Ridiculous Opinions #275
It’s Saturday morning where I’m at. Yet another beautiful day.
As I have told you many times before, I am desperately trying to avoid the news, but stuff creeps in. The goal of the presiding morons in the United States is destruction, pure and simple. So be it. I will continue to whistle through the graveyard as I watch the impending tsunami of fascism destroy the country I grew up in, only occasionally guffawing at the stupidity of humanity that regularly presents itself.
My newsletter is intended to serve as a balm to the crap that gets thrown at most of its subscribers over time. I will talk about things other than politics here (but please forgive me if I occasionally rant about nonsense).
Last night, we watched the documentary “Ladies and Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music” and I have to say that it was just great. If you want a taste of what it is, then watch this opening montage from the show…
(Ooops! I just checked it and they seem to have blurred out half the screen. I don’t know why they would do that, considering it’s the best commercial they could possibly make for the show. Oh, well…corporations!)
Here’s a commercial, but not as jaw-dropping as the one above…
The doc is a spectacular time capsule for how a show can evolve over time, but it also speaks to the notion of how society has changed over time. The doc was made by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez.
Saturday Night Live is part of my DNA. I watched it from a very, very young age (or at least, I watched for as long as I could stay awake as a ten-year old trying to stay up past 10:30 on a Saturday night). SNL came of age as I came of age. Through middle school, high school, and university, I was quoting the show, going to the movies, and watching these musical guests religiously. Eventually, I moved overseas and stopped watching the show, but it still held a special place in my heart.
However, at year 50, I can say that I am no longer a fan. The show just doesn’t have it anymore. The actors are terrible, the writing is awful, and I no longer know any of the musical guests (and the ones that I do know are ancient). This is part of getting older, but I think it also serves as an allegory of what the world has become.
When you watch some of the music clips from the documentary, especially from the early days, you see something raw. These were artists performing live, warts and all. They were edgy. Sometimes they sounded like complete crap. Sometimes they had striking political messages. Sometimes they were entirely uninterested in what they were doing.
You could say the same thing about the casts and the writing of the show over those years. They were angry. They were desperate. They were unhinged. All of those things were true. It’s what kept the show unique and weird. It wasn’t that you were expecting anything crazy to happen on the show (it rarely did); you were simply expecting the show’s personality to rear its ugly head. And the show did have a personality, based upon its cast. Sometimes that personality represented something awful. Sometimes that personality represented something genius. But there was a personality there, nonetheless.
This was clearly visible in the musical acts. Watch the first appearance from Prince on the show. Good God, it was electric! Watch that Captain Beefheart performance where, after it was done, nobody applauded (and one person in the audience yelled out, “Shit!”). I was always excited for the music on SNL, because it was the rawest part of the show. That was a space where you never knew what was going to happen.
But when you watch these performers captured over time in the documentary above, you gradually start to see a fifty-year change. It’s slow, but it’s there. Whereas the music in the first, oh, say thirty years had that rawness to it, in the last twenty years the musical acts became indicative of the way our culture has turned: superficial, glossy, and utterly meaningless.
I suppose it’s always been that way, but there was something about those early days that was just odd. And this leads me to think about the 70s (my decade) as being odd. Everything was gritty and grimy. People were honest about race relations and the economy and the state of the world. It was real.
Compare the following two political sketches from the show. The first one is from 1986:
And this one is from last week:
Good God, the difference between the two is shocking. The first one is biting political commentary. I couldn’t even make it all the way through the second one. It speaks to how things have changed.
So here we are today, where everything is superficial, glossy, and meaningless. I guess it’s just the counterculture in me that watches this doc’s interviews with people like Dua Lipa and Miley Cyrus and thinks, Why? These are the cultural touchstones of the modern era? Maybe for you young’uns, but not for me. Am I really supposed to think of Prince and Miley Cyrus as musical equals? Is Bad Bunny on par with Nirvana as a cultural force? I’m not sure I should. The doc kept coming back, over and over again to the these artists, and I thought, What do these people have to contribute to our culture? And why do I feel depressed about that?
Am I suppose to watch Timothee Chalamet as the host and the musical guest and think, This is awesome! This guy is incredible! Oh, man, this is a generational talent!
No, thanks!
It’s just indicative of how hollow our current culture has become. I’m having a lot of trouble seeing how we’re going to get out of this mess.
There’s a lot of get-off-my-lawn energy to this writing, but I’m starting to feel it more and more as I get older. And quite frankly, I don’t think I’m wrong. Modern music is crap. Modern culture is crap. Everything just seems like an echo of an echo, feedback emanating from better things that have been created in the past. I’m just as guilty as everyone else in feeding into that.
But I digress…
The documentary was very good and it is worth your time, if only to see that things can be glorious when they’re unhinged. I would love to see more of that experimentation in modern society. I would like to see people be weird just to be weird. I don’t want them to be weird for their Youtube channel or to achieve some kind of fame for their weirdness. I want the weirdness of creativity. I want to feel like anything can happen. I want celebrities and musical artists who push boundaries and openly rebel against the way things should be, but not for commercial purposes or likes or follows or the desperate need for page views.
We need to get something back, because over the course of this documentary, you can start to see what we’ve lost. I, personally, am looking to do that. I want to find some kind of spark that will get me through the day and make me feel wonder. I find this often in my day to day. I wonder if society as a whole could do the same.
My all-time favorite promo and a perfect example of how weird this show could be if it tried.
