallas Jenkins, the driving force (IMDB calls him– ha ha– the “creator” of “The Chosen”) doesn’t see a problem. I see a problem. Even if you accept the convention that the bible is “infallible” in some way, a qualification foisted upon it by later generations of church leaders, the bible is still language, words that were written down decades or even centuries after Christ lived, translated, transposed, and yes, even edited, before we in the 21st century received them. They don’t contain, for the most part, the actual dialog or images or smells or tone of the actual events. This is a problem for every rendering of the Christ story because the story is so well-known and revered by so many people that it is very, very hard to free yourself of the contamination of stereo-types and conventions.

The problem is that the people of Israel in 30 A.D. did not live in a script as a reflection of some quaint idea of what Americans think first century Jews were like. We know something about people and society and groups and we know, for instance, that an army of 70,000 individuals can’t move to a new location overnight, appear on the top of a hill, and completely surprise another army. It’s absurd. Simply feeding the army, supplying it with water, taking care of the horses, finding roads and paths, scouting for obstacles, scouting for enemies, scouting for enemy scouts, and so on, will ensure that the army of 70,000 will be noticed long before they appear in formation for battle.

In the same way, if 5,000 people are fed from one basket of fish and loaves, there will be some people who don’t believe what they see, and some who will believe anything they are told, and some who will not gaze with reverence upon the magician who performed this trick. And they are not likely to run around holding intact fish and waving them in the air the way they do in “The Chosen”. I didn’t see any person in the scene biting into it or cleaning and gutting it or anything you might expect someone who is actually going to eat the fish might do.

Jenkins tastefully declines to use the magic of CGI to dramatize the cure of a leper. Instead, we see the blotches, the wounds, and then we see the same patch of skin without the wound. The puzzle for some of us is this: did this and other miracles really happen? Do we believe Jesus the prophet but not Jesus the miracle worker? Do we believe both or neither?

I personally suspect that most of the miracles were actually ambiguous events that were massaged into the more dramatic stories by years of retelling which necessarily incorporate elements of exaggeration and enhancement. Apologists consistently argue that the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world is proof that incredibly dramatic events occurred in Israel during Christ’s ministry. But the faith did not actually begin to rapidly spread until later, through the devout efforts of the apostles, now evangelists, primarily Paul, who never even met Jesus.

If everyone saw correctly what the modern English bible tells us they saw, Jesus would never have been arrested and crucified. There clearly were people, including authorities, who did not believe that Jesus’ miracles were real or that they were evidence of divine power. Even the bible tells us that. So when Jenkins shows us an awestruck crowd he is showing us a fantasy in which all the participants behave exactly the way the fantasist wants them to behave, in a way that gratifies his infatuation with himself as a believer and supporter of pussy-grabbing porn-star payoff artist politicians or even worse, Mike Pence.

Ross Douthat defends an inerrant interpretation of the Gospels. He makes a reasonably good case for it, at least, if you already believe he’s right. He argues that the essential consistency of the gospel message is evidence that it is true. Then he also argues that the inconsistencies prove it is true: because the fact that inconsistencies were left in the gospels proves that no one edited them later to iron out the inconsistencies, thereby corrupting the accounts.

Well, that’s good. It’s inerrant because it’s errant. It’s errant because it’s inerrant.

2024-12-14

Where Does All That Pop Shit Come From?

It comes from here.

Max Martin produces shit. Garbage. Antiseptic mush. Tripe. Poop. Muzak.

[Rick Beato on the same subject.]

Ever wonder why most contemporary pop music has all the distinguishing hallmarks of a wet noodle? This is why: Max Martin, and his ilk. Producers who take whatever creativity and originality remains within a young singer’s aspirational heart and sticks it into a pencil sharpener and grinds it into slivers of febrile strings and then hits it with a flame-thrower and finally shreds it into a box of saturated kitty litter: here, audience, is your dinner.

The Beatles were wrong. Neil Young was wrong. Bob Dylan was wrong. Jimi Hendrix was wrong. Paul Simon was wrong. Tom Waits was wrong. John Prine was way, way wrong.

All of them created distinctive, original music out of their own minds and experiences and intelilgent, thoughtful personalities, and crafted the recordings in collaboration with sympathetic studio producers and sympatigo musicians whose personalities merged into a distinctive entity with personality, mind, and purpose. They jammed. They worked alone in dark rooms to imagine words and notes. They tried out whacky ideas. But always, always the artists were the masterminds, the creative force behind the songs, the originators and inventors of the work.

If you believe in Max Martin, they should never have done that. They should have hired a snare drum consultant, a vocal consultant, an Autotune consultant, an echo consultant, a reverb consultant, a D chord consultant, and consultants for all the other chords, and all the notes, and all the knobs on the recording console, each of them committed to optimizing the one mechanical component of the hit record, based entirely on the previous hit and the next hit and all of the future hits that can be promoted and packaged and Spotified and shoved down the tiktokky throats of 12-year-old girls everywhere. “Picks up the rice in the church where her wedding has been”? No, no, no: “Mmmmph ooommm zommminisa, oompah, bahm bahm bahm, auoooooo!” Yes, yes, yes: those syllables sound moomy. Swirl them, swish them, lick them. It’s the sound, not the content!

His roster of customers is a who’s who of mediocrity: Katy Perry, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Bon Jovi, Celine Dione, ‘N Sync, Pink, Adele, Kesha. Did you have thoughts about admiring Taylor Swift’s phenomenal “talent”? We won’t know if she really has any: she is a Martin collaborator. All she has to do is stand in front of a Neumann microphone in a recording studio and fart and Martin will turn it into a gigantic three-alarm hit, the fucking Grammy people will give her an award, and the sponsors will elbow each other aside to line up at her ass. That means her music is not the product of her imagination or talent or inspiration. It is the product of a faceless mechanism that doesn’t even need her.

Joe Coscerelli, the author of this suck-up, should be journalistically disbarred for the incredible facetiousness of comparing Martin to Lennon and McCartney, because, you know, the only thing important to compare is sales of hit singles.

“It’s staggering when you see it all together,” said Barry Weiss, a friend and veteran record executive who is also a producer of “& Juliet.” “You can legitimately say Max has had a 20- or 25-year fertile period as a writer. The Beatles were what, eight years?”

“Staggering”? Seriously? Seriously?! You seriously want us to believe that this manufacturer of interchangeable non-descript jingles has had a career that should be thought of as “staggering”, and this output rivals the Beatles, except for more than twice the duration?

Barry Weiss isn’t out of his mind. He has precisely the mind-set of a music industry executive who doesn’t give even one tiny little fuck about genuine artistic quality or originality.

Martin’s mentor “was not a musician in the traditional sense but began developing a system in which songs were written more like television shows” and that sounds exactly right. Like “Friends” and “Saved by the Bell” and “Family Matters” in which the entire scripts have been jettisoned in favor of Jaleel White screaming “did I do that?!” (Urkel is obviously Bill Cosby’s real personality exposed.)

Here’s a sample of his genius:

You’re the one that I ever needed/Show me love and what it’s all about.

Yes, now you see where that crap comes from. A Swedish songwriter who believes songs should have feelings but not “content” as if a song that avoids content doesn’t have a meaning. It does. It means you are a cog in the machinery of exploitation and anesthetization. And eccentric, idiosyncratic elements of taste you develop are the enemy of Martin’s product.

More drivel from Pink:

The singer Pink, who has worked with Martin for more than 15 years, called him “a closet punk rocker,” who is “very unique in how he can break you down and pull you apart and then put you back together in exactly the right syncopation, down to the second. He knows how to take your mess and make it feel good in people’s bodies.”

Martin’s music is a psychotropic drug that activates a few cells in your somnambulant brain and massages a few loose spirals of squishy ego until you feel all better until you don’t.

Martin is clueless about his own actual identity, or is he?

“Sometimes I question, like, ‘OK, what do I do?’ I make three minutes of sound. What’s the point?” he said.

No, he does know, on some blank level, that all he does is produce “three minutes of sound” and he has asked the right question. What is the point of this shit? But he’s lying. The point is to make a lot of money. The sales, the popularity of his work, is meaningless– it’s all about selling units to units. Now he has a musical, which is the masturbatory equivalent of Linda Ronstadt doing an album of jazz standards. It’s a joke that the “artist” himself is not aware of.

2024-08-212024-08-21

Monkee See

Here’s the well known story about the Monkees:

In the mid 1960’s– 1966, to be more precise– Screen Gems decided that a TV show inspired by (read– copied from) the Beatles’ movies “Help” and “A Hard Day’s Night”– might be a hit. They already had a young British singer and potential heart-throb Davy Jones under contract so they put out an ad in Variety looking for young male singers/actors and held auditions. They ended up with a couple of actual musical artists in Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith, and a singer Mickey Dolenz. They were hired as employees of Screen Gems and put to work.

The whole project was a typical piece of exploitive corporate derivative trash. It was conceived of as trash, executed as trash, and will never not be be trash, no matter how much nostalgia one wafts over it. It catered to the most manipulable segment of the television audience, adolescents and pre-teens.

The original sin of this project was Screen Gems trying– not too, too hard– to make it look like the Monkees were a real band. They tried to hide the fact that the musicians on their first album were all paid studio ringers, though the vocals were provided by the actual Monkees. On the TV show, the Monkees pretended to be playing their instruments as they performed the songs. They were also pretending to sing, but that goes without saying– almost every piece of dreck at the time used studio recordings dubbed over the video of the performance, even on American Bandstand and Hullabaloo. (Ed Sullivan was, generally, the rare exception.)

The boys did record the vocals, in a studio. Producer Don Kirshner quickly discovered that they had to bring the boys in one at a time or they would clown around endlessly and run up expensive studio time without getting a decent take down.

Here’s the popular conception about it today: the Monkees really wanted to write their own songs and play their own instruments and they complained bitterly that the studio, led by a crass producer, Don Kirshner, wouldn’t let them. Most writers about the issue today are sympathetic to the band members. They were oppressed and exploited by Screen Gems and their talents cruelly repressed.

Because, after all, they really were a great band.

Let’s get that out of the way for a moment: the Monkees were a shallow pop band of no artistic significance whatsoever. Like ABBA and Bobby Sherman and David Cassidy and the Partridge Family, they were a product, shallow, derivative, inane, and trivial. The studio musicians used on the recordings were competent– sometimes excellent– but they were interchangeable parts of a complex of almost mechanical production.

(I saw a recent interview with Bobby Hart, one half of one of the song-writing teams that wrote songs for the band, and he was quietly lobbying for more respect by insisting that “Last Train to Clarksville” was actually a protest song because the narrator had been drafted and was going to Clarksville to be sent overseas: “I don’t know if I’m ever coming home”. Yeah. Deep.)

They began to believe their own press. They became delusional, attributing their popularity to something magical they had in themselves, outside of the entertainment complex that nurtured and managed and exploited them.

I am not sympathetic. I absolutely believe that Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork, and Davy Jones, and Mickey Dolenz should have been completely free to not sign contracts with Screen Gems, not audition for them, and embark on musical careers on their own, play gigs, rehearse, practice, go to New York, whatever they want. On their own. Without the massive and overwhelming support of the Hollywood machinery that made them famous.

Nesmith might well have had a career. He had money– his mother invented Liquid Paper (that’s a whole other era!) and time. Tork was somewhat known as a solo artist in New York, though I doubt he would ever have become famous. Dolenz and Jones were not going to have an impact anywhere, though Jones might have made it on TV as a Bobby Sherman type teen heartthrob for as long as it lasts. They were all born on third base and thought they hit a triple.

But this righteous indignation! If I had been in Kirshner’s position (as much as I despise him), I would have fired them all and enthusiastically encouraged them to go for it: embark on careers in the music industry and fulfill your heart’s most passionate desires, to write songs and perform with your instruments, and the best of luck to you.

Does that mean we won’t be on TV in prime time every week for a couple of years? Well, no: that’s the job you turned down.

That is not what you were hired for. And that’s not the agreement that was signed. You voluntarily signed up to be actors in a contrived, derivative TV program. Then you decided you wanted to be co-creators of the TV show for which you were hired as actors. The creative jobs were already taken when you signed on. Good bye.

It is unseemly to take advantage of the monumental publicity apparatus Screen Gems provided them and the privileged access it gave you and declare that, as someone else observed, you really are Vulcans.*

It’s similar in some ways to Hilary Clinton running for president. Yes, she may have been cute and had a great hair-style, but she obtained the platform from which to run by virtue of being married to Bill Clinton, who did start from nothing, built a career as a local politician and then a governor, acquired a stable of donors to fund a presidential run, and ran for and won the presidency. He gave you some high-profile jobs in his administration– and a lot of privileged connections– which you leveraged into a Senate run and then a run for the presidency which, against all odds, you lost, to an idiot, the worst candidate for president in 200 years.

She may have been smart. She may have been as qualified as any other presidential candidate in recent history. But there really are lots of those around. She was the fucking wife of a former president who leveraged her privileged access to the corridors of party politics to push herself to the front of the line.

* Peter Tork stated: “The Monkees creating the album Headquarters was like Leonard Nimoy becoming a Vulcan”. Here.

2024-07-092024-07-09

Arthur Miller on Method Acting (The Lee Strasberg School of Mumblecore)

Arthur Miller on Lee Strasberg.

While filming “The River of No Return”, director Otto Preminger apparently grew quite exasperated with Marilyn Monroe because every time he gave her direction she would go to her private “coach”, Natasha Lytess, and take direction from her. Lytess bizarrely coached Monroe to enunciate every syllable cleanly and counteracted Preminger’s desire for a more fluid, compelling performance. Preminger should have fired Monroe on the spot but it was the nature of Hollywood then– and now– that big stars command deference, because audiences are stupid and choose their entertainment based on how much they care about the celebrity actors than the writer or director. That’s why so many small-scale independent films are so much better than major Hollywood productions, especially the ones that feature older celebrities playing characters who should be ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger.

Lytess could never have written a screenplay if her life depended on it– she was a parasite, sucking the blood out of the real artists, and Monroe was a repugnant diva more obsessed with her own image and fame than with artistic achievement though she would frame her narcissism as “artistry”.

Anyway, this is an excellent dissection of the Strasberg school of acting:

The following was posted on Facebook 2024-07-09.

I think [Lee] Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. …But the Method is in the air: the actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magnificent. I said to her, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t hear you.’ She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end! It reminded me of Walter Hampden’s comment–because we had a similar problem in ‘The Crucible’ with some actors–he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the fingering is magnificent but there are no strings on the instrument. The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music–that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction. Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted ‘The Seagull.'”

Arthur Miller Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron
The Paris Review, 1966

2024-05-27

An Alarming Digital Theft

We live in an age of digital theft, though not the kind you think of. The real digital theft is committed mostly by companies like Google and Meta that steal your data and then resell it back to you in the form of advertising.

But some digital theft feels more like highway robbery, as in this story in the Times about some humble folk artists who were robbed of the ownership of their own original songs.

No one should be surprised that there is theft, even of intellectual property. What is disconcerting is how difficult it is to reclaim ownership of the stolen property. Our “system” of publication and distribution of intellectual property is clumsy and defective.

But I believe the genie is out of the bottle on this issue.

2024-05-26

Divas about Divas

Join us for SIX: The Musical, a 90-minute extravaganza inspired by the queens of pop – Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, Jennifer Lopez, and Rihanna.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a less promising enticement. I’m impressed though at the remarkable collection of seven of the most inconsequential talents in the pop universe, seven of the singers I would least likely want to hear, all of them making extensive use of Autotune, all of them products, all of them narcissists of the highest order.

On the same day, someone else on Facebook posted a photo of Taylor Swift at some football game with the comment that she did not “ask” to be on TV at the football game.

On the contrary, all she does is “ask” to be on TV.

2024-05-24

Music Industry Reform

The music industry is structured to rip off artists and fans. It’s time the government legislated minimum standards for all recording contracts specifically to prevent companies from charging artists for ancillary services they are actually providing to themselves, and to guarantee minimum royalties per unit sold regardless of advances. Producers should also be prohibited from seizing co-writing credits for songs they record even if they suggest specific arrangements and instrumentation. And yes, break up the ticket agent monopolies so that venues and artists are free to choose the lowest cost agencies. Every recording on which the singer is auto-tuned (which is almost all of them now) should be labelled as such so we can tell who really is a good singer and who is just processed noise.

And it should be illegal to claim that ABBA was ever really anything more than a banal pop band.

2024-01-07

Buffy’s Identity Problem

It’s one thing to deny what now seems obvious. But to attack the journalists who exposed the truth about your ethnic identity as neo-colonialists and racist and sexist is beyond the pale. And given what Sainte-Marie has said previously about her ancestry, she cannot now claim, with sincerity, that she just “didn’t know”. She actively lied, and made up new lies to misdirect people from the old lies. Now she says, well, “I know who I am”, which is a nice way of refusing to take responsibility.

I have a mental hobby of pretending I’m the PR guy for whoever is embroiled in the latest scandal and have to come up with the best solution. In this case, I think she would have been better served with a line of “I admired indigenous culture so much that I wanted to be part of it, and I went too far, and did lie, and I am very sorry. And yes, it was terribly unfair to those of legitimate indigenous ancestry and if I haven’t already done enough to make up for it, I now wish to try.”

Instead, the stubborn denials and self-pity and claims of victimization leave a bad taste in the mouth.

She also claims to have been black-listed by the U.S. government, presidents Johnson and Nixon, and the FBI. I can’t find any evidence of this other than her own assertion:

The former FBI director blacklisted Sainte-Marie as her protest songs gained more and more popularity. She didn’t know that it had happened for about 20 years until a deejay “told me that he had letters on White House stationery commending him for having suppressed my music.” Toronto Star

What deejay? From who in the White House? Did she try to obtain the related documents through a Freedom of Information request?

It’s all beginning to sound a little pathetic. And if it wasn’t pathetic enough, she now tosses out claims that she was sexually abused by her brother and someone else she won’t identify. The brother is deceased– of course (like Joan Baez’ father)– but his daughter (Sainte-Marie’s niece) revealed letters that strongly suggest that Buffy Sainte-Marie threatened to publicly claim he sexually abused her to deter him from continuing to publicly challenge her claims of being born to an indigenous tribe in Saskatchewan when (as is now overwhelmingly clear) she was actually born to a white Christian family in Massachusetts. He backed off.

She should want to be remembered instead for these lines:

Now that your big eyes are finally open
Now that you’re wondering, how must they feel?
Meaning them that you chased ‘cross America’s movie screens.

They are very good. It’s a powerful song. We can have both. We can acknowledge her accomplishments and the weaknesses of character and dishonesty and leave it at that.

2023-12-212024-03-20

Not so Swift

Updated 2024-03-20; I noted below that you rarely hear Taylor Swift playing solo accompanying herself on guitar. Well, NPR had her over for a Tiny Desk Concert– a great idea, by the way– and here she is.

I stand by my comments. She sounds like a talented but amateurish teenager, and, yes, her lyrics remain sophomoric, and, yes, narcissistic (I am SO fascinating). Her first song tries to convince you that if she were a man, she would not be criticized the way she is as a woman. There’s a lot of men who could enlighten her on that subject. (And where does the majority of criticism come from? That’s right: women.) But I do give her points for not getting all whiny and self-pitying about it. And I like Taylor Swift– I do. She’s just entertainment for a lot of fans who don’t need anything deep or original in their music but she’s a good role model. I loved that she re-recorded her songs to take back control over her music (and I hope she inspires others to watch what they sign).

I have had various peripheral encounters with the Taylor Swift phenomenon. I put her in the category of rap music, Harry Potter books, Star Wars, and other cultural products that become extremely popular but have no real value to me. There is a point at which the sheer magnitude of their popularity can have a transfixing effect on critics and writers who should know better. Inevitably, someone will write a epic piece on “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter” that will allege that the seeming banality of these works conceals a plethora of significant and substantial meaning that we all now need to proclaim obeisance to.

No it doesn’t. “Star Wars” was intended as “B Movie” right from the start, a shallow, trivial pastiche of conventionality and cliché. Lucas himself would never have dreamed that anyone would regard it as “significant” or deep or meaningful until it took in more than $100 million in ticket sales. It’s just good fun with space ships and aliens. “Harry Potter”– have you actually read any of the books?– is actually pretty bad literature. I mean it is actually poorly written. The sentences, the paragraphs, the pages and pages of repackaged wizards and golems and sorcerers with very little that is fresh, captivating, or inspiring. And never poetic or allusive or provocative. Rap music? Streams of syllables over a packaged beat. What the hell did anyone ever think was really interesting about it? The fact that it emerged from black culture, that it supposedly defies authority and the establishment, that it expresses — what? The desire to rape or kill, or brag, or bully?

And now there is Taylor Swift. And here is a great mystery. There is no doubt that Swift is a rather banal, narcissistic, self-referential, sophomoric songwriter. If it could be said that she actually does write her own songs (I am very skeptical) her songs are almost completely about herself and how she feels about herself and how she feels about others feeling something about herself. She’s not a particularly good performer either. Let’s hear her without auto-tune, by herself, playing her own instrument of her choice. You won’t. At least, not for a while, until they decide — if they do– to package her that way. If there are other people in her songs, they are very important because they play a role in how she feels about herself. [Well, here she is— judge for yourself.]

But, to my astonishment– I mean, complete and utter astonishment– the New York Times Daily Podcast just presented an utterly slavish, adoring, idiotic tribute to her, citing her choice as Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”, and her massive popularity (of course her tour broke records: inflation never goes backwards, so every new big artist is going to break records).

I thought, did I miss something? Do I have to go back and listen her to best songs again with a fresh approach to see if there is something in them that I did not notice the first time? Or…

I listened with great interest. As cars drove by me on my walk, I turned the volume up on the podcast: I didn’t want to miss this explanation. Why is Taylor Swift so great? The podcast was hosted by Michael Barbaro who interviewed Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Both admitted immediately that they were Taylor Swift fans. They unembarrassedly admitted they were “swifties”. Seriously? This is the New York Times!

Okay, so the Times is giving up the idea of objectivity right off the bat. But let’s hear the reasons– tell my why her songs are so great, and why she is important.

The answer: well, she wrote a song about how she wanted to go to the mall once and she called up her girlfriends and none of them wanted to go with her so she went by herself, with her mother, and there, at the mall, were all her girlfriends. They hadn’t included her. But her mother was very pleasant about it all and they laughed and she had a great time driving home with her mother in a car.

I am not making this up. This is an “important” Taylor Swift song. It is meaningful and substantive and unprecedented (Taffy Bordesser-Akner certainly thought so which immediately prompts the question: are you even familiar with the subject of popular music?). No one, according to Taffy, has ever expressed the feelings of betrayal and lost innocence like Taylor Swift!

Taffy went on to talk about how Kanye West interrupted her at some awards show and then she befriended him and forgave him and then the cad criticized her in a song. Egad! Outrageous! He used to be her friend and then he wasn’t. She wrote a song about it and that song is incredibly important and meaningful. To Taffy and millions of air-heads.

The third song they talked about was “All too Well”. Once again, he was her friend, then he wasn’t. Apparently it’s about Jake Gyllenhaal. One version goes on for ten minutes. Taffy is deeply impressed by lyrics like

And maybe we got lost in translation
Maybe I asked for too much
But maybe this thing was a masterpiece
’til you tore it all up
Running scared, I was there
I remember it all too well

Come on. Seriously?

What all of these songs have in common is the over-looked possibility that Taylor Swift is annoying. Perhaps her friends didn’t accept her invitation to go to the mall because they really wanted to hurt her feelings. Perhaps they just didn’t like her. But Taffy, listen to yourself! It’s a fucking song about going to the mall and hanging out with your friends. It is not deep. It’s not original. It’s not fresh. It’s not profound. It’s a trivial song about a trivial transaction blip in an adolescent girls’ social life. But Taffy– in the ultimate expression of confirmation bias– proclaims it courageous precisely because almost no self-respecting female singer-songwriter would ever embarrass herself by writing such triviality.

It’s true. Because the female singer-songwriters we think of were into much more substantial and original expressions of their art. And absolutely, they would be embarrassed by “All too Well”.

Here’s more:

And you call me up again just to break me like a promise
So casually cruel in the name of being honest
I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here
‘Cause I remember it all, all, all
Too well

The language is stiff, forced. “casually cruel” and “in the name of being honest” and “crumpled up piece of paper” are neither striking nor original and certainly not very powerful. It’s the very definition of sophomoric.

I wonder if Ms. Brodesser-Akner has heard of Joni Mitchell or Ani DiFranco,

It was bad enough that the Times gave overweening preposterous adoration to a trivial, inane pop figure whose success is hugely the result of massive publicity and promotion as much as her own skill at manipulating her public image. Worse was yet to come: Taffy was audibly tearful about how she could relate to Swift’s struggles against her music company after it sold her masters to an investor. She too had been exploited and cheated by people she trusted and loved– paid less then her male colleagues*, not being appreciated for her real talents and skills, being grateful to even have a job, the way Taylor Swift was grateful to her record company for making her famous and rich. Taffy was astounded at Swift’s stunningly amazing decision to re-record her masters so she could sell them instead of the ones owned by the investors.

What would have been genuinely impressive would be if Swift was smart enough not to sign the deal she signed– willingly, in exchange for fame and riches– in the first place, or if she, like Ani Difranco, a female artist who is light-years more interesting than Taylor Swift, told the record companies to just fuck off while she managed her own recordings and career.

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Little Richard’s Revisionism

Suppose a notorious prostitute gave up her profession, joined a church, went to seminary, became a preacher, established a church, built up it’s membership so that it was able to build a lovely new sanctuary, and then retired. And suppose that after her retirement, a large group of former customers decided to give her an award for being the best prostitute in the business.

She would refuse, right? She would prefer that people not even know about her past, but if they did, she would certainly renounce it. She would publicly return all the money she earned from prostitution to a charity for unwed mothers (or something).

Suppose it was discovered that she financed her new church sanctuary with money she had earned as a prostitute?

Suppose that hundreds of young women read books and articles about her early career and announced that they wanted more than anything to become great prostitutes.

Yes, a very weird story, isn’t it? It is the story of Little Richard. Yes it is.

Let me make absolutely career: Little Richard’s rock’n’roll career was not in any manner really prostitution or like prostitution. I am saying that Little Richard himself, by his own standards as a Christian preacher, came to regard it as such. Insofar as it goes…

Little Richard was perhaps the greatest genius of the early rock’n’roll era. If you have never seen a good video of one of his early performances– and I don’t mean just a clip– you must see it. He is utterly remarkable. Here’s another. And another. He was a whirling dervish of dance and vocals and whoops and hollers and piano, and absolutely mesmerizing. He excited people so much they sometimes broke into a riot.

Watch Paul McCartney sing for the Beatles in the early years. You are watching Little Richard. Watch Mick Jagger, Elvis, David Bowie, Prince, Madonna– all owe an enormous debt to the original, Little Richard. Even Bob Dylan, someone you would not immediately think of as influenced by Little Richard, listed, in his high school year book, the ambition of joining Little Richard’s band.

And then Little Richard got religion.

Little Richard, who had been brought up in the church, of course, always believed in scripture, in Jesus, in the Ten Commandments and the Holy Spirit, but he didn’t care at first. He was flamboyant, charismatic, and absolutely homosexual. He lived the way he wanted. But in the early 1960’s, he embraced the religion of his upbringing and repudiated rock’n’roll. He refused to sing any of his hits. He sang gospel tunes, spirituals. Sometimes he would spice them up with a performance that suggested if not replicated his early career, but mostly he stood on stage in a suit and sang into a microphone while barely moving his body.

He says he gave up homosexual relationships. I’m not sure I believe him. He was still surrounded by gay men at times. It’s very hard to tell because Little Richard was not known for his honesty or candor when it came to his personal history.

The point is, Little Richard believed that his early career was a sinful expression of a sinful lifestyle– like the prostitute in my fable above. He begged God to forgive him. He tried to go straight and reform.

But…

As the documentary, “Little Richard: I am Everything” makes clear, unlike the prostitute of my fable, he wants it both ways. He demands recognition for the very things he repudiated in his later life. He demands honors and money for behaviors he now condemns, in his earlier self, and, by implication if not directly, in others.

He complains bitterly about not being paid for his sinful expressions.

I found the last half hour of the documentary a bit offensive because of that. That, and the the rather clumsy attempt to blame everything that was denied to Little Richard on homophobia, as if the Beatles, and Elvis, and Tom Petty, and Joni Mitchell, and everyone else go their due, except for poor old gay, black Little Richard. It’s simply not true. Little Richard did not get compensated fairly for his work because the music industry systematically rips off every young artist whatever their color, religion, or sexual orientation.

Do you think there’s a whole lot of straight male artists out there who were paid fairly and who feel that the industry treated them well? Or contemporary female country artists?

Leonard Cohen, incidentally, did the smart thing and retained control of his publishing rights… until his agent talked him into selling the entire catalogue to Sony Music and then pilfered the money forcing him to resume touring again.