Something that you might not guess about me (or maybe you would; you ‘re an exceptionally clever bunch) is that I loves me some Jesus. I try not to be an asshole about it — I’ve got no use for WWJD wristbands or cruciform bling or “John 3:16” bumper stickers, and I regard faith and science as, in Stephen Jay Gould’s lovely phrase, “non-overlapping magisteria.” But I do spend time thinking about virtue, and about living with kindness and humility, and I find my Christian practice to be a useful roadmap in that regard. No big deal.
Obviously, I’m not one of that stripe who shun “secular media” out of some need or desire to exist within a bubble of cultural product that only confirms my religious beliefs. It’s fair to say, though, that I have a pretty high tolerance for overtly Christian content in pop culture, and that a lot of my favorite movies and much of my favorite music tend toward the overtly spiritual. The Mission, for instance, still moves me to tears after 23 years and countless viewings. (more…)
In a way, this was meant to be the missing half of my Hannah Montana piece from some months back. Astute readers pointed out that my take on the multi-hyphenate one-woman omnimedia engine phenomenon was incomplete, because it skipped any analysis of the teenpop music that ostensibly drives that engine. Now, obviously, Ashley Tisdale is Ashley Tisdale and Hannah Montana is, well, Miley Cyrus — but it’s Ashley Tisdale who recently dropped a new and much-hyped album, Guilty Pleasure, so it is she who goes under the lens today.
A late-inning defensive substitution? Sure. But Tisdale is something of a professional second-stringer anyway. Before her star turn in the straight-to-the-B-list Aliens in the Attic, she specialized in wacky sidekick roles, most notably on Disney Channel’s Suite Life [sic] of Zack & Cody, where she was billed below the Sprouse twins, talent-free muppets whose adorability quotient — never particularly high — has plummeted with encroaching adolescence. She’s best known as the would-be diva Sharpay Evans in the High School Musical series, playing comic foil to the earnest, dull lovebirds Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. Notionally, she’s the Rose Marie of Disney Channel (which would make Corbin Bleu its Morey Amsterdam, I suppose).
I’ll be honest with you — the High School Musical movies are a hell of a lot more fun than they have any business being (thanks, in part, to Robbie Nevil’s songs), and Tisdale is pretty terrific in them. She’s an able comedic actress, nailing Sharpay’s essential comic paradox — she’s both vapid and scheming — with nimble timing. To the standard of The New California Beauty as laid down by the likes of Paris Hilton and Hayden Panettiere (i.e., salon blonde, orange tan, squishy nose and a general softness that renders her cute rather than actually pretty), the Tiz adds a pleasing mobility and expressiveness, along with a willingness to pull goofy faces. (more…)
My usual modus operandi with this column — and the reason why its title is phrased as a question — is to look for signs of quality in cultural products for which I have no reasonable expectation of finding it. I’m not even necessarily expecting that Hannah Montana DVD to be bad — I’m just not expecting it to be very good. My hope is always to be pleasantly surprised. Oh, I hear the same word-of-mouth that you all do, and I know the received wisdom as well as anyone else; but usually I can shrug them off and try to approach the work with an open mind, hoping against hope for something good.
There are times, though, when my own prior experiences lead me to approach my subject with a pre-existing anticipation of its crapulence, and that shit is hard to shake. Such is the case with Star Trek: The Animated Series, released in 2006 in a handsome boxed edition, which I have just re-encountered for the first time since seeing it in its original run. (more…)
If we have learned one thing from the Senate hearings surrounding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, it is that years of pandering to the worst instincts of its base have left the Republican congressional delegation with no guiding principles save for free-floating xenophobia and an aggrieved sense of entitlement. If we have learned two things from the Senate hearings surrounding the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, the other one is that a compelling biography in itself is no substitute for excellence in one’s chosen field. It’s the latter point that I want to look at this week, particularly as it relates to Happy Returns, the upcoming album by London-based punk-popper Livan, which is — let’s get this out of the way right now — currently rockin’ my world down to a nub. (more…)
There’s a tradition in sports of retiring jersey numbers. It’s a way of proclaiming that a player’s achievements are unmatchable. No member of the Boston Red Sox, for instance, will ever again wear the number 9, because that was Ted’s number, and we shall never see his like again; to invite comparison is to invite embarrassment.
I sometimes think it would be a good idea if pop music did something like that. One often hears the argument that certain songs should be retired — even Leonard Cohen thinks the world doesn’t need another cover of “Hallelujah,” and he gets a paycheck every time someone records it — but right now I’m thinking about venues. Maybe not close down the actual site — although the Apollo Theater could have shut its doors after James Brown’s historic 1962 gigs there, secure in the knowledge that no one would ever top those shows, not even James Brown himself — but surely, after Cheap Trick, there’s no further need for anyone to make another live album at Budokan. It’s been done, and definitively.
And as surely as James Brown’s shadow hangs over every subsequent performer to hit the stage at the Apollo, so there is a shade across Rob Thomas’s Live at Red Rocks DVD — or, to give it its full name, Rob Thomas: Something To Be Tour — Live at Red Rocks. The jersey that Rob Thomas has donned bears across its back not a single digit, but a letter and a number; the letter U, and the numeral 2. (more…)
Rock ‘n’ roll, of course, is all about The Kids. No matter what the makeup of its actual audience — and evidence suggests that it varies widely — there’s an assumption that pop music fans skew overwhelmingly young, and the more commercial the act the younger the presumptive audience. That assumption is sometimes trotted out as a preemptive defense against criticism: This music isn’t made for you, Mr. Critic Man — we’re doin’ it for The Kids!
Now, some of that is just bullshit face-saving — a cynical conflation of the ideas of “broad appeal” and “lowest common denominator” that’s frankly insulting to any audience, no matter how young — but there’s a kernel of truth in it. Youth is a time when, perhaps because our own lives are so small and proscribed, pop culture seems so terribly huge and important; it is life on an epic scale, in which we participate by proxy. In adolescence, especially, our skins are at their thinnest, our nerve endings so close to the surface that the joys and pains of art, of music, can touch us in a way that they never really will again.
And so it’s a good thing, I think, to spend time around young people, to revisit that perspective. The kids at The Rock Star Stories have been disseminating that view since 2001, when the Rich siblings — a quartet of showbiz kids from South Florida — started producing their cheapjack cable access-style weekly half-hour. The production values were strictly Wayne’s World level, but the Riches and their scrappy cohort of Boca Raton high-schoolers were soon landing interviews with national acts. From that grew a nonprofit youth media training organization, a show that airs in nearly 70 national markets, and now a new book. Off the Bus and On the Record transcribes 22 interviews from The Rock Star Stories, along with behind-the-scenes tidbits from the show’s on-air talent and production staff. (more…)
When you think about it, there’s no earthly reason why movies based on video games should, as a class, be so atrocious. For one thing, the games themselves are largely cinematic in conception and style; the biggest problem of most adaptations from other media — of imposing a three-act framework on material that lacks structure — is largely absent, since the source game is most often already organized as a series of escalating encounters. Backstory and characterization, however rudimentary, are already in place. And coming from such a design-intensive medium, game-based movies arrive pre-packaged with a deep sense of environment, of atmosphere. The ingredients for success are in place.
And yet, the record speaks for itself. The history of the genre is a grim slog of tax-shelter flops, assembled by Eurohacks for a one-weekend audience of insomniacs, craphounds, and ever-hopeful fanboys. Into this parade o’ crap now steps Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, dropping straight to DVD this week. A spin-off from the Capcom game (and a sequel or prequel or perhaps paraquel to 1994’s Street Fighter, featuring the once-in-a-lifetime pairing of Van Damme and Raul Julia), Legend has already — though the year is scarce half-over — been branded by several critics as the worst film of 2009.
The point of a column like this is not to be a consumer guide, or to give “thumbs up”/”thumbs down” to the latest media product (which is just as well since Ebert owns the whole thumbs-up thing and could sue the pants off me for copping his gimmick). I’m trying to engage some of the ideas underpinning popular culture — notions of authenticity, influence, presentation, expectation — and kick them around to see how they fall. I’m trying, in short, to start a conversation.
And sometimes I’m trying to start an argument. It falls to the critic sometimes to assume a contrarian stance, either by default or by design. The aim is not simply to be disagreeable, not to reflexively oppose received wisdom, but to take nothing for granted. By taking an opinion that “everybody knows” is wrong, you put your interlocutor in the position of defending the view that “everybody knows” is right, and examining why it’s right. And that’s how you get at deeper truths.
And so, in the spirit of the pursuit of knowledge (and also in the pursuit of pissing people off, why isn’t particularly helpful but which can be a whole lotta fun), here are my fightstarters — a selection of my contrarian, heretical, or just plan Wrong ideas about pop culture. You may disagree: in fact, that’s kind of the point.
I think I mentioned last week some of the interesting messages I get via the Popdose mailing list. A lot of what comes through is from public relations flacks; artist reps and label folks get in touch with Popdose EiC Jeff Giles, and Jeff sends the best of ‘em along to the rest of us on the staff. Here’s one that came through a few weeks ago
From: [name withheld] Date: Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:09 PM Subject: Please, please, please listen to this singer! It’s good Karma!
To: jefito@ popdose.com
Hey Jeff,
I have a favor to ask you. Please, please, please give [redacted]’s music a listen. I am begging you. Yes, that’s right… I am begging you.
She is really an amazing and unique singer/songwriter and we need to get her some press. I am hoping you can just take a few minutes and listen to some songs off her new CD “[title redacted]”. It’s good karma and I know you’ll love her as much as we do!!
Now, at first blush that’s kind of cute—a whimsical, unconventional way to promote an artist-client. But you know what else is cute? Monkeys, especially when they think they’re people. You know what, though? Monkeys are kind of whiffy. You don’t notice the smell at first, because they’re so gosh-darn charming, but then it starts to creep into your consciousness, your olfactory landscape and it just won’t quit, and eventually it blots everything else out of your awareness, and you can’t even laugh at the animal’s antics anymore because all you can think is how now amount of dry-cleaning is going to get that ripe ape-scent out of Mr. Jocko’s little vest and cap, and the only thing for those clothes will be to burn them.
The e-mail above has a slight odor to it, too—the mingled smell of condescension and desperation. The moral bullying is bad enough (listening to Artist A will make you a better person! Don’t you want to be a better person?), but there’s a passive-aggressive undertone that quickly becomes off-putting.
Since I’ve joined the staff for this site, I’ve learned so many things just by virtue of being on the official Popdose e-mail list. For instance, d’you remember that high-larious “Shoes” video from a couple of years ago? You know: You have too many shoes. SHUT UP!! Man, good times. Dig this, though — the drag-queen dude from that video is back with a new clip, for another grassroots viral sensation! And I never would’ve known ‘til I got the nice e-mail from his publicist. And without the Popdose e-mail list, I never would have heard about Jason, and the terrible thing he did with the goats — although, to be fair, I only heard that from Jeff, and I’m not entirely sure I can trust him anymore since he told me that Mishka was big in Japan, which doesn’t even make sense; I mean, yes, obviously your European of typical height is going to be comparatively bigger when surrounded by Japanese, who tend statistically to be shorter, but still, that doesn’t actually make him “big in Japan.” Anyway.
The Popdose mailing list also clued me in that Brian Warner and his popular beat combo the Marilyn Mansons have a new record coming out. Now, I admire young Brian. I’m not a superfan or anything, but you’ve got to be impressed with the way he’s overcome a host of disabilities — albinism, lazy eye, and (judging from this photograph) gynecomastia, among them — to become a big wheel in the music business. Some of the tunes are pretty catchy; I’ve always liked “The Dope Show,” especially since the kids explained to me the whole bad-means-good hip-hop slang thing; and while I’ve never seen Marilyn and the Mansons live, I’m sure they put on a show that is, indeed, “dope.” (more…)
