As anyone must be who follows pop entertainment, I’m a keen observer of trend cycles. Culture is a marketplace, and there are all kinds of practical reasons to keep an eye on what succeeds. There’s the mercenary motive, of course — predicting the market is the way fortunes are made, and if chutney is the NEW salsa it’s only smart to put your money into chutney — but even for those of us without a financial stake in the business, there’s a hum of recognition when something fondly-remembered bubbles up again. It’s the same pleasure you feel when the old familiar chorus of a pop song rolls around, sure as the sunrise — or, perhaps more accurately, the pleasure of a well-turned poem, which is all about the delight of the new as it evokes the old. Because history, you see, never quite repeats itself, but it often rhymes.

Beverly Hills 90210 is not particular fondly-remembered, at least by me. The whole franchise and its many spinoffs constituted a brief blip in my pop consciousness. But the impact, outside of my own personal headspace, was considerable. 90210, as it turns out, ran for ten years, from 1990 to 2000. (Who knew?) And the teen-soap model has been imitated and co-opted and recalibrated for subsequent waves of TV watchers. For a while, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the NEW 90210; but inevitably what went around came around, and now there’s a remake, or reboot, or reimagining of 90210 itself filling that void. New 90210 is the NEW Old 90210. And again, it seems, the 1990s are back.

So if the 20teens are the NEW 1990s, where does that leave us? I haven’t seen the show itself, so I can’t really comment on how it evokes or fails to evoke the 1990s. On the 90210 soundtrack album, though, there are definitely some moments that hew to 1990s musical models.

Much of it is actually rather good, as these things go. Mute Math’s “Valium,” (download) for instance, is gorgeous, folky and spacey all at once. Dig the swirly psychedelic intro, conjuring echoes of world music; the dudouk is the NEW didgeridoo, which was itself the NEW sitar — but if you’re intentionally evoking the old school, as here, sitar is still sitar. Overall effect of plainspoken melody with mildly lysergic ornamentation; Mute Math = the NEW Beth Orton.

Even better are N*E*R*D, a.k.a. the ace production team The Neptunes — producers are the NEW deejays are the NEW rockstars; “Soldier” is the highlight of the record, the ska underpinnings alternating Pharrell’s toaster-style rapping with throaty vocals from Santigold (hook girl is the NEW guitar solo).

The effect harkens back to a time before 90210, to a previous wave of ska, when two-tone groups bestrode the dancefloor like colossi; for one song, at least, N*E*R*D and Santigold are the NEW Selecter. (Okay, wrong decade. Still, great band.)

As on any compilation, there are some embarrassments. Jet — or, as they insist on spelling it, JET — doubtless wish to evoke the proud hard rock tradition of their native Australia, and stand bravely in the forefront of slovenliness as the NEW primping (under which formulation body odor is the NEW cologne); but spending a song — even a short song — in spiteful bitching about the subculture du jour is no way to get yourself taken with even the seriousness afforded an AC/DC. Jet set their sights on “hipsters” here — hipsters being the NEW yuppies, and now that you mention it, that footage of Corey Glover rockin’ the “Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirt really hasn’t really aged well, has it? — and pack their screed with references to Pitchfork and thrift stores — references that seemed up-to-the-minute when the song was written, I’m sure, but which were already hopeless clichés by the time of the record’s release. And so “One Hipster One Bullit” (sic) is so hysterical and hypocritical, and Jet so fundamentally a shamming novelty act, that their ‘90s analogue can only be another one-hit wonder who neither rocked as hard nor cut so deep as they may have wished; congratulations, Jet — you are the NEW The Odds.

And so it goes. “I Want You So Bad I Can’t Breathe” is a slice of fey robo-funk several levels sub-Bowie; with this track, OK Go are the NEW Nancy Boy. Later, the All-American Rejects follow up with “Sierra’s Song,” a melodramatic acoustic waltz livened up with harpsichord; the NEW Goo Goo Dolls.

It doesn’t all map up quite so neatly. The Raconteurs, for instance, remake “Many Shades of Black” with Brit chanteuse Adele on vocals. Adele has been acclaimed in some quarters as the NEW Amy Winehouse, which would make The Raconteurs the NEW Dap-Kings; but they’re remaking their own song here, although it sounds more like a karaoke track, which I suppose makes the Raconteurs the NEW “As Made Famous By The Raconteurs.” Which doesn’t quite pass muster, notionally speaking — but the song is still a pleasure, no matter who’s singing, the guitar-churned quick-waltz enlivened by horns and piano. (Another waltz! Is it too early to declare that three is the NEW four?)

Then the referential lines get really blurry. Sarah Solovay’s got a nice husky voice and “Hearts Collide” (download) sets it against sweet and sprightly folk guitars. Next up, Darrelle London’s “Understand” has chirpy, wholesome vocals (Darrelle is Canadian, by the bye, so for her presumably 90210 is the NEW DeGrassi) — “Sorry if you wonder why I don’t call you my BF,” she sings, in a line perfectly encapsulating the song’s utter twee-ness — set to “Chopsticks” piano and cuckoo-clock percussion.

And for the space of two songs, it’s like Fiona Apple and Sixpence None the Richer traded places. It’s all very heart-on-sleeve, anyway: obvious is the NEW ironic.

So what’s missing here? For one thing, there’s virtually no call back to the musical forms predominantly used in the original series; while 90210 1.0 was loaded with the pop R&B and New Jack Swing that ruled the charts in its time, African-American forms and artists (with the stellar exception of the N*E*R*D track) are barely present on the new disc. It’s pretty much white indie-pop from stem to stern, and that’s perhaps the first sign that we’re on a different point along the trend curve — the conscious branding of the new show as a niche product, the recognition that, in a 500-channel universe, the notion of a “general audience” is a relic of the past, and the best anyone can hope for a is a plurality share of any of a zillion tiny demographics. In other words, cult hit is the NEW hit full-stop, and white girls ages 13-18 are the NEW “everybody.”

But even a niche product should have some resonance with the larger culture, or it risks irrelevance. African-American musical forms are no less ubiquitous a presence on pop radio and high-school dancefloors now than they were in the 1990s — if anything, they’re even moreso — but they’re absent here, which makes it a weirdly inauthentic sonic portrait of the contemporary teenaged experience, even in Beverly Hills. The student body of the real Beverly Hills High School has a large proportion of minority students, most notably some 40% who are of Persian descent; the 90210 reboot, to its credit, manages one Iranian-American character — but they still didn’t dare make him a Muslim. Apparently updates can only go so far. The end goal of trend-spotting is sometimes described as the “New Black,” and there are indeed many shades of black, and they are embraced by real kids of all races — but you’d never know it from 90210.

Pity poor Steven Seagal, the Forgotten Man of action movies. His fellow redneck / kung-fu badass Chuck Norris becomes popcult meme thanks to “facts” like Lightning never strikes in the same place twice because it knows Chuck Norris is looking for it — but when it comes to Seagal, both recognition and facts are thin on the ground.

Part of that is by design. Seagal has always preferred to keep his past shrouded in mystery. He has teased interviewers with hints and allusions, insinuating that he has ties to the CIA, the yakuza, and the Tibetan resistance movement; he has variously claimed to be a Green Beret, a Zen master, and a Navy SEAL, and spoken vaguely of his influential relationship with various foreign dignitaries and spiritual leaders.

One thing everyone seems to agree on, though, is that Seagal is an unpleasant egomaniac — self-involved, vindictive, and insecure, given to threats and tantrums. Seagal is the subject of a couple of extended digressions in Orville Schell’s terrific 2000 book Virtual Tibet, a brilliant and lively study of the West’s fascination with — and misunderstanding of — that ancient land. In a one-on-one interview, Seagal brags about how tight he is with the Dalai Lama. Yet later on, at a fundraiser for the Tibetan government-in-exile, Seagal is relegated to a seat far from the guest of honor: “[D]espite Seagal’s offer to make a substantial financial contribution, the Dalai Lama’s aides have decided to maintain a certain distance between the star and their charge,” Schell writes. “They evidently fear the Dalai Lama’s becoming too closely identified with such a loose cannon of a celebrity.”

Friends, when even the Dalai Lama thinks you’re an asshole, it’s time to rethink your life. And so Seagal has scaled back his efforts from bringing enlightenment to the world to simply keeping the peace in one county — and, of course, documenting the results in basic-cable reality show. On his new A&E show Lawman (Tuesdays, 11 PM EST) Seagal cruises the mean streets of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, looking for bad guys and protecting the innocent — in theory, at least; but more about that later.

A&E, of course, used to stand for Arts and Entertainment, and those of a certain age will remember the network’s early days when it ran BBC costume dramas and Evening at Pops. Heady times, indeed. But now, even in a lineup dominated by the likes of Intervention, Hoarders, and Psychic Kids, Seagal’s little vanity project stands out; Lawman ain’t art; indeed, it’s barely entertainment. It’s basically Cops plus Steven Seagal — in other words, a nightmare from which I cannot awaken.

Seagal’s association with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office began nearly twenty years ago, when the chief invited him to teach some martial arts moves to the recruits at the Sheriff’s Academy. In recognition of his services, he was designated “Reserve Deputy Chief of Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office Reserve Special Services,” which sounds approximately as legitimate as Elvis Presley’s DEA credentials.

Elvis, however, never got to ride along on any drug busts. Seagal, though, gets his own posse of uniformed deputies, all conspicuously pudgy and out-of-shape — which is really saying something, given that Seagal himself looks like a side of beef. This is crew is turned out to tool around the parish in two big unmarked SUVs; admittedly I’m no expert, but this whole setup doesn’t seem exactly regulation, and I find myself wondering just how many of these guys (if any) are what you might call, y’know, real cops.

Seagal’s the only cop in this gang of four wearing a bulletproof vest, presumably because Steven Seagal is the biggest pussy in the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s department. He sits in the passenger seat, rocking his yellow-tinted specs — what, he thinks he’s Bono now? — and providing a hysterically self-important narration, as atmospheric B-roll fills the screen. “As a lifelong practitioner of the martial arts, I’m trained to remain calm in the face of adversity and danger,” he says (Seagal begins many sentences with the words, “As a lifelong practitioner of the martial arts”). “When the world is speeding by for others, I see things for what they are. A cock of the head, a foot planted forward or back, a flick of the wrist — they all tell me something.” This is accompanied by a slow rollby of two black youths, juxtaposing one grabbing his crotch with Seagal glaring at him appraisingly.

The citizens-on-patrol stuff is intercut with bits of Seagal teaching self-defense to various deputies and recruits. It’s ostensibly because he worries about them — “I want to protect my guys that I love” — but in practice it’s a chance for Seagal to show off how fast he still is, despite having the appearance and demeanor of a tranquilized manatee. He also trains a deputy nervous about passing his annual firearms proficiency test (Seagal is, of course, a dead shot). Always eager to appear profound, he characterizes it as being “like Zen archery, or — something,” but his weakness for showing off soon surfaces, and before long he’s trying to light matches by shooting at them; for a couple of seconds, I think I’m watching Mythbusters.

The setup seems ripe for hilarity, but there are hinky elements at play that make Lawman hard to enjoy. Just as on Cops, there are constant uncomfortable undercurrents of race and class privilege. Jefferson Parish is a largely black area, but of the half-dozen or so cops we meet, exactly one is African-American. The suspects, though, are overwhelmingly persons of color. In one episode, the cops are called in to break up a parking lot brawl; they immediately start cuffing black suspects — until bystanders I.D. the passengers of a truck fleeing the scene as the instigators. The driver and his compatriot turn out to be fratty-looking white guys, who immediately start whining, “They were bullying us.”

The white kids get hustled off downtown without incident, while one of the brawlers — a black man who is, in the best Cops tradition, both shirtless and drunk — kicks out a cop car window while being arrested, and gets himself tased on camera. It’s pretty disturbing, made no less so when Seagal upbraids the man for being not such a good Zen practitioner.

Even more problematic, though, is that Seagal appears to have a free hand in following any avenue of investigation down which his vaunted sixth-sense-for-danger leads him. This leads to a lot of “Suspicious Persons” reports, which in practice tend to translate as “Guilty of Walking While Black.”

In one episode, Seagal’s posse descends upon two guys leaving a house in the small hours of the morning. “I think these guys are drinking,” Seagal snarls, and sure enough, one is toting a still-full bottle of Goldschlager. Open-container laws are cited, but the men both insist they have done no wrong. One of them gets off the quote of the night: “I understand y’all are doin’ y’all job, but right now I don’t feel like y’all are doin’ y’all job!” Truer words.

Then things take a creepy turn. The cops pat the guys down, and one of them is packing a gun. There is a potential for things top get ugly indeed — but a quick check indicates that the gun is legally registered, that neither man has any priors, and that neither one has even been drinking. (I think the one guy got the bottle from his Mom, which is kind of sweet.) Seagal lets them go, as he must, bust first has the balls to lecture them about his righteousness: “I’m out here looking for murderers,” he tells them sternly, which is cold comfort to a poor man, living in a rough neighborhood, who has just been hassled by a slumming movie star.

To his credit, the man listens to Seagal’s tirade with stony silence, which is more than I could manage in the face of such self-righteousness from such an overprivileged buffoon. Then again, he’s come out of his encounter with Seagal with no injury but a delay in getting home. It could easily have gone worse. Much, much worse. And that’s why I can’t even laugh at Lawman. Because when Steven Seagal tries to gin up some drama for the cameras, innocent people will suffer — maybe suffer inconvenience, maybe worse. All to assuage the boredom of an over-the-hill actor.

Listen. Most real cops, in my experience, have a sort of weary compassion. They, more than most people, recognize human folly. They know the ways that people have of fucking themselves up, and they empathize, while balancing their empathy with the need to keep people safe. They’re not in the business of perfecting human nature; they’re just trying to maintain the peace.

So I cannot imagine what the Sheriff of Jefferson Parish was thinking when he deputized Steven Seagal. His history, and his contradictory accounts of his own past, would tend to indicate that he is highly imaginative at best, at worst delusional, and in any case prone to over-identifying with the parts he play-acts. Bad enough when he’s just romping around Hollywood, with no one to hurt but himself and his career; but why in God’s name would you give such a man a position of actual authority?

Seagal’s egomania doesn’t allow him to do anything by halves. During his Tibetan Buddhist phase, we would claim to Orville Schell that the Dalai Lama “gave me a spiritual blessing that would not have been given to anyone who was not special. I don’t think he has given such a blessing to any other white person.” He reportedly told others that during their private meeting, the Dalai Lama had knelt and kissed Seagal’s feet. Later, he found a Tibetan cleric who was willing (in exchange for a large cash donation) to proclaim Seagal a tulku, or “living Buddha” — that is, a reincarnation of a revered high lama.

Steven Seagal is the worst kind of wanna-be — an underachiever with a bottomless sense of entitlement, a man who can’t be satisfied until he’s recognized as tops in the field, no matter how ill-qualified he may be; when he gets religion, he won’t settle for being a disciple — no, he has to be a god himself. And someone gave this pathetic bastard a badge and a gun and set him loose to keep order among the poor and privilegeless, according to his own discretion. Yeah, this is going to end well.

In the abstract, Neil Diamond seems like somebody I should dig. Smart dude; good work ethic, fairly self-aware, tries a lot of different things. Steeped in the classics of pre-rock music, both the Great American Songbook — what a jazz cat would call “the standards” — and the Brill Building pop of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Impatient. Devoted to his craft.

And yet.

For whatever reason, I could never warm up to the guy — couldn’t even muster the heat to fire a decent hate; towards Neil Diamond and all his works and all his empty promises, I Was mired in savage indifference. A hard-working mediocrity, I’d concede — but a mediocrity for all that. Nothing to get excited about, for good or ill.

I suspect that even his fans know that, deep down, judging from journalist Jon Bream’s handsome new coffee-table book Neil Diamond Is Forever. (Oh, that title: really, Jon? Dude, for serious?) From the get-go, there’s a curious defensiveness to the enterprise. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

Everybody’s read one: a review deriding Neil Diamond as the “Frog King of Rock” or the cheesiest purveyor of pop on the planet. … The keepers of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame haven’t thought enough of Neil to put his name on the ballot, let alone induct him.

And that’s the opening paragraph, friends. That’s how Jon Bream chooses to start his celebration of the man and his music. Can you imagine a biography of any other star of Neil Diamond’s stature (and he’s still a pretty gaddam big star, even now) going to such great pains to point out how unfashionable its subject is — and then do nothing to refute it?

It’s the fan’s dilemma; he must believe that the object of his fandom is worthy of the time and attention that he has put forth, despite the critical line. To avoid that cognitive dissonance, he employs the trick that readers of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four might recognize as doublethink; in everyday use we just call it “having it both ways.” Throughout the book, Bream tosses around the word “hip” like a blasphemy — while splattering nearly every page with testimonial pull-quotes to Diamond’s genius from a who’s-who of the music industry. He acknowledges Diamond’s hideous fashion sense — “those familiar garish beaded shirts” — then glosses over it as simply part of the package. When he needs verification for his facts, he cites earlier “warts and all” biographies of Diamond, conceding those books are “well-researched” — while dismissing their “muck-raking” content as irrelevant. Journalistic truth, it seems, can safely be discarded, along with logical consistency, wherever either conflicts with fannish devotion.

But I can’t buy into that. When fans love an artist despite the flaws that make him intolerable to the out-group, that’s testament to the redemptive power of talent. But when fans insist on loving the artist because of those flaws, well, that’s just perverse — even masochistic. The Kinks early on staked out a territory as outsider heroes — the misfit’s favorite, the none-of-the-above option in the strict binary environment of Beatles vs. Stones — but they had the songs to back it up, from “Days” and “Celluloid Heroes” to “Lola’ and, yes, “I’m Not like Everybody Else.” Tom Waits is the weirdo with the consumptive’s growl and a mug like a chainsaw sculpture — but at the end of the day, he’s the weirdo that wrote “Georgia Lee”: case closed. What is Neil Diamond, in the face of that?

Bream and his cohort of “Diamondheads” (sigh; really, guys?) would just as soon ignore the question. Different means, to different ends, they argue, citing the man himself: in 1976, Diamond told Rolling Stone, “I never could identify with …. this rebelliousness. It didn’t relate to what I was trying to do, which was essentially to try and be Alan Jay Lerner or George Gershwin. Hip was something frivolous people had time to be. I didn’t have time to be hip and with-it and groovy. I was dealing with something much more important: with my life and trying to write songs that had substance.”

Two things are apparent; first, that the defensiveness on display in Bream’s book comes straight from the top, and second, that you damned kids had better stay off Neil Diamond’s lawn.

But okay, let’s take Diamond at his word, and judge him by his own preferred criteria. Where, in his vast catalog, is a melody as elegant and indelible as “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” or “I Could Have Danced All Night” — or, for that matter, “Always Something There To Remind Me” or “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”

That’s not as rhetorical question; take your time to answer.

Some great pop happens unrehearsed, and some is deeply crafted. But the craft is apparent only on close inspection. I would argue that all great pop sounds effortless and immediate — like a deeply felt idea overspilling the confines of the heart and bursting into the larger world. Of all Neil Diamond’s songs, I’ll grant you mmmaybe “I’m A Believer” with that explosive, spontaneous quality; the rest of the oeuvre puts the heavy labor front and center. “I Am … I Said,” he claims, took four months to write — four solid months of eight-hour days. And it shows — in the strain, in the melodrama, in the pointless flourishes. Even alleged rockers like “Cherry, Cherry” and “Sweet Caroline” overload their slender melodies with elaborate structures ‘til they collapse under their own weight.

Fans praise Diamond because he doesn’t hold anything back — but if anything, he can’t afford to. Many pop stars disappoint because they give off the air of A students working below their abilities; Diamond, though, has the maddening eagerness of a C+ student gunning to earn that A through effort alone, hustling to elevate average material through sheer force of will. If perspiration had a sound, it would sound like Neil Diamond.

That same dynamic extends to his personality quirks — the other half of the equation for celebrity. Diamond has reputation as a brooding, complex individual, but his alleged complexity sounds like nothing so much as ordinary human self-awareness, caricatured to heroic proportions by his fanbase. Listen, every artist has occasional doubts and second thoughts about his work. In Bream’s narrative, though, these everyday insecurities become a crippling uncertainty that Diamond must struggle mightily through.

Diamond himself happily feeds into the mythology that simply being thoughtful and reflective qualifies his as a tortured artiste; he spent a couple of years in therapy in the ‘70s, for instance, and he hasn’t shut up about it since. He’s praised for the dryness of his humor, when all that’s really going on is that he can’t tell a joke. Even his failings and weaknesses are banal; he’s been married a couple of times, and it took him a bunch of tries to quit smoking. Not exactly the stuff of rock ‘n’ roll legends.

Then again, this book isn’t meant for the likes of me. It’s for the superfans — and after a while, fandom becomes relexive. Fandom comes to be about the experience of fandom itself at least as much as it is about the object of same. There are plenty of photos of BNeil Diamond here, but there are also pages of artfully-composed pictures of tour T-shirts, badges, ticket stubs, backstage passes, vinyl 45s, posters, foreign album sleeves, and signed publicity glossies. Photographs of photographs. The artist becomes a commodity, a collectible.

That happens, to some degree, to everyone who gets famous enough; I understand that. And that fame is based on connection; the audience hooks into something and invests the performer with a projected significance, earned or not. I can understand that.

But what I still don’t understand is: why this guy? Bream spends a lot of energy on bulletproofing his idol and naysaying the haters, but he can’t convincingly explain why he loves the guy, let alone why I should do the same. By all means, give the people what they want. But, why, out of all the things they could possibly want, would they want this?

Comedienne Kathy Griffin takes as her great subject the foibles of Hollywood celebrity culture. Part of the kick of Griffin’s TV show Life on the D-List and her stand-up routine is the feeling of being privy to the private inside dish on the stars we love — or love to hate. Here are some of the supersecret celebrity revelations gleaned from a viewing of Griffin’s new DVD, the extended cut of her HBO special She’ll Cut a Bitch:

• Singer Taylor Swift sure is young! And tall!
• James Gandolfini, believe it or not, is kind of unapproachable!
• Cher’s hair is long, black, and straight — in real life!
• That Tracy Morgan — what a kidder!
• Kathy Griffin is a crass narcissist with some patronizing, retrograde ideas about cultural appropriation and sexual identity!

At one point in She’ll Cut A Bitch, Griffin gives call-outs to the various constituencies that make up her audience: “Women and lesbians! Where are the women? Let’s hear ya! And where are my gays at? Yeah! All right! Straight men — sorry, guys. I’ve got nothin’ for ya.”

And, you know, in my case she was right — thought not for the reasons she thought.

Kathy Griffin talks about “her gays” a lot. That’s how she addresses her audience sometimes, collectively: “And, Gays, I could not believe my eyes…” Now, of course it’s all pitched as an affectionate tease, and of course Griffin is a longtime friend to the gay community — a campaigner for marriage rights and AIDS research. That is both undeniable and immensely admirable. But she seems to take that achievement as license to use gayness as a punchline. Griffin identifies herself as being, basically, a gay man, and the whole audience, gay and straight, laughs knowingly. But there are whiffs of a weird, patronizing attitude — the Straight Girl’s Burden, call it. The gays, you know, they’re so wonderful. So fabulous and carefree. Like children, really.

Now when, say, Ted Nugent identifies himself as a black man to anyone who’ll listen, it comes off as blatantly creepy and hateful; it’s a screamingly dishonest ploy for the Nuge to use his pretended negritude as a stick with which to beat up current trends in African-American pop culture, leadership, and mores. What Griffin does is less overtly icky — more along the lines of the well-intentioned but hapless New York mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino proclaiming to his African-American supporters, “My heart is as black as yours” — but it stills comes from a place of privilege and condescension. Griffin legitimizes her own petty, bullshit obsessions by constructing an imagined connection with a collective identity, literally appropriating an identity not her own.

But as squicky as all this is, I might have forgiven it as a jolly lark, a thumb in the eye of fusty old Political Correctness, if it had actually been the least bit funny. Alas, ‘twas not to be. Griffin draws her material from life; she has encounters with the great and the good, and tells stories about those encounters. She’s limited, therefore, both by the quality of the celebrity dish she offers and by her skills as a raconteuse. As the bullet list above would indicate, the insights aren’t particularly scandalous, or even very interesting — less Hollywood Babylon than Joe Franklin. You can get juicier stuff by skimming the Enquirer while waiting in the checkout line at Shop ‘n Save.

Now, that’s not a fatal flaw; a gifted storyteller can always mine humor from the everyday. But Griffin’s delivery doesn’t elevate the gags much. Structurally, the act is a mess; the stories spin their wheels while she explores blind alleys, revels in her crappy impersonations, grooves on the sound of her own voice. The non-celebrity stuff — mainly about Griffin’s relationship with her elderly mother — is built on played-out old-people-are-wacky riffs that were tired when Bill Cosby did ‘em, thirty-five years ago. Griffin tries flogging some life into these old warhorses with sheer volume — yelling is her go-to comedic device throughout, actually — and more gratuitous catchphrases than your typical Black Eyed Peas single, but to very little avail.

There was only one moment that actually amused me, and not in the way it was meant to; Griffin talks about coming home late one night and embarrassing her mother, catching the poor woman in the act of watching … Keeping Up With the Kardashians. Griffin is horrified, shocked that her mother should be enjoying a cable reality series about women on the margins of showbiz who have the unmitigated gall to capitalize on their connections within the industry to obtain a modicum of unearned fame for themselves. Forget the Enquirer, friends — there’s the real scandal, right there.

Some men lead blessed lives. They discover early on where their desires lie, and they’re able to pursue them. Look at me. I’ve been lucky enough to figure out that writing is the thing I love most — the only thing I’m really good at, in fact — and I get to do it all the time.

Blackie Lawless divined from a young age that what he really wanted to do was to rock and roll all nite and party ev-e-ry day. But alas! for Paul Stanley already had that position monopolized, and Blackie, luckless, was left to shift for himself. The career that has led to Babylon, the latest disc from Blackie’s band W.A.S.P., has been a history of drift and dabbling — a fate not uncommon among those cheated of their true calling.

And yet Blackie Lawless, through no fault of his own, has had a greater cultural impact than his more-famous peers. Whilst earning his spurs as a shock-rocker in the mode of his boyhood friend Ace Frehley and his later protégé Nikki Sixx, young Blackie recorded a little ditty entitled “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast).” This tender love ballad was a nine day’s wonder in the mid-80s when it was cited by the PMRC crowd as an exemplar of the coarsening of pop music. In retrospect, they were right — but not in the way they thought they were. Now, Blackie did not testify at the infamous Senate hearings on raunch-pop, but via the industry’s panicked response to the unwanted government attention he helped to midwife a new Golden Age of vulgarity.

The self-regulated labeling and codification of “Explicit Content” that came out of Blackie’s run-in with the PMRC ended up, paradoxically, giving subsequent artists unprecedented license to explore sexual and violent themes without recourse to euphemism. In a stunning example of the law of unintended consequences, the PMRC’s most far-reaching achievement was killing off the double entendre. These days, heaven knows, anything goes — as long as it’s got the sticker on the front. And so W.A.S.P. made possible the likes of Nine Inch Nails, and not just because you can draw a straight line from “Animal” to “Closer” (although you totally can).

So how do you follow up a cultural bang like that? I mean, pissing off religious conservatives is a good start to any career — if you can find a way to capitalize on it. But a funny thing happened on the way to world domination. W.A.S.P. had plenty of street cred, but they couldn’t translate that into mainstream success. As Motley Crüe and Guns ‘n’ Roses rode their sleazed-out turbo boogie to fame and glory, Blackie was messing around with Sabbath style Armageddon-rock (Headless Children) and proggish concept albums (Crimson Idol and the two-part The Neon God), and trying his hand at acting (he was supposedly “considered for” the part of the T-1000 in Terminator 2, which I take to mean that his manager wangled a lunch meeting with a junior casting assistant).

As the long hangover of the 90s faded, Bret Michaels and Tommy Lee got reality shows; Nikki Sixx has a book deal; and Blackie kept playing mid-sized venues, and couldn’t keep a steady band together, and started putting cranky libertarian political messages in the liner notes of W.A.S.P. albums, and never became more than semi-famous in the larger culture.

It probably didn’t help that he wasn’t pretty. He can write and sing, and he can play like a motherfucker, but Blackie’s face has always had a worked-over, vaguely mummified quality. He was never the ugliest in the LA metal contingent — that would be Crüe guitarist Mick Mars, who looks like Darkseid after an allergic reaction to shellfish — but he’s hardly a model frontman. Or a model for anything, full stop.

What he is, though, is a dab hand with a pop hook, and Babylon has great moments of ear candy even for less metallically-inclined audiences. Listen to the clarion guitar riff that kicks off “Crazy” (download) — transpose that lick to a clean electric 12-string, and it could pass for early R.E.M. And in a genre that still favors the Germanic wail, Blackie’s voice has a pleasing hint of Springsteenian heartland gruffness; “soul” is always a relative concept in metal, but Mr. Lawless has definitely got it.

And in the end, soul is what it’s all about. Babylon feels, in some ways, like an inconsequential record — only nine songs, two of them covers, a banal and horrendously-edited political screed in the notes, silly and shopworn apocalyptic lyrics. (Sidebar: Why, oh why is it that so many half-educated rockstars are so drawn to the Book of Revelation? I think it’s be because, like most people who don’t read much, have the bad habit of skipping to the end to see how it all turns out.) For the duration of one song, though, it seems very important indeed. “Godless Run” (download) is the album’s crowning moment — a profession of faith so aching, so truthful, it did the last thing I expected any W.A.S.P. record to do; it moved me.

When I was a kid, my father read to me a poem by Francis Thompson, called The Hound of Heaven. The poem’s central image is of God as a hunting dog, chasing down the lost soul who thinks he has no need for God, pursuing him patiently, relentlessly, no matter how he far he flees. In the end, the soul is caught; grace is inexorable and inevitable, and there is no escape from God’s wondrous love. It’s a weird and beautiful work, the product, obviously, of a complicated relationship with the idea of salvation. “Godless Run,” in its own meatheaded way, captures some of that same strange power; it sidesteps the simplifications and clichés of Christian metal to paint a picture of a religious experience that I recognize, shot through with anger and doubt, where the “aha!” moment comes not with happy-clappy bliss but with a weary resignation.

So while it may seem like cheap irony that Blackie Lawless, who made his name by making religious conservatives nervous, should end up a religious conservative himself; that he should deliver a record with no explicit lyrics warning; and even disavow his earlier work to the point of no longer performing “Animal” live — it’s no stranger than the pervasive and inescapable love that should bring him to this point. Some men lead blessed lives, and follow their pursuits. But all men are pursued themselves in turn, and some — perhaps the most blessed of all — manage to get themselves caught.

You still hear the word agitprop thrown around occasionally in pop culture criticism, usually when somebody’s talking about the Clash, or maybe Michael Moore. But like many elements of the critical lexicon, the word has a very specific meaning that’s sometimes forgotten in the grab for respectability by the half-bright. In its strictest sense, agitprop refers not to the artistic statement of an individual — no matter how vehement or politically-charged the statement — but to the use of art as a collectivist political tool.

By that reasonable definition, the Clash didn’t produce agitprop, because the Clash weren’t a political action committee — they were a rock band. True agitprop flourishes (if that’s the right word) in times and places where there’s a heavy State apparatus to promulgate it: the early Soviet Union; China in the days of the Cultural Revolution; today’s North Korea, where the only radios available come straight from the factory pre-set to the government frequency, and with no tuning knob.

In a free society, though, people are going to watch and listen to whatever the hell they please. In the marketplace of art, victory doesn’t always go to the worthiest agenda, but to the strongest craft. That the Clash was the Only Band That Mattered while (say) Crass or Chumbawamba are footnotes is not necessarily because Strummer et al. had better politics, but because they had better hooks.

But people still insist on trying to make art that’s powered only by politics, with good intentions as all to recommend it. Such is the case with the audio drama It’s Up To Us Alone, which had its radio premiere on Radio Pacifica in November and is now available for download and on physical media.

As you can see from the rather scanty Web info, the producers aren’t big on individual credit. Oh, Ed Asner’s name is trotted out for its dubious marquee value, and a narrator reads the cast list. But in true agitprop fashion, the script and direction are credited simply to “the PEN” — that is, the People’s Email Network, an allegedly-grassroots organization that seems to operate under a number of different website fronts to raise consciousness and funds for anti-war and progressive causes, and whose methods have come under some scrutiny. (Full disclosure: I’m on the mailing list, though I’m not sure how or why I got on it. I was not, however, consulted or invited to contribute to the script of this radio drama; a simple oversight, surely.)

Now: if you’re thinking that collective credit is a neat way of avoiding individual blame, well, you may be onto something.

It’s Up To Us Alone tells the story of how the cycle of violence creates intractable tensions in the Middle East. At least I think it does, because the PEN, in its collective wisdom, studiously avoids naming the nation wherein the play’s action unfolds. The words Israel and Palestine are never uttered — although, given the half-swallowed Jerry Lewis voices that the cast assumes to represent the local dialect, perhaps that’s for the best.

Gohhh, laydee…

This is by way of introducing our hero, Benjamin Shalom, a young Jewi — er, young government scientist. Note how efficiently (not to say artlessly) the script establishes that Benjamin is a big ol’ slob. This, like everything else in the play, is significant. Remember Chekhov’s dictum that if you show a gun on the mantelpiece in Act One, it’s got to go off by Act Three? Shlomo has helpfully pointed out the ascorbic acid on the lab bench.

Benjamin, you see, has a complicated personal life. His girlfriend Fatima is a Palestini — ahem, a girl from the Occupied Territories. In what is transparently a mandate of the script, they are Deeply In Love, or so we are told; frankly, there’s not enough reagents on any lab bench to conjure up chemistry between these two.

More problematically, Benjamin’s father, Ari Shalom, is the Minister of Defense; and Ari’s politics are, well, a trifle retrograde. Here’s Sunday dinner chez Shalom…

And would it kill you maybe you eat a little something?

Obviously Ari’s got some issues — besides being played by Ed Asner, I mean. (It’s a good thing that radio plays don’t require scenery, because ol’ Ed done chewed it all up.) Thing is, he’s not wrong about the “meeleetant terrrorrrrrzztz.” His “cold,” as it transpires, is actually weaponized encephalitis, contracted via a rocket attack from the Occupied Territories, using a black-market biological warhead.

Hundreds of people, then thousands, fall ill, the infection spreading worldwide. Benjamin and Shlomo — who seem mysteriously immune — labor mightily to find a treatment. Then the unthinkable happens, and Ed Asner really earns his paycheck:

Now this is how you sprinkle pixie dust on a scene.

(Incidentally, “pixie dust” is also carnival slang for buckets of sawdust used as vomit absorbent, for when somebody throws up on the Tilt-A-Whirl. For what it’s worth.)

Now, as deathbed conversions go, this one is — well, it’s less than convincing, innit? I mean, if you’ve spent your life paranoid that a hated Other is continually plotting your destruction, wouldn’t the news that your lethal illness is in fact the result of coordinated biowarfare tend to confirm that worldview? You’d think — wouldn’t you? — that instead of saying “I was wrong,” Ari would instead be saying “I told you so.” But It’s Up To Us Alone isn’t really interested in telling a recognizably human story; any feints towards character development or emotional truth are drowned out by the relentless drumbeat of the Message. (This criticism may sound familiar to devotees of politically-charged art.)

Inevitably — OMG SPOILERS WTF OK NOT REALLY — the beaker on the lab bench goes off; Benjamin discovers that the encephalitis bonds to the Vitamin C receptor sites on the body’s cells, and that megavitamin therapy can vanquish the infection. Somewhere Linus Pauling is slapping his forehead, and so am I; elide his ethnicity though the play does, in the end Benjamin is spared a horrible death because he is a Nice Jewish Boy Who Listens To His Mother.

Seriously.

C’mon, I’m all for peace; I think we can all agree that War is not healthy for children and other living things. But it does the cause no favors to present it in terms that a middle-schooler would find naïve and simplistic. And though the story is an impassioned plea for compromise, why does it find it so necessary to present such a one-sided view of the conflict? Ari Shalom gets a tearful speech admitting that violence only begets violence; but what about the jihadi who actually fired the bio-warhead and unleashed the plague? He’s conveniently presented as a lone gunman, operating without the sanction of the Fatah-like “Occupied Authority” — but not before he’s introduced with a sympathetic backstory, explaining his radicalism as a response to the violent death of his brother at the hands of the occupying army. (Once he actually launches the rocket, he disappears from the story entirely, and so never has to deal with the consequences of his actions.) An Isn’t-raeli general vows, on the record and as a matter of policy, to unleash a “disproportionate response,” and talks scornfully of flouting UN resolutions. On the Phoneystinian side, though, violence just sort of happens; no one is actually responsible, and to suggest otherwise is to blame the victim.

There’s no Anti-Semitism at play here, though critics of the peace movement will doubtless make the claim, in their usual reductive, intelligence-insulting fashion. What’s really coming out, though, is sympathy for the apparent underdog. And that’s only natural. When we see suffering and injustice, our hearts go out to the people who are hurting; and the Arab population of Gaza and the West Bank has indeed suffered terribly in the Intifada.

Now is both the best and worst possible time to be thinking of alternatives in the Middle East peace process. There’s an increasing discontent in both Israel and in the Palestinian territories with the intransigence on both sides. Any voice calling for true, just, and lasting peace is still much needed when, even in an allegedly-liberal U.S. media outlet, a thumbsucker with a headline like “Is It Possible to Be Moved by the Palestinian Plight and Still Be Sympathetic to Israel’s?” still passes for cutting-edge thought on the subject.

We need to move beyond that, to admit that yes, it is possible to acknowledge Palestinian suffering — while also acknowledging that much of that suffering has been inflicted by the Palestinian leadership, which has too often worked harder at maintaining and manipulating the status quo to its own ends than at actually solving the problems of its constituency. Opposition is easy, but governance is hard; time after time, Fatah and the other, more radical players in regional politics have chosen the easy path.

Until you acknowledge that, it’s impossible to write honestly about the tortured history of the conflict. But the anonymous authors of It’s Up To Us Alone don’t seem interested in honesty. Even if you agree with the play’s politics — and Israel’s policy in the West Bank and Gaza is unpopular pretty much everywhere except in the U.S., even within Israel itself — the story is so ridiculous, and the deck so stacked, that this production is valuable mainly as an object lesson; good intentions do not necessarily translate into good drama, and sometimes you’re left with a product best suited for resurfacing that well-known road to Hell.

Because I love you, I’ve saved the best for last — the obligatory soaring the theme song, which, according to the press release, “was recorded in Los Angeles with some of the most creative musicians in the city at one of the top studios, and mixed and mastered by name engineers,” all of whom declined to be named. Wonder why?

C’mon, girls!

Sweet dreams.

Much (though by no means all) of the stuff I talk about in this column comes to me free for review, often well in advance of the street release date. That means there are a lot of unfamiliar CDs and books and DVDs scattered around my workplace; it also means we get a lot of mail.

My kids thought that part was pretty exciting, when I first took the gig — until they got a load of the actual contents of most of those packages. “Hey, guys, who wants to watch this Rob Thomas DVD with Dad?” is kind of a non-starter, when weighing the options for a rainy Thursday afternoon.

Every now and then, though, a hit finds its way into our house. I got my advance copy of the lavish annual photo-book put out by the Ripley’s people (this year’s edition is subtitled Seeing Is Believing) literally months ago, and I’m only writing about it now — because it’s been the exclusive property of my seven-year old since its arrival.

In fact, he wrote his review before I did:

The main idea of this book is basically about gathering up ramdom facts and try to shock you with unbelivable sights. (note: seeing is beliveing) My favorite part is when a bus jumped over 15 motorcycles while on fire in reverseal to Knievel’s stunts!

He’s not wrong, you know. Oddity for oddity’s sake has been the Ripley brand for well on 90 years now. Though it’s been through many incarnations — a radio show, a newsreel feature, a museum franchise, and no fewer than three television series — “Believe It or Not!” began as a newspaper comic. Robert L. Ripley’s little daily panel was (and, in the hands of current artist John Graziano, remains) a masterpiece of concision, depicting strange and unusual people and events in a single striking image and a few well-chosen words.

Ripley himself was an unholy admixture of P.T. Barnum and that guy that does “News of the Weird,” with the draftsmanship of a Hal Foster thrown into the bargain. He remains a curiously underrated artist, even among comics historians — perhaps because of his extensive use of photo reference, perhaps because he increasingly handed off the art chores to assistants and ghosts as he grew more famous, or perhaps because he worked exclusively in his own singular form.

Whatever the reason, even the book series that still bears his name downplays that aspect of his life. You won’t find any of Ripley’s cartoons in Seeing Is Believing’s 240+ pages — which is why Sam and I had to draw our own — but what you will find are hundreds of color photos of crazy athletic feats, human oddities, outsider art, uncanny coincidences, cultural footnotes, and other credulity-straining phenomena, all rendered in that classic, breathless tone:

STRANGE FAMILY! The elephant shrews, or sengi, are a family of tiny, insect-eating African mammals that are more closely related to elephants than to shrews.

CAMEL GIRL! Ella Harper of Hendersonville, Tennessee, appeared in shows as “The Camel Girl” because her knees turned backward. Owing to this deformity, she struggled to walk solely on her feet and preferred to move around on all fours.

OLD SPRUCE! A spruce tree in Sweden has been sprouting new trees for nearly 10,000 years. Scientists think the tree took root in Dalmatia around the year 7542 B.C.

Selected items have a longer feature-style article attached, but for the most part the book reads just like this — like a Twitter feed from some slightly-more-wonderful world just alongside our own.

I’m not surprised that Sam glommed onto this book; the seven-year old version of myself would have devoured it, too. There’s something irresistible about this sort of miscellany. Leafing through such a book gives some of the same thrill of random discovery that you get when you’re surfing Wikipedia, looking for nothing in particular. When I was a kid I would pore over the Guinness Book of World Records, and I still get a little thrill every autumn when the new edition of the Old Farmer’s Almanac hits the shelves. John Hodgman lovingly skewered the format in The Areas of My Expertise, and captured the tone of facts and figures shading into anecdote, conveyed with the same earnestness. He ramps up the absurdity quotient — in Hodgman’s almanac, charts of the moon’s phases cross-reference not only the tides but the stages of werewolfism, and a survey of beard styles sits side-by-side with exposé of America’s secret hobo empire — but the essence of it, the free-floating oddities, shorn of context, adding up to singular worldview, comes straight from the models.

The Ripley books, like their spiritual descendants (and icons of my childhood) the People’s Almanac and the Book of Lists, are of dubious value as references; they’re thinly-sourced, and serve to perpetuate apocrypha and give new life to discredited old stories. The world of these books is full of mystery and wonder — just like the real world, of course, but in the crush of the mundane it’s easy to forget that. Seeing Is Believing’s emphasis on the weird and sensational is, in a way, a comfort; the message is that there is more to life than your workaday existence, that there is beauty and surprise all around you, if you look.

There’s a great repeated line in Warren Ellis’s recently-completed comics series Planetary, a line spoken by a “mystery archeologist,” an old-school globe-trotting adventurer who publishes his discoveries in a set of esoteric guidebooks — a figure not unlike the talented Mr. Ripley himself, now I come to think of it. “It’s a strange world,” he says; “Let’s keep it that way.” Exactly.

Seeing Is Believing is a wonderful stimulant for the mind, a snack tray for the imagination, a perfect vehicle for spending an evening around the kitchen table with paper and crayons in hand. Bottom line: if you have, are, or ever have been a child, this book should be somewhere within easy reach of your toilet.

Many is the pop star who harbors a dark secret beneath his wholesome façade. Michael Bublé’s is that he is an evil death robot from the future, sent back in time to annihilate mankind.

I’ll admit that I lack ironclad proof of Bublé’s status as a remorseless genocidal automaton, but there is circumstantial evidence aplenty encoded into his — its — latest release, Crazy Love. Careful listening can leave no doubt: This so-called “Bublé” is in fact a B.U.B.L.É. — a Binary-logic Undercover Bio-Life Eliminator, With The Accent On “Eliminator,” an emissary from some dystopian robocratic hell, and if he is not stopped he will bring humanity to extinction by ensuring that no one ever gets laid again.

Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this is the sheer arrogance of the plan. The mechanical entity they’re passing off as a big-band singer isn’t even a particularly convincing AI; performance clips and interviews suggest that the Bublé-creature would not pass the Turing test, let alone the more rigorous Voight-Kampff inventory. And this weakness extends also to the musical component of Bublé’s cover story. Without reading the filenames, compare and contrast these two performances of well-known pop songs. Can you tell which one is being performed by a computer?

It’s a trick question; actually, they both are. Hard to believe, I know. You’d never mistake the Eagles tune for the work of a human being — but the Stone Roses cover, which sounds so natural and organic by comparison, is actually “sung” by a tricked-out Windows laptop. Now, if a part-time programmer and DJ can cobble together an approximation of emotional connectedness and allow for proper phrasing (giveaway: Bublé consistently lags behind the beat, not out of any approximation of “swing” but because the algorithm cannot mesh the demands of the rhythm with the telltale over-pronunciation), and do it using only consumer software, the failure of the B.U.B.L.É. to conform to basic standards of believability bespeaks the dreadful contempt of our would-be robot conquerors for gullible humanity. To call these machine overlords “brazen” would be an understatement (and also painfully literal).

But what is the threat, you may ask? How is this extinction-level cockblock to be perpetrated? As is often the case, the mythic past predicts our sci-fi nightmare future. Consider: this Bublé entity — let’s face it, the ladies love him. And why shouldn’t they? (Aside from the whole destroy-the-human-race thing, I mean.) He has been designed and packaged specifically to win their affections. His essential ratio of swagger to vulnerability has been precisely calculated, and his raffishness quotient calibrated to tolerances of less than one-tenth of one picoRaff. In short, he’s as cute as a fucking button, all perfectly-engineered teeth and stubble, and he looks better in a suit than anyone this side of the Mad Men wrap party. He looks so good, in fact, that he makes it gaddam impossible for any flesh and blood bio-boy to measure up. As the legendary sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with the lifeless statue Galatea, as the youth Narcissus was transfixed by his own beauty, women invest the B.U.B.L.É. with an amorous importance, forsaking all others — an attraction that has no outlet.

Straight males, by contrast, hate the guy — perhaps sensing, even unconsciously, his inhuman origins and exterminationatist goals. Some few may misguidedly feign an interest in the Bublé-droid and its music, with the aim of getting into a girl’s pants — but such efforts are doomed to fail. The “romance” in which Bublé trafficks is puppy-dog stuff; it resists any attempt to advance beyond kissing and holding hands. It requires inhuman skill to take a swooner like “All Of Me” (download) and denude it of any hint of sex — but such is the Bublébot’s malign genius. Nobody’s getting’ lucky after an evening of this stuff; this is a prelude to an evening of cuddling. And cuddling’s all well and good, friends, but it doesn’t keep the population numbers up.

Of course, no sort of pop success is possible without the help of many collaborators — and in this case, the word has never been so apt. Chief among these musical Quislings is none other than David Foster; not content with merely badgering poor Terje into a nervous breakdown, the “Hit Man” has the entire human race in his assassinatory sights now, abetting Bublé’s musical mass-gelding by buffing the album’s sound to an appropriate gloss. How much did you get for your soul, Foster? What they offer you, to sell out your own species? Did they promise you a seat at the cold, steely right hand of power? (That would explain a lot, actually.)

Thanks in no small part to the assistance of Foster, Crazy Love — not unlike the B.U.B.L.É. itself — is a thing of seductive surfaces. But the truth will out; in navigating the human institution of the music industry, the AI betrays itself in small and telling ways. The marketplace demands that the artist take a hand in writing the songs, and so the machine intelligence does as machines do — hewing to a successful template. There’s probably no grounds for a plagiarism suit — you can’t copyright a rhythm, after all (if you could, the estate of Bo Diddley would be worth more than George Soros) — but the blatancy of the cop, the laziness and completeness of it, again indicates the Bublé-construct’s absolute disregard for human niceties.

In the end, paradoxically, that very contempt provides a glimmer of hope. Our future doom is not inevitable; the machines are overconfident, and their hubris has made them vulnerable. There is still a chance for humanity to beat back the B.U.B.L.É., but it will require a strong application of human-made music, music for and about sex and nothing but sex, music dedicated entirely to gettin’ it on. If anybody’s asking, I’ve got a suggestion to start with…

A Note on This Week’s Column: I’ve been sidelined by the Dreaded Deadline Doom this week, so there’s no new column, strictly speaking. But as a special treat — all right, to fill the gap in the schedule — I’m presenting here, for the first time, the very first How Bad Can It Be? ever written.

Jeff Giles first approached me about doing a column about a year ago — November 2008. We kicked around some concepts, knocking the premise into shape. To help me get a grip on it, I wrote a bunch of sample columns, including this one, about the then-current season of NBC’s The Biggest Loser. The start date for the column was eventually pushed back to January 2009, leaving this piece basically unpublishable — hopelessly past its sell-by date. And so it has sat on my hard drive until now. Hope you enjoy this peek behind the curtain — the Secret Origin of HBCIB?, if you will.

As this was to have been the inaugural column, it begins with a statement of purpose — one I find worth revisiting now and then…

I will not cop to charges of snobbery; I find my pop-culture thrills wherever I can. I freely admit, though, that I’m selective. Any consumer of media has to be, I think. There are only so many hours in a day, and so much to fill them with. It’s not so much that I’m actively avoiding anything; it’s just that there’s so much good stuff out there that I’ve not yet experienced — Infinite Jest, “Trout Mask Replica,” Kurosawa’s Rashomon — that I’ve got to be choosy with the little time I have above ground. And because I write about media from the perspective of an enthusiast, rather than a critic, I’m not obliged to watch or read and listen to anything in which I would otherwise have no interest.

In practice, that means gravitating towards a comfort zone. It’s a big zone, as these things go — I’m a pretty well-rounded guy — but in the great spectrum of mass media, it’s a relatively narrow bandwidth. Now, I can and do often enjoy myself when I venture out of that zone; but I always do so with mingled feelings of hope and dread. Part of me wonders, “Am I going to hate myself for watching this? Will I wish I could have this hour back?” And another part of me thinks, “Hey, you never know. This could be a keeper. And really, after all — how bad can it be?”

This column aims to answer that question.

So you can see why it was with some fear and trembling that I tuned in the new season of The Biggest Loser (Tuesdays, NBC). The show is basically a Survivor-style competition; each season, a group of morbidly obese contestants is whisked off to a ludicrously lavish “ranch,” where they are divided into two teams. Each team is assigned a personal trainer, and through a regime of diet and exercise they work to trim down. Each week, there’s a weigh-in, and one contestant is eliminated. The eventual winner — the “biggest loser” — is the contestant who loses the highest percentage of body weight over the course of the program, and he or she is rewarded, as is usual, with a cash prize and an assortment of consumer goods. So far, so Mark Burnett.

What makes The Biggest Loser so car-crash fascinating is the simmering brew of emotional issues and class politics bubbling under the surface. These people aren’t just fame-whores, or even contestants playing a game — they are sick people who are clutching for a chance to get well. Received wisdom holds that you can never be too rich or too thin, and The Biggest Loser promises to deliver on both aspirations — but thinness itself is rapidly becoming a class aspiration. As Greg Critser points out in his book Fat Land (a critical text for understanding the obesity crisis), government subsidies and agribusiness consolidations have overturned historical precedent; in 21st Century America, a diet of pre-prepared, calorie-dense foods is actually cheaper and more readily-available than one of traditional staples. And so obesity becomes a socio-economic issue, with the poor gorging on sweetmeats that would astonish Henry VIII, while the rich pay big money to eat like peasants.

The emotional aspects are even gnarlier. This season, The Biggest Loser has rejiggered its formula; instead of individual contestants, we get overweight family units. The two starting teams consist of four husband-wife couples versus four parent-child pairs. I’m having a hard time imagining this is going to end well for any of them. One fat person on his own is a medical issue; two fat people in a family relationship are a stew of guilt, recrimination, and enablement. Put ‘em in a high-pressure environment, under the ever-watchful eye of the camera — that’s a recipe for entertaining television! (Or possibly manslaughter.)

Struggling with all this, I sit down to watch, and we meet the trainers and the families, most of whom have been supplied, through the magic of editing, with some sort of relatable backstory. Trainer Bob is working with the couples; he looks a little like the guy from The Soup, but with a three-day beard. Of the two younger couples, the Orange team are relative newlyweds who want to get their weight under control before they start having kids, while the Brown team seem mostly just to want to win the game; they’re clearly being set up as the villains. The Red team is a middle-aged couple who’ve left their three kids — including an autistic eight-year old — in the care of relatives, while they ship off to the fat farm. Somehow, I’m not as sympathetic towards them as I think I’m supposed to be. Trainer Bob seems an amiable doofus, like Brad Pitt in Burn After Reading, until he starts snarling at his charges and calling them “bitch” while demanding push-ups in psychotic-gym-teacher fashion.

The parent-child teams are in the care of trainer Jillian. She’s got father-son cab drivers who come on like bit players from Gone Baby Gone; two sets of miserable twentysomething doormat daughters stuck living with their miserable overbearing moms; and a weepy girl who idolizes her father, a cop, who is so debilitatingly huge that he requires an oxygen tank about five minutes into the episode. Jillian is sexy ugly in a way vaguely reminiscent of Sandra Bernhard, and shows her deep emotional attachment to her team by screaming insults at them and smacking them upside the head.

The workout segments are the cheap thrill of the show; we get the sadistic spectacle of a toned, sharp-tongued quasi-dominatrix tormenting a pack of fatsos — for their own good! The rest of it, though, seems constructed primarily as a cross-marketing platform. We get a few perfunctory cooking tips, this week featuring chef Rocco DiSpirito, who of course has a TV show of his own; he briefly addresses the idea that healthy food must perforce be expensive, a throwaway moment that is as close as the show ever comes to addressing the class issues of obesity. And there’s relentless shilling for sponsor products, done with a blatancy not seen since the early days of TV, when Jack Benny would interrupt his own show to light up a Lucky.

The thing is, the damn show is two hours long, and even with the slack pacing, there’s a lot of time to fill and a lot of fake tension to build. And so the contestants are roped into idiotically contrived side bets and games. These segments are hosted by soap opera actress Alison Sweeney, smirking as she puts the teams through activities of dubious therapeutic value and questionable reward.

This week there’s a degrading debacle involving huge, color-coded Slip ‘n’ Slides, with the prize being a phone call home; for people struggling with a health issue related to their family dynamics, you can see where that may be counterproductive. The winner is the wife on the Orange team — that’s the couple getting ready to start a family, remember — and when she breaks down in tears while talking to her father, it’s hard not to imagine an unwholesome backstory. (But then, I have a vivid imagination.)

Then it’s back to more workouts, more yelling, more close-ups of sweaty fat people. My queasiness about The Biggest Loser, I think, reflects my ambivalence about the morbidly obese in general — an ambivalence heightened by the fact that I’m a big fat slob myself. But while I could surely stand to drop fifty pounds or so, I can still manage a five-mile hike without breathing hard, to say nothing of getting around the grocery store unaided. When I see folks at the market, too fat for the basic function of walking, tooling around in their electric carts, the thought occurs unbidden: You’ve crippled yourself, and it didn’t have to be like this. No one did this to you — you did it to yourself. In much the same way, you’re rooting for the contestants on The Biggest Loser, but watching them moan and perspire and weep, you can’t help thinking that, y’know, they brought this all on themselves.

But enough uncomfortable reflection: It’s off to the weigh-in, padded out over three (!) commercial breaks with fish-faced reaction shots and booming tympani. I’m unprepared for how much math is involved in this show. Immunity and the possibility of elimination are calculated on the total weight lost per team versus total starting weight; there’s also an over-under on the side wager, which automatically puts that team up for elimination. I wish I had a slide rule at this point. In the end, a bunch of people don’t do so good. Weepy Girl and Officer Porky have made a foolish wager early on, and lose badly; when all is said and done, though, the survivors vote to send the Car Talk guys home. Their reaction (paraphrased): “Meh, fuckit.” My reaction: roughly the same.

So how bad is it? Pretty bad. The ugly emotional explosions never arrive, which is a pity; they would have been a distraction from the deep and uncomfortable contradictions at the heart of the show. On the one hand, it The Biggest Loser Families wants to be empowering and heartwarming; on the other, it wants to serve up the red meat of entertainment — a suspenseful game, colorful challenges, and an endlessly-replayed clip of an old fat man falling off a treadmill.

And so the show constantly undercuts itself. Moments of naked calculation and strategizing — like the Brown team throwing a game on purpose because they “don’t want to be seen as a threat” — bounce up against tears and hugs played out against soaring strings; but the pathos ultimately feels unearned. When the Red team calls home and their autistic son — who seldom expresses emotion — tells them he loves and misses them, it actually makes them seem less sympathetic; after all, the reason they’re separated from him in the first place is because they’re off chasing cash prizes and a new RV.

Again and again, the games aspect is at odds with the goal of actually getting well — beginning with the fact that the players who are losing weight most slowly, who obviously would benefit most from staying in the program, are the very ones who get booted out. Jillian gets a lot of great reaction shots, looking convincingly disgusted at the way the producers contrive to set the contestants at each other’s throats; I think I know how she feels. There’s an ugly cynicism at the heart of The Biggest Loser franchise, in how it tries to have it both ways — purporting to help its contestants while simultaneously inviting the viewers at home to laugh at the fatties.

Bottom line: Watch at your own risk. It’s enjoyable enough, in a train-wreck kind of way, but if you’ve got a single spark of decency in your soul, you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

If you haven’t got a single spark of decency in your soul, of course, you can probably get your own development deal with NBC, if you hurry.

As I write this, the Dow-Jones is breaking 10,000, and the economy looks to be coming out of a slump — even though nobody’s hiring just yet. Most folks who still have jobs are hanging on by their fingernails, but the privileged classes are already talking about bonuses. A popular Democratic president is trying to pass meaningful health-care reform, and the postideological spoilsports of the Right are pitching a hissy fit. Holy crap, it’s 1993 again! And right on cue, the Squirrel Nut Zippers are back together!

To ease into this reunion thing — and to whet your appetite for new material — they’ve released a live album this week, culled from one hot night in Brooklyn late last year. It’s called Lost At Sea, but a better title might be Testing the Waters. Because, really, of all the 1990s bands that might make a go of it in this transformed pop landscape, I’ve gotta ask: the Squirrel Nut Zippers? C’mon.

All right, that’s not exactly a question. But still; it’s a mystery how these guys got big in the first place, let alone how they might have a comeback. The Great Swing Scare of the 90s remains one of those vaguely mystifying moments in the popular culture. Sure, yuppie scum have never lacked for any number of idiotic pastimes to separate them from their money — but really: A-line skirts? Lindy Hop lessons? What possessed us?

It’s been suggested that the irrational exuberance of the market engendered a cultural echo of the Roaring Twenties. Maybe. Or maybe it was yet another strategy for Generation X to defer adulthood. The fashions, the cocktails, the foxtrots and the Charleston — all comprised a reach toward the trappings of sophistication, without a full commitment to constructing a grown-up identity, responding to the dilemma How do I avoid turning into my parents? by embracing an idealized version of their grandparents; it was suddenly okay to wear a suit, as long as you did it ironically.

(Not coincidentally, the Swing Revival ended at about the moment that Gen Xers started having kids of their own; and so they transitioned to new ways of staving off adulthood, mostly by vicariously sharing in the childhoods of their offspring — signing up for Mommy and Me classes, watching Yo Gabba Gabba!, writing trend pieces about “kidults“ and “alternadads,” and coming no closer to swing music than their regular Saturday-night date with A Prairie Home Companion.)

Regardless of the sociological implications, the Swing Revival hinged on the music, and here — as with any such cultural moment — the quality was variable. You had some genuine, huge talents revealing an unexpected affinity for jump and jive (e.g., Brian Setzer), a whole lot of trend-hoppers (Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, I’m lookin’ at you), and the usual assortment of marching-band refugees looking for some way to put their horns to good use once the latest wave of ska fizzed out. The Squirrel Nut Zippers were probably the best of the bunch, and certainly seemed the most authentic.

It probably helped that they were from North Carolina. Pop fans have been conditioned by long experience to accept, and even expect, a certain level of eccentricity from Southern bands, and that’s generally worked to their advantage; let’s face it, the B-52s probably never would have made it as a going concern if they’d come out of, say, Detroit.

In the case of the Zippers, the mythic images of the South played into their particular gimmick. You could almost imagine them as a cotillion band gone horribly wrong, leaving bevies of traumatized debutantes in their wake as they rampaged from gig to gig. The sound was raucous and expansive; the manner was genteel charm ramped up to cartoon proportions. Frontman Jimbo Mathus came on like Foghorn Leghorn with a special emphasis on the “foghorn,” while man-faced ukulelist Katharine Whalen triangulated a performance style somewhere between Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, and Jessica Rabbit.

On record it sometimes came off as affected and shticky — how could it not? — but the band had a fierce live reputation. Lost At Sea shows that their powers are undimmed. The Zippers — in this incarnation, at least — emerge more as a rock band with horns than the Dixieland pranksters of the studio, with electric bass and nasty guitars to the fore.

The prominence of the electric guitar is the biggest revelation here, in fact. On “Good Enough For Grandad” (download) — a title that functions almost as a manifesto — big-toned, semi-distorted hollowbodies hold down the changes in the absence of a piano, and take swooping, stinging runs amid the blat of the horns. Dude’s no Brian Setzer, but it’s pretty smokin’ stuff.

The pace lags a bit at times — and frankly, a little of Whalen’s pitchy kootchie-koo act goes a lo-o-ong way with me — but when the SNZs are hitting on all cylinders (as on “Suits Are Picking Up The Bill” [download]), it’s downright compulsive; the high-energy drumming, the tag-team instrumental breaks, that manic good cheer of it all.

For many young professionals, the boom days of the 1990s ended too soon. Lost At Sea doesn’t, but unlike the dreary decade just past, it doesn’t outstay its welcome, either. It remains to be seen, though, whether there’s a place for the Squirrel Nut Zippers in this brave new post-millennial economy. For a band so determinedly backward-looking, it would be an irony both cruel and poetic if they should end up on the nostalgia circuit.