Happy Holidays by Billy Idol is Yet Another Moment where parody withers under the steely glare of reality. I mean, wasn’t this a sketch on SNL Saturday Night Live in the 80s? It should have been.

The SF Chron asks readers Do the Rolling Stones still have it? Aside from the content, here are some of the people whose responses they used:

We saw the show last night and this is of course a valid representation of the demographic. It’s just still an emotional collision to be at a stadium concert and see people who resemble your parents in the seats behind you. The Stones are aging, and too much has been written about that, but we’re all aging as well. I’ve noticed a gentle version of this at Tragically Hip concerts, where the band and their fans have grown into early middle-age together, but it’s a more soothing transition. Here, with the Stones and their fans, we’re forced to confront the absolute opposites of the image of rock and roll and the reality of rock and roll.

At the same time, we’ve got this whole School of Rock thing going on, where kids who weren’t born when we were rocking out in high school are now recording or performing some of the same music. Is there any rebellion for a 15-year old in 2006 to be windmilling a la Townshend as his parents beam in approval? Were kids singing Pat Boone along with their parents 40 years ago, or is there a new form of co-option going on? This MeFi thread about kids covering Rush songs doesn’t quite get there (although some of the example YouTube links are fun) and I certainly can speculate but I don’t know the answer.

I think it was Dennis Miller, in his younger rebellious (and long-haired) days who joked that Pete Townshend was going to have to change the lyrics in the upcoming (the first of many, it turned out) reunion tour to “Hope I die before I get oldest.”

Looking through an airline magazine last week we found this:

That’s a detail from this full-page ad:

It seems the devolution that this art-project was always telling us about is indeed further along than when they started. It’s one thing to see an aging Steve Perry try to hit the high notes at a casino, but when you’ve got a band that dressed in silly costumes and ironically questioned their own human-ness, the nostalgia-revisionism takes on a whole other set of meanings. Their band picture evokes lameness at first, but then really just seems so perfect.

Tastiest of all is the name of the place where Devo is playing: Moron Go!

Brotherhood

is the latest Showtime series. I watched the first episode and I quite liked it. You could describe it (in a fashion reminiscent of Altman’s The Player) as West Wing meets The Sopranos meets The Wire (second season). But that doesn’t mean it was derivative, it just had familiar elements of storytelling, character, less than style.

But 3 minutes before the episode wrapped up, they went to the indie-emo-gritty-yearning-soft-hard-rock-song thing. Ya know, where a white guy-sing shouts slowly over plucky distorted guitar, while there are a bunch of slow shots. A character looks wistfully out at his city. Another turns over in his bed and stares at the wall. Meanwhile, the mother feeds her bouncing children in the kitchen, unaware of ill portent, as life carries on normally for other characters. I don’t know if those were the shots they actually used in Brotherhood, but they are so generic that it doesn’t matter.

I just read something about Michael Mann and his legacy in revolutioning the way we see TV drama, and they cited that very phenomenon. And normally, I don’t mind it. It evokes some great emotions on Rescue Me, on the Shield, the Sopranos. I remember Homicide: Life On The Streets using music (specifically Tom Waits’ Cold Cold Ground) very well. There was just something default about Brotherhood doing it. Oh, it’s a show, it’s dramatic, we better toss ’em the song at the 52 minute mark. Felt perfunctory and actually pulled me out of the show.

We build this language of signs and symbols that we use in drama (and in every form of storytelling, like advertising, and products, and web sites, and interfaces) and they are effective short hand. But we have to be careful to really mean them when we use, else they come off as insincere and cliched.

I’m excited to keep watching Brotherhood, but they’ve got me a bit on the defensive, ready for them to screw up. We shall see.

Two really excellent and thoughtful reviews in the NYT today. The new TV show Black. White. and a performance by Hasidic rapper Matisyahu. Both articles are insightful and funny and deal with entertainment and culture and race. Read the excerpts below for most (but not all) of the good stuff.

Black. White. is a show where two families (one black, one white) are made up and go out into the world as white and black, respectively. And there the hilarity er um I mean cultural insights ensue.

If reality television can be said to be about anything at all, it seems to be about impersonation and the odd and increasingly tenacious hold it has on the American psyche. The crooked-nosed are made over and play the genetically good-looking. Heiresses get out of their $200,000 sports cars and enact the habits of the agriculturally inclined. A vegan mother from Boulder trades houses with an evangelical wife in Mobile, is encouraged to care about scripture and breakfast sausage, and essentially tries to pass.

Reality television, as we know it, in fact, could exist only in a culture infatuated with passing – a world where white suburban boys dress to look more like Nelly and Punjabi girls from Queens wear blue contact lenses to link them closer in appearance to someone who might trace her lineage four generations in Laguna
….
The problem with “Black.White.” is the extent to which it inadvertently supports the foundations of Bruno’s reasoning, searching for examples of racial discrimination, as it does, almost entirely within the world of the consumer marketplace. The participants are too often sent out to stores to take the measure of race relations in America. “Black. White.” would have felt far more substantive had it sent Brian and Bruno, in their racial guises, out on a mission to procure high-end medical care or mortgages, say, rather than trousers and shoes.

When Rose and her mother, as black women, go out with an African-American friend, all pretending to look for jobs, they do so not in the offices of a small insurance company but in clothing stores in a swanky shopping district on the West Side of Los Angeles. The women are told that managers are absent or applications not in stock. (Leaving aside the possibility, however remote, that the responses were honest ones, it might have been faintly interesting then had the producers sent Carmen and Rose, as themselves, out to look for jobs in hair extension salons in Compton.) At any rate, the suggestion you’re left with – one similar to a point made some years ago in a controversial essay by Patricia Williams, an African-American law professor – is that the worst injustice a black person can suffer is to be denied the best treatment at department stores or the chance to sell expensive jeans in Santa Monica.

I thought Hasids doing “black” music were a joke (Rapping Rabbis) as old as Night Court (and we’re talking fifth season of Night Court lame), but there’s a big NYC/Brooklyn Jewish hipster thing going on and reggae singer Matisyahu is increasingly hot (and presumably not as hip at the same time). But no one ever talks about the rapper Curly Oxide (profiled a while back on This American Life).

The record is dull, and the concert was often worse.

Still, once you hear Matisyahu’s music, you may wonder why someone didn’t think of this sooner. The plaintive, minor-key melodies of reggae aren’t so far removed from the melodies Matisyahu would have heard, and sung, when he attended the Carlebach Shul, on the Upper West Side. And the imagery of Rastafarianism borrows heavily from Jewish tradition: Matisyahu is by no means the first reggae star to sing of Mount Zion, although he might be the first one who has had a chance to go there.

Matisyahu’s black hat also helps obscure something that might otherwise be more obvious: his race. He is a student of the Chabad-Lubavitch philosophy, but he is also a white reggae singer with an all-white band, playing (on Monday night, anyway) to an almost all-white crowd. Yet he has mainly avoided thorny questions about cultural appropriation. He looks like an anomaly, but if you think of him as a white pop star drawing from a black musical tradition, then he may seem like a more familiar figure.
…
Perhaps Matisyahu’s fans aren’t familiar with a little-known group of performers who still make great reggae records: Jamaicans. Maybe they are waiting for a shopping list of the best recent reggae CD’s from Jamaica. So here’s a start: Richie Spice, “Spice in Your Life” (Fifth Element); Luciano, “Lessons of Life” (Shanachie); Sizzla, “Da Real Thing” (VP).

Matisyahu has built a following by bypassing reggae fanatics (many of his fans come from the jam-band world). That explains why he outsells and outdraws his Jamaican counterparts. And it may also explain why some listeners find his music so exciting. Certainly no one seemed disappointed after Monday’s concert. And as the crowd filed out, a wry young black woman working the door could be overheard singing to herself. It was a line from an older reggae song: “Could You Be Loved,” by Bob Marley. “Don’t let them fool you,” she sang.

So much for fact checking. A review from the SF Chron

CD REVIEWS: “In a time of austerity in the music business, ‘Weird Tales of the Ramones‘ is a behemoth, containing 85 songs on three CDs and every single video the band filmed from 1981 to their retirement in 1996. In this unsentimental but nonetheless fascinating document of rock endurance, fans visually and audibly experience the Ramones in their sullen glory, all deadpan pasty faces, ripped skin-tight jeans and off-the-rack leather jackets. They go from snarling through three-minute blasts of rage and irony on songs like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,’ ‘Cretin Hop’ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ to having most of their raw edges rubbed down as they become the benign cartoonish elder punk statesmen of their later years, wading through a myriad of age-related songs like ‘When I Was Young,’ Tom Waits’ far too revealing ‘I Don’t Wanna Grow Up’ and the painfully brilliant ‘I Want To Live,’ from Joey Ramone’s posthumously released solo album. This is a fascinating but hardly weird tale, unless you consider it weird how undervalued these pre-eminent architects of the American punk juggernaut were during their lifetime.

— Jaan Uhelszki.

But I Want To Live isn’t from Don’t Worry About Me (the above-referenced posthumous Joey album), it’s from 1987’s Halfway to Sanity (and it seems to be called I Wanna Live, in fact).

How hard would it be to get that right? I haven’t seen the new box set, but don’t you imagine it includes liner notes that indicate where the songs were from?

Lame.

Mini Kiss, a Kiss cover band, staffed by little people. More pics here
(also Mini Elvis )