tv
September 08, 2006
Pop Culture 2.0?
It's the end of an era. Two of the most influential figures in American pop culture were fired this week: Tom Freston and Robert Christgau. Freston, who was head of Viacom's cable networks, was one of the key executives behind the rise of MTV. Christgau is the self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics," the writer who redefined the rock canon away from the populism of the mainstream music press, and toward what he sometimes called "semipopular music."
Freston got canned after the MTV Music Video Awards continued their ratings freefall this year, while MTV's web offerrings got their clocks cleaned by "Web 2.0" social networking juggernauts MySpace and YouTube. Christgau got axed after the Village Voice was sold to an alternaweekly chain desperately trying to compete with craigslist's free classified ads.
The old frameworks for making sense of pop culture are starting to collapse. Pop's presumed market of scarcity - only a handful of songs can make it to heavy rotation, only a handful of artists can become stars - is being overwhelmed by an information explosion. On MySpace, thousands of local band listings sit side by side with Paris Hilton promotions - and Paris needs the locals more than they need her. No one indie band has the reach of a pop star, but it's the community they've built that brings eyeballs to Paris's page. Meanwhile, viewers are tuning out TV channels and becoming their own programmers on YouTube.
The demassification of American popular culture continues. Every year, the big networks lose ground to cable, while the big cable channels lose ground to the profusion of newer digital channels. The big record labels' sales shrink, while the global jukebox becomes available on all-you-can-download subscription services like Rhapsody. Radio listeners abandon terrestrial's shrunken playlists for Sirius and XM. "The Long Tail" grows ever longer.
Which explains not only Freston's departure, but perhaps Christgau's, too. When the mainstream dissolves, how do we define the margins? If there's no longer such a thing as pop, how can there still be punk?
Christgau himself was never an indie snob - he's always had the open-earedness to praise a big star like Garth Brooks if he thought the music earned it. And I'm sure he'll land on his feet - some smart publication should grab him for some instant hipster credibility. Freston, I'm not so sure about, although I'm confident his parachute was much more golden than Christgau's. But the real question is what comes next.
Pop Culture 2.0 no longer needs a lowest common denominator. Traditional media companies are always out to score a blockbuster, because it's so much more efficient to sell one product to one million customers, rather than a thousnd products to a thousand customers each. But to MySpace, it's all the same. They make their money off ads, and a million pageviews is a million pageviews, no matter how they're sliced up. In fact, better they be a thousand different pages with a thousand viewers each - all the more room for growth. Finally, the economics are on the side of cultural diversity.
That doesn't mean they'll stay that way. I'm sure that Fox, which bought MySpace, would love to see it simply replace MTV as pop's top tastemaker. But I doubt we'll ever again see the kind of teen monoculture I lived through in the 1980s. There's just too much cool stuff out there to listen to. Christgau's the one who taught me that. And now everybody's figuring it out.
Posted by tedf at 01:21 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2006
Way Cool Death Star Home Theater
Click here for more. (via Digg.)
Posted by tedf at 07:09 PM | Comments (0)
February 14, 2006
I Always Thought of Myself as More of a Trekker, But . . .
You scored as Babylon 5 (Babylon 5). The universe is erupting into war and your government picks the wrong side. How much worse could things get? It doesn't matter, because no matter what you have your friends and you'll do the right thing. In the end that will be all that matters. Now if only the Psi Cops would leave you alone.
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) | 88% | ||
Moya (Farscape) | 75% | ||
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) | 69% | ||
Serenity (Firefly) | 69% | ||
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) | 63% | ||
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) | 63% | ||
Enterprise D (Star Trek) | 63% | ||
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) | 63% | ||
SG-1 (Stargate) | 56% | ||
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) | 56% | ||
FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) | 56% | ||
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) | 50% |
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics)
created with QuizFarm.com
I'm basically a left libertarian, but I guess there are no shows that fit that bill. Fair enough - there aren't really any governments that match up, either, although I guess Holland comes the closest. The big problem is that I've always hated those Bab 5 uniforms . . .
For more on the politics of Trek, check out this piece I wrote years ago for a long-defunct webzine called Stim, "Capitalism: The Final Frontier." I also talk about the utopian economics of Trek in the intro to my book, Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture. Here's the chapter. You can buy the book here.
Posted by tedf at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 01, 2005
TV Coverage of New Orleans
From what I've seen so far, it looks like CNN is doing a good job of covering the full ramifications of the flood, while NBC is milking human tragedy to provide a platform for promoting Brian Williams as the next star TV personality. I haven't had the heart to see how Fox is handling things.
Here's a solid NYT piece on ths subject:
Television Finds Covering Area Hit by Storm Is Like Working in a War Zone - New York Times
Posted by tedf at 02:16 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2005
Slate on Sleaziest Uses of Classic Songs in Ads
The winner: Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," a song about shooting up smack used in the current Royal Caribbean ads.
That's just sort of funny, though. The song probably subverts the ad more than the ad neutralizes the song. The real travesties are CCR's "Fortunate Son" being used to sell Wrangler jeans and Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" selling, well, you guessed it. In "Fortunate Son," they play that first line - "Some folks were born to wave the flag/Ooh that red white and blue" - then cut the rest of the lyrics, since the next line goes, "And when the band plays Hail to the Chief/They point the cannon at you." The whole song is about how patriotism is used as a cover for class exploitation and warmongering.
I wonder if Fogerty was hard up for cash, or if he lost control of his publishing rights as part of his general screwing by Fantasy Records. It seems hard to believe the former, since he was still playing "Fortunate Son" as a very appropriate anti-Bush song at Kerry rallies last fall.
What's the Worst Ad Song Ever? - The results are in. By Seth Stevenson
Posted by tedf at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)
Slate on Sleaziest Uses of Classic Songs in Ads
The winner: Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life," a song about shooting up smack used in the current Royal Caribbean ads.
That's just sort of funny, though. The song probably subverts the ad more than the ad neutralizes the song. The real travesties are CCR's "Fortunate Son" being used to sell Wrangler jeans and Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" selling, well, you guessed it. In "Fortunate Son," they play that first line - "Some folks were born to wave the flag/Ooh that red white and blue" - then cut the rest of the lyrics, since the next line goes, "And when the band plays Hail to the Chief/They point the cannon at you." The whole song is about how patriotism is used as a cover for class exploitation and warmongering.
I wonder if Fogerty was hard up for cash, or if he lost control of his publishing rights as part of his general screwing by Fantasy Records. It seems hard to believe the former, since he was still playing "Fortunate Son" as a very appropriate anti-Bush song at Kerry rallies last fall.
What's the Worst Ad Song Ever? - The results are in. By Seth Stevenson
Posted by tedf at 12:19 PM | Comments (1)
May 24, 2005
"George Jetson Gets a Present From Dove"
Stay Free! Daily: George Jetson Gets a Present From Dove
Posted by tedf at 02:08 PM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2005
Science Fiction and Fantasy Media Intro Lecture on MP3
Continuing my audio series, here's the introductory lecture to my course in Science Fiction and Fantasy Media. It's in two parts. Click here for Part A, and click here for Part B.
The syllabus for the class can be found here.
Posted by tedf at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2005
Hootie Returns
In the last few days, I've been getting more and more hits for this essay on Hootie and the Blowfish I wrote about ten years ago. It's even turned up in a couple of blogs, Dead Parrot Society and The Long 21st Century. That's a healthy change of pace, since the other spot my name has turned up recently is in this blog, in which one of my dopplegangers writes about his heroin addiction. (Still, that's better than the Ted Friedman who always used to turn up in Lexis-Nexis searches - a disbarred lawyer so infamous in certain New York law circles that a certain kind of sleazy activity would be knowingly referred to as "a Ted Friedman kind of thing.")
The reason for the renewed interest in Hootie is clear: those strange Burger King commercials featuring Darius Rucker in western gear. I love Dave LaChappelle, the deleriously over-the-topphotographer/music video director who made the commercial. (He should get to make an SF epic - it could be The Sixth Element. And his video for Xtina's "Dirty" is one of the most gloriously perverse things MTV has ever aired.) But I find this ad really depressing. Rucker looks abashed, humiliated. His singing is almost mournful (although also quite lovely - he still has a beautiful voice). And the racial politics are deeply creepy. Rucker's long been mocked for being a deracinated black man in a white frat band, but I've always admired his willingness to play the kind of music he likes, no matter how whitebread. And I found the old-fashioned sentiments of "Hold My Hand" a sweet throwback to '60s peans to cross-racial brotherhood like "Joy to the World." But here, the commercial seems to be mocking Hoote for how far he's willing to go to humor the white man. He's even singing about fried chicken. I imagine LaChappelle thought the image of a black man as a cowboy would be an empowering reversal of cliches - like that cowboy character Laurence Fishbourne played in Pee Wee's Playhouse (a clear influence on LaChappelle). But something went horribly, horribly wrong between concept and execution.
Update:
Check out today's Boondocks on Hootie.
Posted by tedf at 03:38 AM | Comments (2)