80’s Conformity

For anyone who suspected the 80’s a particularly dire time to have been babysat by the box, here’s Phil Mendez, one of the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon:

Dungeons & Dragons was a series about six kids who were transported to a dimension filled with wizards and fire-snorting reptiles and cryptic clues and an extremely-evil despot named Venger.  The youngsters were trapped in this game-like environment but, fortunately, they were armed with magical skills and weaponry, the better to foil Venger’s insidious plans each week.

The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric.  Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn’t like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do.  Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in.  He was the one thing I really didn’t like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there?  Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens’ television.  We call them “parents groups,” although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents.  Study them and you’ll find a wide array of agendum at work…and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield.  Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain “pro-social” morals in our shows.  At the time, the dominant “pro-social” moral was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties’ cartoon shows.  If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them.  There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle.  Each week, whichever member of the gang didn’t get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this “lesson” in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, “I don’t want to do that” and paying for his social recalcitrance.  I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson.  I don’t believe you should always go along with the group.  What about thinking for yourself?  What about developing your own personality and viewpoint?  What about doing things because you decide they’re the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?

We weren’t allowed to teach any of that.  We had to teach kids to join gangs.  And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.

What a stupid thing to teach children.

Contemporary TV Modes

Asshole Drama

House, M.D. appeals to people who admire the attitudes of patriarchal authority; House is imperious, dictatorial, possessing an implicit conservatism effaced only by his distaste for organized belief. Temperance Brennan, protagonist of the knock-off drama Bones, is identical but female; Emily Deschanel’s performances bring less archness, swap instead for naive shock at the inadequacy of others’ logic. Tim Roth in Lie To Me plays a smug deception expert who makes unilateral decisions based on his superior knowledge of human nature (hence FOX’s decision to schedule him next to Hugh Laurie). Glee, too, features a hard-ass front and center; the idea is that even sincere, spirited “good kids,” like the kind mythologized in the “high school musical” genre, could use the teachings of a know-it-all jerk. On the further end of the spectrum, these are joined by Dexter, about a know-it-all serial killer cop, and 24, about a know-it-all serial killer cop. The M.O. of the “asshole drama” is that people are inadequate, and the reason assholes exist is to teach us to be better. It’s a low-key kind of emotional fascism, which borrows the attitudes of the nihilistic comedy but dispenses with nihilism; its covert message is the promotion of various forms of authority.

New Sincerity

Doctrine has it that postmodern excesses leave Millennials with a new mandate for sincerity in the arts (where that tends to mean optimism) and a new license to be grandiose. The West Wing, arguably the first TV show in this mould, turned the political genre on its head by presenting politics as a lot of basically decent people (!) doing the best they can. Since then, the same logic gave us everything from the frankly spiritual Lost to the frankly dispiriting Cold Case, whose producers signal their hope for the inner city by playing U2 all over it. The danger for this genre is that with hamfists like the authors of Cold Case making grandiose gestures everywhere, sincerity (and optimism) could acquire the stink of chauvinist, majority naiveté.

Neoclassicism

In my mind, this is the bellwether for the era’s defining Boomer conservatism. Neoclassicism is a movement currently gaining momentum in the pop arts that prioritizes such qualities as traditional content, formal elegance, restraint and “class.” This is the secret to the The Sopranos’ critical success. More than its story, its formal qualities appealed to critics’ inarticulate sense for canonicity; naturally, it was quick to canonize. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing neoclassicist show is AMC’s Mad Men, which extends the mandate for tradition to actual nostalgia, and makes formal elegance such a byword that its setpieces often resemble living paintings. The trouble, I suppose, is that formal elegance is intoxicating when it frames a story like The Sopranos, which is compelling and well-told, but is easily imitable and dulls in application to the half-assed and the ill-conceived.

Hyperrealism

Hyperreal shows blur the boundary between fiction and reality, generally by fitting wholly fictional elements into a milieu that’s deliberately as realistic as possible. The realism is achieved either by meticulously low-key storytelling, or (more commonly) by the insertion of recognizably real elements (like real landmarks or celebrities) into a more fictionalized narrative. Hyperrealism has a long working history with nihilistic comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Head Case, etc.) but is now being appropriated by dramedy too (Entourage), to occasionally striking effect. Baudrilliard would argue that the hyperreal is aimed at supplanting reality, but to my feeling, the true silliness of this genre is in the way it makes reality a mere product placement; the fiction is often no more believable for the inclusion of realities than it would be without them. In other words, the tools of postmodernism do wear out: the mind becomes habituated to these anomalies and it no longer seems disorienting. Then what? I’m guessing the cheeky celebrity guest spots start to look pretty stupid.

New Naturalism

Not to be confused with hyperrealism, this is a cousin of both neoclassicism and New Sincerity; like those, its rise is intimately connected with the decline of postmodern dogma. The degree of naturalism varies. The Wire and The Thick of It are as naturalistic as possible, going to elaborate lengths to “rough up” the speech with dialect and found idiom, and whenever possible depict stories taken from the news. Others shoot for impressionistic naturalism; Deadwood uses deliberately anachronistic profanity to convey the gritty, underclass feeling of the American frontier. Strict diegetic sound is popular in this genre. Naturalism is a strange thing on US television, which has tended to skew toward the imaginary; for an example of the weaknesses of this dogma, look toward British TV, where naturalism reigns and even so, actual insight can be elusive.

Irritating Ad Trends

1) Seemingly everyone, from Visa to Cricket, now has an ad full of gangly, tone-deaf people singing pop songs in public, with jump cuts to connect their snatches of awkward mewl together. Actually, this is probably meant to signify “togetherness” and “spontaneity” and other things GenY consumers supposedly shell out to feel associated with. Thing is, most of these “singers” are excruciatingly bad, the sort of people who’d cause actual pain if they sang in actual public. Cricket claims you’ll get respect online.

2) Next up: auto insurers and their mascots, whether they be Progressive’s simpering, uncanny Cusack byblow, Geico’s triptych of uninspired corporate symbols, or SafeAuto’s remarkably graceless references to The Office. The idea may be that auto insurance is a faceless industry that consumers need personified; true or not, these are living spambots.

3) “My life is unique.” Preferred pitch for free checking accounts and Axe products. Usually features a series of rapid-fire beats depicting quirky, unique activities like partying with teenagers, flirting with girls, riding a truck, eating a sandwich, dancing with a sweatband, having sex with people in rabbit suits, taking pictures with friends, taking pictures with eccentric strangers, playing on a giant metal dinosaur, climbing stairs, having sleepovers, high-fiving, and so forth, in order to establish that the protagonist needs special accommodation or products with unusual resilience just for being so goddamn on all the time.

Cold Case

Cold Case is The Wire with maudlin in place of brains.  In other words, it’s nothing like The Wire.

Roger Waters

Pink Floyd’s The Wall was an attempted dissection of the incipient fascism of arena-rock, a topic of frequent discussion in the rockcrit of the late 1970’s. If it comes across as an indulgent letter of complaint by lyricist Waters, it’s only because he didn’t spare himself or his own band from critique. That is admirable. Even when The Wall goes too far, is graceless or overwrought, the often discomfitting personalization in the lyrics is a mark of artistic commitment.

Because he’s associated with prog, a peculiarly unreflective “thinking person’s genre,” Roger Waters is often dismissed as an obscurantist. This seems unfair. Waters is an unusually frank and personal lyricist; he reveals uncomfortable feelings other artists might well avoid. His caricature as self-indulgence personified glosses over how rarely he fails to take responsibility for the crimes his lyrics confess.

The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking weathered a shitstorm when it came out, thanks to a cover feminists interpreted as degrading of women. Okay, so it’s a little tasteless, but it’s also an adequate summary of the concept: an examination of the adultery fantasy, its shallowness and its eventual consequences. The protagonist does demean and objectify women, but Waters identifies with this character only provisionally. In the end, his grandiose womanizing stands revealed as immaturity and fear – of loneliness, and mortality, and what happens when you let someone in. His cardinal sin is lack of empathy, a theme that returns again and again in Waters’s art.

Fiction writers often agree provisionally with someone they mean to expose later. Waters personalizes his subjects to understand them, and make us understand them. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking contains plenty of ugly thoughts, no doubt thoughts he’s had in real life. That the art treats them so darkly should be enough evidence, with or without the come-clean coda at the end, that the aim wasn’t to valorize them.

Now, don’t go taking the above as a full recommendation; I’m defending Waters against the charge of sexism. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is still a lousy rock album. It may be worthwhile if you’re in a downer mood and have the patience to lose yourself in a piece of audio theater; otherwise, the most charitable description of most of it is “nonmusical.” When Waters deigns to put song to his verse, it’s all obvious-unto-death. Blues cliché merges with blues cliché, aided by Eric Clapton, for whom cliché is a specialty, and who fails to bring any life to this stagnant opera.

Radio KAOS is the opposite. Songful, even catchy, it reduces the laborious conceptual staging down to its smallest possible footprint: segues, plus a Floyd-like audio collage at the emotional climax. The story is more populist and frankly, much stupider: a poor working stiff taking care of his catatonic son loses it one day, breaks into a hi-fi shop and accidentally kills a guy. The son is sent away with a stolen cordless phone, and uses his radio mind-powers to stage a fake nuclear war, to scare the powers that be and make the people reconsider ruthless capitalism.

The production is baroque 1980’s, complete with drum machines, slap bass, bell piano, saxophone, shakahachi – it’s not far from Dave Gilmour’s own Momentary Lapse of Reason. The key here is the songs, which are direct, emotive and singable, even coverable. I hate to admit it, but as stupid as the plot is, you really start to feel for these characters. That makes Radio KAOS a success in rock opera terms, where the telescoped stories fail without a compensating weight of emotional identification via the music.

Amused to Death is his final, most grandiose, most Floyd-like and in many ways, mushiest and least fulfilling album. Musically, it attempts to marry the chorus-oriented songwriting on Radio KAOS with Hitchhiking’s elaborate prose. Lyrically, it’s a trans-apocalyptic story about television, war and humanity’s demise, though the details are left unclear; Waters speaks in allegory whenever possible, as on the three-part “What God Wants” and “Too Much Rope,” apparently about the experience of being moved to tears by a TV movie. “Watching TV,” a song with Don Henley about a Tiannamen protester’s physical beauty, is too much to stomach.

Amused to Death is nearly saved in its dénouement, where at last the songs begin to connect. “Three Wishes” works a surprisingly touching point about the melancholy beneath material desire; “It’s a Miracle” is the kind of croaking dirge Waters used throughout Hitchhiking, but here, his rebuttal to Reaganomics is more focused and funnier; “Amused to Death” proceeds leisurely from morning TV to the extinction of civilization over a power ballad that works both as satire and song.

Neither these, nor the spottily brilliant “Perfect Sense,” are enough to redeem the album of its worst moments. Neither do they make a convincing case for Waters as more than a noteworthy lyricist. The whole project remains risibly middlebrow. They do, in my opinion, prove Waters as an artist who learned from his errors, enjoyed partial success with unreasonably ambitious goals, and possessed more than a modicum of empathy for his subjects.

Pink Floyd’s The Wall was an attempt to dissect latent fascist impulses in arena-rock, a topic of frequent discussion in the rockcrit of the late 1970’s. If it comes across as an indulgent letter of complaint by lyricist Waters, it’s only because he didn’t spare himself or his own band from critique. That is admirable. Even when The Wall goes too far, is graceless or overwrought, the often discomfitting personalization in the lyrics is a mark of artistic commitment.

Because he’s associated with prog, a peculiarly unreflective “thinking person’s genre,” Roger Waters is often dismissed as an obscurantist. This seems unfair. Waters is an unusually frank and personal lyricist; he reveals uncomfortable feelings other artists might well avoid. His caricature as self-indulgence personified glosses over how rarely he fails to take responsibility for the crimes his lyrics confess.

The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking weathered a shitstorm when it came out, thanks to a cover feminists interpreted as degrading of women. Okay, so it’s a little tasteless, but it’s also an adequate summary of the concept: an examination of the adultery fantasy, its shallowness and its eventual consequences. The protagonist does demean and objectify women, but Waters identifies with this character only provisionally; in the end, his grandiose womanizing is revealed as a banality, as the rationale for immature fears. Like Pink, his cardinal sin is lack of empathy, a theme that returns again and again in Waters’ art.

Fiction writers often agree provisionally with someone they mean to expose later. Waters personalizes his subjects to understand them, and make us understand them. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking contains plenty of ugly thoughts, no doubt thoughts he’s had in real life. That the art treats them so darkly should be enough evidence, with or without some come-clean coda at the end, that the aim wasn’t to valorize them.

Now, don’t go taking the above as a recommendation; I’m defending Waters against the charge of sexism. The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking is still a lousy album. It may be worthwhile if you’re in a downer mood and have the patience to lose yourself in a piece of audio theater; otherwise, the most charitable description of much of it would be “nonmusical.” When Waters deigns to put song to his verse, it’s all deathly obvious. Blues cliché merges with blues cliché, aided by Eric Clapton, for whom cliché is a specialty, and who fails to bring any life to this stagnant opera.

Radio KAOS is the opposite. Songful, even catchy, it reduces the laborious conceptual staging to its smallest possible size: segues, and a Floyd-like audio collage at the emotional climax. The story is more populist and frankly, much stupider: a poor working stiff taking care of his catatonic son loses it one day, breaks into a hi-fi shop and accidentally kills a guy. The son is sent away with a stolen cordless phone and uses his radio mind-powers to stage a fake nuclear war, to protest the barbarity of ruthless capitalism.

The production is baroque 1980’s, complete with drum machines, slap bass, bell piano, saxophone, shakahachi – it’s not far from Dave Gilmour’s own Momentary Lapse of Reason. The key here is the songs, which are direct, emotive and singable, even coverable. I hate to admit it, but as stupid as the plot is, you really start to feel for these characters. That makes Radio KAOS a success in rock opera terms, where the telescoped stories fail without a compensating weight of emotional identification via the music.

Amused to Death is his final, most grandiose, most Floyd-like and in many ways, mushiest and least fulfilling album. Musically, it attempts to marry the chorus-oriented songwriting on Radio KAOS with Hitchhiking’s extended prose. Lyrically, it’s a trans-apocalyptic story about television, war and humanity’s demise, though the details are left unclear; Waters speaks in allegory whenever possible, as on the three-part “What God Wants” and “Too Much Rope,” apparently about the experience of being moved to tears by a TV movie. “Watching TV,” a song with Don Henley about a Tiannamen protester’s physical beauty, is too much to stomach.

Amused to Death is nearly saved in its dénouement, where at last the songs begin to connect. “Three Wishes” works a surprisingly touching point about the melancholy beneath material desire; “It’s A Miracle” is the kind of croaking dirge Waters used throughout Hitchhiking, but here, his rebuttal to Reaganomics is more focused and funnier; “Amused to Death” proceeds leisurely from morning TV to the extinction of civilization over a power ballad that works both as satire and song.

Neither these, nor the spottily brilliant “Perfect Sense,” are enough to redeem the album of its worst moments. Neither do they make a convincing case for Waters as more than a noteworthy lyricist. The whole project remains risibly middlebrow. They do, in my opinion, prove Waters as an artist who learned from his errors, enjoyed partial success with unreasonably ambitious goals, and possessed more than a modicum of empathy for his subjects.

Amadou et Mariam, Welcome to Mali

They knew this record had legs, hence the title. Note the expansive syncretism that “world music” was supposed to embody in its era, but rarely did. Amadou and Mariam seem like prodigious music fans: at home with the elements of Euro dance, Carribean music and rock ‘n’ roll as well as their own Afro-pop territory, and confident enough to fuse them all in complex ways that go beyond referencing.

Okay, so their idea of rock is a little antique (signifiers: 4/4 beat, Hammond organ, pentatonic guitar solo) and to these ears, that adds a note of banality. But to these ears, the Malian song forms are exotic, and presumably the duo don’t find them so. Maybe predictably, I like the pastiche best when it slips — like the fiddle on “Bozos,” which starts out like a joke on country/western but does something entirely different with the melody instead. For reasons of rhythm, catchiness and mallets, “Ce N’est Pas Bon” and “Batoman” deserve special mention too.

El-P, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Okay, I’ll admit a bias here: I discovered this during a pretty angry episode in my life, and it was perfect timing. I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead is a furious record, with El-P directing bile and lightning bolts at a slew of targets (war, gentrification, cokeheads, suicide, etc.), but maybe more importantly, identifying feelings secondary to anger (projection, alienation, self-doubt, etc.) that are unavoidable when you’re a reflective adult in the throes of it. It’s sometimes uncomfortable, even self-indulgent — but I’ve never been into the idea that music needs to be comfortable, universal and morally correct.

Sonically, it’s a paradigm shift from Fantastic Damage. The sound is still oppressive and mechanistic, constructed from dissonance and Bomb Squad-esque samples, but where its predecessor was all punchy, mono soundbites stacked on one another, ideal for blasting in cars, this one is cavernous, hi-fidelity — an urban evocation that works best when you can stand inside it. It’s not a headphone album as such, but it’s loaded with nuances and benefits from clarity and surround sound.

Here, El-P’s obsession with dystopia seems more like an idiosyncratic personal language than a delimiting subject matter; the lyrics feel closer to reality. It’s a thematic record, one whose subjects (mostly) reinforce one another, and ought to be heard together, like an old rock record. That said, “Tasmanian Pain Coaster” is also his best rap to date.

Phony Populism

David Brooks is probably correct to argue that there’s more to Obama’s backlash than race. But his explanation is misleading and self-indulgent.

In his version of events, the assorted tea-partiers, birthers and townhall trolls aren’t just the Republican fringe, they’re the American populist movement, and what they’re protesting is:

a government of the highly educated … [which] includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals.

It’s the righteous anger of Jeffersonians against financial and political elites.

While that may describe supporters of, say, anti-Fed zealot Ron Paul, the 2008 Republican primary results show those are small minority.

David Brooks wants to cast the Obama backlash as a bipartisan phenomenon, ideally one going back to the dawn of America. Congressional voting patterns show differently. The much simpler explanation is that the G.O.P. hardcore are freaking out, just like progressive Democrats did when George W. Bush rolled out his post-9/11 agenda.

Brooks almost certainly remembers that Bush bailed out Wall Street before Obama did. I’m sure he’s aware that the A.M.A. and insurance industry are elite, with top-dollar lobbyists on payroll to prove it.

There are plenty of perfectly consistent, conservative reasons to freak out at the Obama agenda; that should be adequate without needing to claim, as well, that G.O.P. hardcore are today representing “the people against the elites” or some other grand dialectical conflict that only exists on op-ed pages.

Pearl Jam, Vitalogy

As grunge heroes, Pearl Jam suffered from crossed purposes — stodgy classicists sometimes, half-assed formalists others, often the product of too many compromises to escape middle-of-the-road. On Ten and Vs., Ed Vedder’s lyrics were surprisingly impersonal, dwelling on the homeless, the insane and children of dysfunction. The sense of burden he injected into his performances seemed vicarious — well felt, to be sure, but not felt first-hand.

Vitalogy is a mess in classical terms. It never nails a style, departing in a half-dozen directions without capitalizing on any or, failing that, flowing elegantly from one to the next. It’s littered with incomplete experiments and outtakes. But where this approach would damage a less self-conscious band, it frees Pearl Jam from their usual surplus of study. Vedder’s immature scrawls (“Better Man” and, one assumes, “Whipping”) counterpoint Ament-Gossard’s trad-rock input (“Satan’s Bed”) nicely. Plus, the formalism here is sincerely odd (“Bugs”) and occasionally good as well (the faux-Miles intro to “Last Exit”). Pearl Jam would never achieve this balance of intentions again; probably it was an unrepeatable accident.

Sympathy

In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card’s how-to for fiction, he writes extensively about the subjective dimension of characterization, what he calls “sympathy.” Writers use tools to make characters more or less likable to the reader, and these don’t necessarily have a lot to do with what makes a person good. For example, we tend to sympathise more with a character who suffers, even an evil jerk — which is why in fiction, evil jerks we’re supposed to tolerate are generally put through a lot of suffering. Pain and fear are hooks for empathy.

Does it make good moral sense? Not really. That Rudolf Hess suffered in Spandau prison doesn’t make him any more likable as a Nazi fuckhead. Nor does it make sense to assume an intellectual is a bad guy, though as Card points out, that’s the rule as often as not. The crux of sympathy is perceived likeness. People being people, they generally like a character if the character is like them. But where do we get our ideas about what we’re like?

I remember, when I was a child, watching cheesy box-office adventure movies and feeling desperately alienated from the heroes. By convention, these were mostly square-jawed football types whose distinguishing feature was a sort of moral “clarity” (i.e. simplicity). My sort of people – science-freaks, skeptics, liberals – were invariably sidekicks and jokes, misguided fools or finks for evil. I often suspect that this kind of cognitive dissonance, with its origin in normatizing fictions, is as much responsible for the appeal of the “gothic” subculture (and other deliberate affronts to popular morality) as anything else.

One of the purposes of The Sender, when I began writing, was to study television’s sympathy ploys and infer something of America’s emotional landscape. So what, then? Well, if we momentarily accept Card’s hypothesis about sympathy, we can guess that Americans still feel stupid; broad popular support for Homer Simpson attests to that. Moral simplicity also remains much-prized; cf. Marge Simpson, sure, but also Michael Bluth, Jack Bauer, John Locke, Buffy Summers, etc., all protagonists who face moral challenges by being conscientious and inflexible.

Card didn’t write about nihilistic irony; perhaps he never recognized it. I’d argue that comedies making heavy use of it tend to employ an inverted value structure. Curb Your Enthusiasm consists almost entirely of unsympathetic, unlikable people — we follow Larry David not because he’s particularly likable (though who can’t relate to faux pas?) but because his flaws are so much more spectacular than the others’.

The Office makes such an explicit hierarchy out of its sympathy claims that it’s often embarrasing. Young, white and clever are the top of the heap, privileged not only to viewers’ presumed sympathy but also their interest (we follow their personal lives without any humorous hook). Black and gay follow, privileged to viewers’ respect and called upon to add moral weight, but from a distance. Viewers are not asked to respect the elderly, the misfit or unattractive women — they’re mostly used for one-note jokes. For the boss and his sycophants, the show asks our occasional pity. Toward the conservative Christian, we are invited to feel mostly contempt.

Card makes a few questionable posits — for one, the tenor of his writing suggests that he believes these claims to be universal, a tedious and predictable assumption. He also seems to believe that the relationship between consumers’ attitudes and fiction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way. Kate Wright offers a more nuanced, if a thousandfold more disturbing, view in her Hollywood how-to Screenwriting Is Storytelling — but I’ll cover that another time.