The Pop View

As some social critics would have it, we do not live in an age of enlightened communication. Being facile in verbal communication is supposedly not as important as being technically proficient. Coarseness seems much more prevalent. A familiarity with the Western canon is not what it used to be.

But I’m not convinced this is empirically true. After all, Victorian England could enjoy the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, but if you had surveyed the residents of England, do you think they sat around reading books or that they regularly attended the theater? Probably not.

The media did used to unspool in a more relaxed fashion. When you look at old movies and television shows, they seem positively glacial in terms of pace, compared to today’s works. It was also quite common to see conversation on television: two people sitting in chairs, just talking about things. I don’t mean an actress plugging her new movie, I’m talking about talking – an actual exchange of ideas.

I’ve been surprised how much I enjoy the podcast for Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show. I like Pollak, but who would have thought that he’s the guy you’d want to see talk to artistic types for over an hour?

Here you can see Pollak talk to director Jason Reitman for the better part of 90 minutes. I also recommend the episodes with Eddie Izzard and Matthew Perry. Pollak has discussed the fact that he’s been offered deals to bring that show to television and he’s refused, because he knows he would have to do the show differently. I think he’s right. It would have to be structured much more tightly for TV, because modern television doesn’t generally do loose.

(You can subscribe to  KPCS via iTunes.)

Craig Ferguson does provide examples of the looseness I’m talking about. His show will do a cold open of just Ferguson standing on a stage, sometimes just chatting to the camera. Sometimes you just see a hand puppet talking. This week, he did a whole episode without an audience and with only one guest. (The intro is embedded below; then you can follow the links to the other parts.)

I mention this program because it serves to provide proof that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all that often on television these days, whether on broadcast or cable TV. It could be done; it’s cheap enough fare. But I’m not sure that any networks think that viewers will enjoy sight and sound of people talking at length, no matter how interesting they are.

But I do…

The Pop View | Television | 02 25th, 2010 | No Comments »

I’ve been listening to the new Sade album and enjoying it quite a lot. It brings to mind this 2005 post about Sade, in which I said that Sade Adu’s voice is not always served by the production. To my mind, it needs a little weight behind it. Lovely and ethereal needs something to hold it down, otherwise it will just float off like a balloon. Soldier of Love, the first album from the group in a decade, has that weight. Thank God.

(MP3 included in that earlier post; check it out.)

The Pop View | Music | 02 14th, 2010 | No Comments »

In just a few hours, the final season of Lost will begin. This is a great thing, marking a remarkable achievement in storytelling on television.

In a couple of previous posts, I have mused about the challenges of telling a huge, sprawling story. And doing sequential narrative on television is even more challenging. (See How to tell a big story on TV. and Watching Life on Mars.)

The easiest way to really appreciate the accomplishments of Lost, is to look at the competition.

Dollhouse has just ended. Even its biggest fans think the show was fumbling around until the episode “Man on the Street” and only really got good from “Spy in the House of Love” to “Epitaph One.”

Read this article about Season One of Fringe and you’ll find that the biggest change was when Akiva Goldsman was brought on board to do some writing and was told what the overarching mythology was to be.

Recalls [producer Roberto] Orci, ”Akiva was like, ‘This is the stuff fans want to know! Let’s get on with it!”’

One of my biggest peeves with Lost fans is when they say they don’t care about the mysteries of the Island or the time traveling and whatnot, all they really care about are the characters. I care about them too, and a complex show like this without meaningful characters would be unwatchable, but great characters and a muddled mythology brings you The X-Files (Did anyone ever figure out what that black oil was?).

So, what Lost got right was telling a story from the start and trying to keep that story moving forward with each new episode.

My biggest pet peeve with Lost viewers is when they’re presented with some crazy twist and then they accuse the producers of just making it up as they go along. In this interview from three years ago, Damon Lindelof said:

There were certain things we knew from the very beginning. Independent of ever knowing when the end was going to be, we knew what it was going to be, and we wanted to start setting it up as early as season 1, or else people would think that we were making it up as we were going along. So the skeletons [Adam & Eve in the cave] are the living — or, I guess, slowly decomposing — proof of that. When all is said and done, people are going to point to the skeletons and say, ”That is proof that from the very beginning, they always knew that they were going to do this.”

In preparation for tonight, many people have been going back to old episodes, especially Lost’s two-part pilot. I predict that it will turn out that lots of things were set up from the start. We ought to revel at the way this will unfold, because telling this kind of complex story on television, setting up and paying off details, is just damn hard.

UPDATE: Nightline just ran a segment on Lost. At one point, the producers spoke about making the decision during Season 3 to have a definitive end date for the program. Lindelof said, “If you’re not moving towads the end, you’re just doing middle.” See here and here for comments from J.J. Abrams on setting an end-point for Fringe.

The Pop View | Television | 02 2nd, 2010 | No Comments »

I haven’t weighed in on this whole Jay v. Conan thing; mostly, I’ve been enjoying the unusual public fighting. You don’t typically see people just say straight out what they really think.

But it seemed hard to care all that much and two recent news items clarify the point.

• Comedian Louis C.K. appeared at the TCA tour, expressing his respect for Conan O’Brien, while also saying he doesn’t understand the allure of hosting The Tonight Show (which he describes as “just this old, shitty thing.”).
• In the NY Times, David Carr says that the age of The Tonight Show as “a search engine on culture,” encouraging water cooler conversation the next day, may have passed.

After the death of Johnny Carson, and the subsequent universal praising of his talent, my wife and I purchased some DVDs of his show. I hadn’t watched Carson in years. He was clearly funny and gifted, but it didn’t take long to remember why I had eventually stopped caring about The Tonight Show in the Eighties. It was from a by-gone era of sexist jokes and out-of-date references. It was a format whose time had gone.

We used to have variety shows on TV, lots of them. We used to have westerns. Soap operas used to have huge audiences. Slowly, these things are changing and fading away. We can mourn their passing, but we should not hang on unduly long. (See this previous post on I Love Lucy.)

I’m just old enough to have watched The Mike Douglas Show and The Dinah Shore Show and The Andy Williams Show and The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dean Martin Show. There is a style to these programs I do not ever expect to see return.

But maybe The Tonight Show is different! After all, NBC has a few programs with classic pedigrees: The Today Show, Saturday Night Live, Meet the Press. They’ve been around for a long time; we expect them to last forever; we don’t particularly care who the host is at any given time.

But Louis C.K. notes that Letterman’s show in the Eighties was known as “Letterman,” even though it was actually called Late Night. The Late Late Show has been on the air for 15 years and Craig Ferguson is its third host. Does it feel like there has any continuity going on there?

Let’s ignore how NBC has handled this situation (badly) and how Leno has behaved (badly). The Tonight Show as an idea, as a television tradition stretching back 56 years, the third longest-running entertainment program in the U.S., is probably gone now. If it wasn’t before, it feels to me as though these shenanigans – this elegantly brutal game of Musical Chairs – have killed it.

The Pop View | Television | 01 19th, 2010 | No Comments »

So, there was Glee and then NBC kind of ripped it off a bit for The Sing Off. And then Ben Folds was a judge on The Sing Off because he had already put out an album of university a cappella groups doing covers of his songs.

Point is, there’s something kind of funny about a capella groups going very hip pop songs. I think it’s because a capella – which goes back hundreds of years – seems a little unhip or, at the very least, more innocent. Of course, it’s also a little more pure: You can fake singing and be a big pop star, but when it’s just your voice naked, then you better have the goods.

Anyway, the video above (via TSS) is by the group Candy Slice Comedy and it purports to be an audition tape for The Sing Off. And it’s funny, but it’s also a more compelling version of “Money to Blow” by Birdman, featuring Lil Wayne & Drake. Compare for yourself.

UPDATE: Meant to link to this old post, with its passing reference to the college a capella scene.

The Pop View | Music | 01 6th, 2010 | No Comments »

It’s a thing I do here each year, to post two final songs for New Year’s. It seems in recent years, I’ve been a little regretful and sorrowful at this time, wishing for better times to come. Alas, I feel like it’s the same situation again.

Annually, I post Dan Wilson’s “What a Year for a New Year,” because it is always the perfect song for this time of year. It expresses a powerful longing that I always feel, tempered by a bit of hope.

And then we’ve got a funky version from The Black on White Affair of the classic “Auld Lang Syne,” the Bobby Burns poem set to a folk tune. Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? I don’t think so.

The Pop View | MP3s | 12 31st, 2009 | No Comments »

What with that new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie out, it’s timely to recall that Ross Bagdasarian, Sr. (a.k.a. David Seville) had just two big hits: “Witch Doctor” and “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).”

Both songs were built around the gimmick of speeded-up vocals, but the Chipmunks became characters of their own. And it’s worth noting that beyond the squeaky voices, both “Witch Doctor” and “The Chipmunk Song” are just plain catchy tunes.

So here are two cover versions. Powder gives the song the hard rock treatment, which also includes a very nice arrangement. Then, Rosie Thomas goes the opposite direction, soft and contemplative (By the way, Thomas’ Christmas album is excellent).

The Pop View | MP3s | 12 24th, 2009 | No Comments »

Fans of the late, great John M. Higgins may be the proud possessor of one of his Christmas mixes. See this post for background, but collecting Christmas music was one of the many things we shared.

We each did our own thing, he more studiously than I. But one year, we split a mixtape, with one side from him and one from me.

It was originally done on cassette tapes, but thanks to the miracle of digital technology, you can now download your own copy.

[For purposes of history, I wish I could be exact with the date on this, but I only know it comes from some time between 1998 and 2003, probably in 2000 or 2001.]

Side One, presented by John Higgins

Side Two, presented by Paul Rodriguez

The Pop View | MP3s | 12 21st, 2009 | No Comments »

I’m always fascinated by how Christmas is celebrated in other parts of the world, since Americans seem to forget that the holiday started in Europe and they have their own spin on it.

Thanks to Hans (a friend-of-a-friend), here’s a little background on Christmas in Denmark:

“In Denmark, like many other things, Christmas is steeped in long standing traditions, that modernize little by little over the years.

“Jul is the 24th in Denmark. The traditional ‘Nu er det jul igen’ is a children’s song ‘Now It’s Christmas Again’ which points to how the Danes get ready for Christmas starting in December, including the 24-day countdown calendars, and the 4 advent days. This ‘quickening’ occurs as you get ready with all of the planning, decorating (though the tree isn’t usually trimmed until the afternoon of the 24th) and gift buying. Basically, celebration takes place over all of December (and oh, yeah, the julefrokosts – company and club (soccer, basketball) ‘Christmas Lunches’… that’s part of the ‘quickening,’ too).

“Another big part of the countdown is the media-based broadcast of the ‘julekalender’ – Christmas Calendar. Typically for Children, this is a serial broadcast for kids, telling a story leading up to Christmas. Recently there have been adult Christmas Calendar broadcasts, which are simply edgier, and sometimes probably not appropriate for younger viewers.

“So, suddenly, it’s the 24th. First, you eat in the evening, and then you light your Christmas tree candles (surprisingly you don’t get too many fires!), and dance and sing around the Christmas tree. This is the song you sing last because it’s fast, and you then run around the house holding hands.

“Then julemanden (Santa Claus) knocks on the door, brings in the presents, and mayhem begins. Depending on how much you have to drink at dinner, mayhem can ensue when you start dancing.

“This song dates back to the 1850s, as you can see here.”

That’s all the set-up to two Danish songs I’m presenting here. Now, back to Hans.

“The first song ["Jul Igen"] is really scrooge-like take on Christmas. Basically taking a cynical look at all of the aspects of Christmas. I ran the lyrics through Google translator and then doctored them a bit.”

Here’s just the beginning:

And then it’s Christmas again
and so it’s Christmas again
and so it’s Christmas again!
Christmas trees, Christmas hearts, Christmas movies
Christmas in the merchant’s house, Christmas in karate club
Christmas in Copenhagen inn
Christmas ending, Christmas, Christmas meal
Porkroast Christmas, red cabbage and red beet Christmas
rice pudding and rice almond porridge Christmas
Christmas in the pipeline since Christmas

“The second song ["Jul På Vesterbro"] is from an adult julekalender… It takes place in Vesterbro – arguably the most urban/edgy, and recently the most hip area for young families.”

Now DET JUL again and what do I care?
My life is in his autumn and there is an ulcer on the way!
My gold tooth is broken and it’s not fucking funny to damn,
when you have a hemorrhoids as an egg!
And I have beds and paw degree and renal failure,
yellow teeth, liver cirrhosis, heart failure ledger!
I have a nightmare where my dog Rollo the Ask a fiddler
whether it should get me into heaven when it dies.
So hey, Lillemor? (Go away!) Do you decline? (Go away!)
Waste of time, so grab a stesolid!

So, here you go.

The Pop View | MP3s | 12 21st, 2009 | No Comments »

Okay, we all know this time of year can be stressful. Yeah, Happy Christmas, la, la, la… But there’s the hustle & bustle of preparing for the holidays and there’s dealing with family and stuff like that.

So, if you find yourself in a tough situation in the coming days, here are a couple of songs to get you through.

MxPx is almost always referred to as a “Christian punk rock,” even though I’ve never heard any specific references in their songs. They are from Bremerton, Washington (I always loved their song “Move to Bremerton”) and released their first album in 1994. (Shall I mention that the politics of being in or expliciting rejected the Christian music industry are very fascinating?)

Anyway, they’ve done Christmas songs for their fanclub for years and they finally put out an album (Punk Rawk Christmas) collecting the songs and adding a couple new tunes.  This song is about the fact that it sucks to be sick at Christmas. Which it does.

You know what else would stink? Getting stuck at the airport. This topic is addressed by Money Mark in his song “Stuck at the Airport.” How pertinent.

Mark Ramos-Nishita first became known for his production work with the Beastie Boys, but he then began releasing his own music in 1995 with Mark’s Keyboard Repair. In 2006, Money Mark signed to Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records label, which Johnson had created to release soundtracks. This particular song appears on the compilation This Warm December: A Brushfire Holiday, Vol. 1, which came out in 2008. The collection is a little too laid back for me, but the other stand-out track is the charming “No Christmas for Me” from Zee Avi.

The Pop View | MP3s | 12 15th, 2009 | No Comments »