Ridiculous Opinions #244
My friend, Chris, texted me the other day and said:
I find it weird that I now enjoy old country songs. Like it reminds me of old cigarette machines in an early 80s smokey bar we might’ve found your dad in alongside Philo Beddoe. I enjoy it.
What is happening to me?
In case you’re wondering, Philo Beddoe is a character from a 1970s movie called Every Which Way But Loose.
I will directly quote the summary of this film from Google so that you have a basic idea of what it is about. The summary says:
Philo Beddoe, a bare-knuckle boxer, travels from one fight to another in a truck, accompanied by Clyde, an orangutan, and his human friend Orville.
Yep. That’s the plot. That’s the whole movie. A bare-knuckle boxer going from fight to fight in a truck, alongside his orangutan. I can’t even make fun of it by trying to type a sarcastic summary because that’s just what it is. The trailer is even weirder:
The 70s were a weird time. They made some really funky stuff and though I know things were bad, they actually seem weirdly “better” from a cultural standpoint. There was something unhinged about that period in history, almost as if the working class was establishing itself as an entity at that time.
Back then, movies weren’t pretty. They were ugly, like the world that they represented. Color palettes were brown and grey. Clothes were disjointed and funky. Haircuts were awful. The seventies brought us television that seemed to represent the real world more than anything else.
One of the biggest TV hits of the 70s was Welcome Back, Kotter. Just look at the opening credits to this show:
Does that make you really want to watch the show? It looks a little depressing. But everyone watched it. It was a triumph of the working class. The episodes were full of people from a wide-variety of backgrounds and cultures. Look at the people in this scene:
They actually seemed like real people. They were doing real things and speaking about real issues.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dM7X6nFD3eM
Now, before you get back to me about how all this is Hollywood and such…I know that. It’s a limited representation. But I grew up in rural Oklahoma and this was my only exposure to the outside world. I had to see that there weren’t people like me out there in order to understand a larger world view. Television did that for me, because I saw a diverse group of people!
It really started with Sesame Street in 1969. When I was young, we got four channels on our television: ABC, NBC, CBS, and (the one I barely counted), PBS.
But in the mornings on PBS, you would find two utterly weird shows that I used to watch all the time: Sesame Street and The Electric Company.
I know you’ll all think, Sesame Street wasn’t weird!
But it was! They’ve watered it down to ridiculous proportions in today’s society and turned it into a playground for insulated rich creatives, but when I was growing up, Sesame Street was about the working class, and it was really pretty awesome. Here’s the pilot episode:
Go to 4:09. Imagine a three-year old Randall growing up in Tahlequah, Oklahoma watching that kind of diversity on television and imagine how that shaped my life (not to mention the content of the lyrics, which are pretty incredible). This is what I would wake up every morning to watch! Seriously, if you want something awesome, watch the whole show. You will not find a SINGLE THING on television today like that.
The Electric Company was just as odd!
Check out this sketch from that episode:
Morgan Freeman is AWESOME in this as Easy Reader. The energy. The learning that took place with these shows. I absorbed every bit of it. Again, you won’t find any of this slow-paced, education-forward programming today.
But bringing it back to what Chris originally wrote in his text…The 70s weren’t just a weird establishment of inner-city diversity. The rural regions were also represented. As stupid as it seems, Every Which Way But Loose represented a group of people that I understood quite well: that of a redneck culture.
Films like Smokey and the Bandit, TV shows like BJ and the Bear, songs like On the Road Again…
…these things shaped my youth. I grew up around these people! So, when Chris talks about these things, he is speaking of a different time that I think a lot of people my age long for!
I wrote this back to him:
You enjoy them because old country songs were REAL. The people that sang them lived those lives. There was a quality to the songwriting and performing that had a lived in experience that I think people like you and me crave at the moment. It’s a reaction to the fake things that surround us every day. We don’t like modern music because all of the songs are about experiences that the songwriters and performers never actually had. We don’t like modern movies because they’re filled with nepo-babies who haven’t ever had the emotions that they’re pretending to have on screen! And even the environments that they even SHOW us on screen aren’t real!!
And it’s true. The late 70s/early 80s were the last gasp of real things. At some point in the 80s, things started to become fake. Everyone was too good looking. The lifestyles were just a little bit too glamorous. And over the last 40 years, we’ve been trapped in a feedback loop of the same better-than-you lifestyle, over and over again until it becomes meaningless. Taylor Swift might sing about being sad, but has she ever really been sad? I mean, really? This is why there are no good movie and pop stars today. They’ve never experienced anything but glamour.
This brings us back to the capper for this little newsletter. This is an article about the writer’s strike in Hollywood and its after-effects. The article is very long, but there are some interesting tidbits in there.
What I found most interesting about this is the underlying notion that you can’t become a writer in Hollywood unless you have money to begin with. If you want to write, you need something to support yourself, so the only people who write in Hollywood are trust fund kids and people with connections. And when those are the only people writing in Hollywood, you end up with shows that they want to make. Succession, Euphoria, Keeping up with the Kardashians, Suits, Friends, How I Met Your Mother…I could go on and on about how these shows represent a very narrow market and world view that has to do with rich, white people and what they think we want to see.
And it’s only going to get worse, because there’s no way to break that feedback loop. It’s just rich people doing rich people things. And rich people have even created ways to perpetuate the feedback loop with the creation of AI creative tools. FAKE, FAKE, FAKE.
So, when I say that we need to go back to the 70s, I mean that metaphorically, where there was a bit more diversity in terms of storytelling. And if there wasn’t diversity in terms of storytelling, at least the people were somewhat real!*
I’m against the fake.
I should write a book about this…
*There are holes to this argument, I know, but the right spirit is there.
