I don’t know how popular this opinion is but my favorite Metallica album is their first, Kill ‘Em All. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a lot of metal bands whose fans think their best album is their debut. Guns n’ Roses, sure. Van Halen, yeah, though some prefer 1984. But it feels wrong for a metal band to peak with their first try. Metal bands should be their best when they’re at their biggest, when they’ve reached their final form, so to speak, and certainly Metallica would grow and change dramatically after their first, and most people would agree that one of Master of Puppets, The Black Album or maybe even And Justice for All as their best – all arguably their peaks. But there’s something about Kill ‘Em All for me, they’re so young and scrappy, Hetfield (not yet old enough to buy a drink) almost unrecognizable with his voice ragged and still teenage-sounding. This is Metallica in their real garage days, almost a punk band, none of the grandiosity you’d associate with them later, and you can still hear the influence of recently-departed guitarist Dave Mustaine in the riffs. I might like Mustaine’s Megadeth more than I like Metallica. Mustaine is one of the biggest assholes in music but he’s a funnier asshole than the assholes in Metallica, who were often very dour. I think it’s telling that Metallica’s biggest song, “Enter Sandman,” is also the silliest tune in their catalog (look out for the Sandman!! He brings heavy thoughts tonight and they aren’t of Snow Whiiiiite!!), and there’s no way to imagine them doing something like Megadeth’s “Peace Sells” or “Sweating Bullets,” something with punch lines. Metallica were so rarely this fun.
Now Queen, there was a fun band, Freddie Mercury poncing around in his giant mustache and short shorts, the rest of the band camping it up alongside him. It’s remarkable that even during a virulently homophobic time period, Queen had such a great reputation with hardasses like Metallica and Guns n’ Roses. Axl Rose of course enjoyed his pomp and circumstance just as much as Freddie did, but Metallica? Metallica was the heaviest band to show up at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, alongside such artists as Annie Lennox, Seal, Lisa Stansfield and Liza Minnelli, but such was Queen’s range that they all made sense.
I don’t know when Metallica discovered Queen – I remember from doing the St. Anger episode that Cliff Burton introduced hardcore metalheads James and Lars to a lot of acts beyond what they were used to, bands like Yes, ZZ Top, Peter Gabriel – but also that Kirk Hammett mostly grew up playing that classic ‘70s rock. In any case, Metallica’s discovery of “Stone Cold Crazy” seems fairly inevitable – as has already been observed by so many so often, even the original sounds like it was destined to be a Metallica song. Freddie, with his big gay mustache and overbite, fucking invented Metallica while Metallica’s members were still in grade school.
Actually, I don’t know whether I consider “Stone Cold Crazy” to belong to Queen or to Metallica. It's not that Queen didn’t have their hard rock bonafides, but they had no fucking business releasing something as fucking metal as “Stone Cold Crazy.” Allegedly, its inspiration was Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown,” a track that seems like it’s going to spin out of control at any moment, but somehow Queen outdoes Led Fucking Zeppelin in terms of heaviness and breakneak speed. Reportedly it was one of the first tracks they ever wrote, though they didn’t record it until their third album. I straight up didn’t believe I was listening to Queen, the band who made “Killer Queen” and “You’re My Best Friend,” the first time I heard it, not until those familiar harmonies -- “Stone cold crazy, you know!” – hit during the chorus.
On the other hand, “Stone Cold Crazy” is a ridiculous song, far more so than Metallica were usually willing to go, none of the po-faced grimness they were known for. As far as I can tell, it’s about having a very silly dream about being in a gangster movie running from the police – the imagery it evokes is less Scarface and more Keystone Kops, and Freddie’s references to playing the trombone and shooting people with a water gun pushes into straight Roger Rabbit territory. This is something James Hetfield could never – NEVAH! NEVAH! –have written, and it feels weird to have him sing it. Luckily, Hetfield is more or less incomprehensible a lot of the time anyway, so he gets away with it, and instead the band leans on the more badass lines – they NEVER, NEVER, NEVER want it any more, CRAZAYYYY, STONE COLD CRAZY YA KNOW. Like the original, it’s a miracle of tightness, but they add some more muscle and metal flourishes – the bass drum on the second verse, the full stops on NEVAH! NEVAH! -- that make the original feel like it’s missing something. But what it doesn’t have is those harmonies, every second of Freddie’s camp replaced by Hetfield’s guttural growl. It loses something very obvious, but it gains it all back. “Stone Cold Crazy” doesn’t sound right without that dash of opera, but it also doesn’t sound right without James’s guttural adlibs. HUNGH! YAH!!!
But I wouldn’t give it up for the world. The definitive version is the one at the end of Metallica’s “Live Shit: Binge & Purge” album from 1992, their closer at the height of their power. “Stone Cold Crazy” had already been. Even Hetfield puts a little camp in his voice as he rolls his R’s introducing the song, “IT’S ENTITLED STONE COLD CRRRRRRRRRRAZEHH.” (He is almost certainly incredibly drunk by that point, and the banter is pretty great too, “I don’t think we have any more good songs!” Lars tells the crowd, “I think that’s a bunch of SHIT! Let’s steal someone else’s,” says James.) I love the little coo-coo gesture Newsted does on the first “stone cold crazy yknow” too. By that point, “Stone Cold Crazy” had already won Metallica their second Grammy and it was deserved – something about Metallica covering Queen is more awesome than either Metallica or Queen on their own.
Anyway: Please vote in the Song vs. Song poll, which, I guess isn't a poll this time around. It's open ended -- Best Rain Song. Vote! https://www.patreon.com/c/songvssong/home
Anyway, the requests. This is going to be disappointing for almost all of you, but I have indeed put up the One Hit Wonderland request price, and unfortunately, the price is going to be at an absolutely insane and unjustifiable 1,500 dollars. I do not like putting up something that absurdly expensive, but I need to pay for my poor dog's very expensive medical bills and I don't want to have to be doing this for an entire year, so this is a tier that is going to be only for the most wealthy and insane freaks I have following me (and to my wealthy and insane fans, I say that with love. When you sign up, please contact me through my DMs).
I do not expect to get more than 2 to 4 requests but I have capped it at 6 because, you know, who knows. Again, I am sorry for the 99.999% of fans who got priced out of this, I feel absolutely ridiculous charging this much. I am telling myself I deserve it as compensation for the emotional labor of looking at my poor dog Amy who stares at me from her cone with sad eyes and keeps trying to spit out the meds I have to give her.
For the rest of you I hope to have the next video out (a new OHW!) in a week or less. Wish me luck!
I auctioned off some One Hit Wonderland requests many years ago because my car broke. My car's fine now. My dog broke though. She needed some stuff done to her eyes and it was expensive. Dogs are expensive! I bought a pooping-and-licking machine with high upkeep costs and malfunctions all the time and chews my garbage.
Anyway, might be that time again to start selling myself off to the highest bidder, but I only intend to sell four or so requests so it's gonna be priced insanely high. Like, stupid high. Part of the reason is to keep it exclusive to only the most insane and rich Todd superfans so I don’t get flooded with more requests than I can handle like last time, but also last time I badly undervalued myself, I want to set a price point that proves that I Know My Worth. The problem is that I don’t actually know my worth, or what my requests are worth. What I’ve always wanted to do is auction them off, but Patreon doesn’t have that function so what I want you to do is tell me what you are willing to pay. Put in a bid, give me the highest number you are willing to pay so that I have some kind of gauge on how much I can charge. Comments are off, I want you to DM me your price so that we can keep this whole sordid financial transaction tactfully private. This does not guarantee you will get a request, it’s just for me to gauge interest. Once I have an idea what I can charge – maybe it won’t be super high at all! Maybe I have no fans willing to put up that kind of money! We’ll see -- I’ll make a new exclusive tier for a small number of requests. So, DM me and tell the highest number you are willing to pay and then we’ll see what happens.
Man, I did not mean to have left you for two whole months without something to step to. I was semi-working on this during my vacation but I got waylaid by a minor medical thing (I have a doctor's note, available upon request) plus this subject matter was, ha ha, a bit fraught. please check if I said anything wrong or fucked up anything
I am SUPPOSED to be on vacation but me and Lina are gonna have to knock out this one a little early for scheduling reasons so please vote! We are doing REM's "Everybody Hurts" vs. Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train."
I confess a certain indifference towards Britney Spears, which is probably a character flaw for my line of work – how can you be a pop critic and not be deeply invested in the life and works of Britney Spears? I’m not sure. I was a teenage boy when “Baby One More Time” dropped and I understand what makes her great; I don’t remember loving that song, because it was for girls, but I do remember staring at the video every time it came on. It wasn’t even because I was a teenage boy; she just pulls focus like no one else ever has. Like everyone else I was constantly aware of her troubled existence and tabloid hounding over the next twenty years, and I agreed that hashtag Britney should be hashtag Free. And yet, Britney as a person and as an artist, I find hard to really connect to. All her biggest and best songs, “Baby One More Time,” “Toxic,” etc., I enjoy them, I can sing along with them, I respect their greatness, but there’s no Britney song that I really love or that’s part of my soul or anything. In an attempt to feel something about her, I watched a little of the “Framing Britney Spears” documentary; I couldn’t stand it, and I didn’t make it very far. Despite its New York Times branding, it felt horribly tabloidy and gossipy, and the angelic victim depicted in it felt as fake as the TMZ version of her. She emerges as something pitiful; it didn’t surprise me at all that Britney herself wasn’t a fan.
Before I turned it off, the doc did try and make the case for Britney as a real auteur, the driving creative force behind the Britney phenomenon – she’s not just some puppet to be pulled around on strings, says one tour performer. That feels like a necessary corrective, because guilelessness and lack of control wasn’t just a tag by unfair critics, it was practically her whole aesthetic – the sense that somehow she’s doing all this by accident. In his 2003 profile of her for Esquire, Chuck Klosterman describes her as either “the least self-aware person I've ever met, or she's way, way savvier than any of us realize. Or maybe both.” She takes several topless and bottomless pics for the magazine (and Klosterman’s article is extremely weird about this) but she doesn’t really think it’s anything provocative – she refuses to think about it at all. And then after that there were the public breakdowns, and the fact that she literally lost her rights as a human being. But that lack of autonomy was also a theme in the music itself – “Oops I Did It Again,” she led you on completely by accident. “Lucky,” she’s trapped in fame and miserable (astonishing that she was already singing about this so early). “I’m a Slave 4 U” – I mean, come on. I think it’s that, more than anything, which keeps me from being invested in her fully – she never seemed to have much authorial control, not like her peers, not like the Main Pop Girls of the 2010s and especially not like Christina, who was defying her pop-princess constraints almost immediately. But maybe that isn’t a fair impression; lots of teen stars come off as naifs initially and then eventually come of age, and Britney was in that process too. The “Toxic” video, a pointed cover of “My Prerogative,” I remember her trying her hand at directing her own videos; now that I think about it, she was showing herself more and more as someone in control of her own destiny – until, publicly and legally, she wasn’t.
I started being an actual pop fan in 2007 so that’s my favorite period of Britney, which makes me feel bad because that was a really bad time for her personally – the divorce, the head-shaving, and then the conservatorship. Those albums sounds like someone who has lost control, especially her 2007 album Blackout;the producers fill the tracks with noise, glitchy synths, stuttering beats, vocal distortion – she sounds like a ghost in the machine, trapped in the Matrix. “It’s Britney, bitch.” Was it, actually?
Blackout was the album where her music became all about the Britney phenomenon. She hadn’t been “Britney, bitch” before then. The signature track was “Piece of Me,” a song where she lashes out at her critics. I remember liking it, but it didn’t sound to me at the time like the real Britney; it sounded like a PR statement written for her. I guess it worked in that it was a hit single and kept people interested, but I’m not sure I enjoy it much in hindsight. A touch overwritten, way too defensive. She doesn’t sound like she’s punching back at the press so much as flailing at air.
This is what made “Circus,” one of her last great singles, so compelling, such a brilliant act of PR, and somewhat queasy to listen to now. The title track to Blackout’s follow-up album, “Circus” immediately contrasted with the album’s (awful) lead single “Womanizer”; compared to “Womanizer” and to Blackout, “Circus” was the less messy, more respectable version of The Britney Spears Experience. “When I crack that whip, everybody gonna trip just like a circus,” Britney sings. She’s the ringleader. She calls the shots. She runs a tight ship. She makes it hot, when she puts on a show. Blackout cleared out some space for Britney to rework her image, and “Circus” put her back on top (of the narrative, at least, if not quite the top of the charts). No more Britney against the music, or Britney against the press. The dark period of two years earlier -- the 2006 VMA disaster, the umbrella attack, the head-shaving, K-Fed – all part of the act, folks. “All eyes on me in the center of the ring just like a circus.” You eat it up, don’t you? A brilliant reframing of the Britney phenomenon, as both superstar and mastermind – she gets all this attention because she commands it. And it’s true – she does, she does it like no one ever has, and she knows you can’t resist.
And at the same time, it wasn’t true at all. A circus is one thing that gets attention, and it does so by design. It’s a much more flattering comparison than another thing that commands attention, the one Britney typically heard from the press: a trainwreck. “All eyes on me in the center of the news just like a trainwreck” would scan but it wouldn’t reflect well on Britney or anyone in her orbit. No, a circus is the more convenient metaphor. But there are lots of performers in a circus. Circuses have ringleaders. They also have animals, in cages. Who was the ringleader here? I’m looking at the credits and whaddya know, it appears that the mastermind of this song was one “Dr. Luke,” an early hit for him on his way to building a reputation as an abusive controlling Svengali with a trail of aggrieved female artists who’ll never work with him again. Dr. Luke has admittedly made a lot of good songs, and this is one of them, a high point for both him and Britney; this beat cooks, and Britney kills on it. And yet. Britney was infantilized by so many and I don’t want to be one of them, but I cannot shake the suspicion that this song, about how in control she is, is one of the biggest lies foisted on her by her terrible father and handlers. “I’m the ringleader, I call the shots.” What a thing to make a woman with no legal rights say. Fucking dark, man.
Honestly, “Piece of Me” is probably closer to the real Britney than I gave it credit for. Judging by her Instagram, she does in fact have tons of grievances at the way she was treated and she’s letting them all out now, now that she’s free to. She’s said she’ll never make music again. “Circus” begins “There’s only two types of people in the world, the ones that entertain and the ones that observe… well baby, I’m a put-on-a-show kind of girl.” But there are other shows besides circuses that entertain people. New York Magazine’s “House of Spears” article pointed out that her father was an athlete in high school and she could have been too; it takes no stretch of the imagination to see her as a gymnast, it notes, with her toned physique and perfect moves, and it helps me to think of her as such. An athlete performs until they can’t and then they retire in their thirties and write memoirs and live off the fortunes they made with their past glories. An athlete, not a ringleader. A ringleader has to keep entertaining the masses. A ringleader says the show must go on. Britney decided that the show didn’t “must go on” at all. What stronger case could there be against the song than that?
With this I am officially on vacation. Desperately need some time off because my brain is incredibly fried. Like, you have no idea. My brain needs desperately away from the computer
/edit some minor stuff fixed. the annoying thing is that i already had fixed them before you guys said anything, i just linked the wrong version on patreon. so now you think i'm just a lazy person who doesn't notice that there's a big blank space in the middle of video
We're doing "Jump" by Van Halen vs. "Here I Go Again" by Whitesnake! Rock on. Also, I am almost done with the next video, it should be done soon. It's kind of a sequel to another video, no it's not Katy Perry, sorry
“Style” by Taylor Swift still hits me so hard it makes me ill. It might be my favorite song of the decade. It’s Taylor’s hottest song by a substantial margin but Taylor is never going to be entirely comfortable with adult situations or adult language (most notably, she can’t drop an f-bomb properly to save her life). If you want sexy songs, Taylor’s not going to be your go-to artist. For me it hits because it’s Taylor grappling with her own shallowness – she was always the girl singing about fairy tale romances, prince charmings, popular boys who just needed to see that he belonged with her. Her real life didn’t resemble that at all -- it was a never-ending array of short flings and high-profile hookups that got her a reputation as a serial dater (shockingly, for all the famous men she’s dated, she’s never been part of a power couple until the present moment). “Style” is a song about attraction but it’s also a song about pain. Taylor wants this to be more. It’s not going to be. Taylor finds this guy who treats her badly irresistible, not because he’s so attractive, but because they’re so attractive. They just look too good together on the Insta. The idea of them as a couple is too powerful. Taylor, now a young woman, has discovered that she’s much more superficial than she thought she was when she was 17. It hurts.
Taylor never confirms who her songs are about but you don’t exactly need to be Batman to figure it out. The queen of sneak disses that aren’t very sneaky and subliminals that aren’t very sub, Taylor’s subjects are always sussed out pretty easily by anyone who bothers to look. In this case (like so many), they didn’t have to look very hard – the title is close to a namedrop to Harry Styles, who she’d been seen with more than once over the past year. How lucky that his name fit the theme of the song – it doesn’t matter that they weren’t a good couple, or even a couple at all, they were stylish.
I have no way to know for sure how Harry Styles took that song, except for the song he wrote in response, “Perfect.” And judging by “Perfect,” he took it the only way he could, and the way I believe it was intended: as a massive compliment. Putting the biggest pop star in the world in so much emotional turmoil that she writes “Style” about you has to be a giant ego boost, so naturally he wrote a response. Taylor says that Harry is an irresistibly glamorous, unserious dirtbag? I sure fucking am, says Harry Styles.
But Harry Styles wasn’t quite Harry Styles yet – he was still “One Direction’s Harry Styles” at the time, still that English kid with the wild hair that seemed larger than his head. And just as Taylor’s image (and self-image) evolved as she aged into adulthood, so too did One Direction. “I might never be your knight in shining armor,” this song opens, and it feels pointed. Just as Taylor was always singing about knights in shining armor, One Direction were always being the knights in shining armor she was singing about. If Taylor Swift had unfairly high expectations of Harry Styles, it’s not hard to see where she got them from. One Direction’s first few songs are sickly-cutesy, so unctuously pandering to innocent teenage girls that I detested them immediately. You’re cute with no makeup, girl. You’ve got that one thing. You hate that you can’t fit in your jeans but I love that about you, baby. Barf.
But within a shockingly short period, One Direction had somehow become a pretty decent power pop group. (Curiously for a boyband, they were never really conversant with r&b.) Their come-ons became less oily. Their songs just plain got better, and the band was clearly moving in more sophisticated, uh, directions. (And styles!) In 2015, as Taylor dominated radio and reached new peaks of stardom, One Direction were clearly not who they were just four years earlier. They were now down a member, and those who remained were clearly eyeing the next phase of their careers, one where they wouldn’t be limited by the teen idol format. The band wouldn’t last much longer; “Perfect” was their last big single. Listening to it, you can hear at least one of them, probably all of them, ready to drop their boyband image for good.
Anyway, Harry Styles can give as good as he gets, as it turns out. (Harry shares a writing credit with another of his love interests, Louis, but Harry is obviously the main character here.) If the subject of “Style” was unspoken but obvious, “Perfect” is even more so. It’s not just a response to “Style,” it practically is “Style,” with a tune so similar it borders on legally actionable – Harry hammers the hell out of that ninth in the melody the exact same way Taylor does, JAMES-DEAN-DAY-DREAM, if you LIKE-CAUsing TROUBle-UP-in, etc. It’s the cheek of someone who is wildly high on themselves, and I can’t deny that I admire the cockiness. He saves his slyest dig for the bridge – “If you’re looking for someone to write your breakup songs about, baby I’m perfect. Baby, we’re perfect.” Early One Direction songs were deliberately generic and broad enough so that all their fans could imagine it was about them. “Perfect” is written to one person only.
Harry one-ups Taylor in one major regard – self-awareness. 1989 is probably my favorite Taylor album, and it has some very self-aware songs (“Style” being one of them) but it suffers from Taylor still being under the delusion that she’s the underdog; “Perfect” revels in superstardom. The cheap-looking video (One Direction rarely ever had good videos) was clearly shot in the middle of a tour or something, in their hotel suite, and it works at least at conveying that these are guys who can get you the fanciest room in exotic cities. I’m hot. I’m famous. I’m here for a good time, not a long time, baby. I’m too famous to be tied down. I’m here if you want to have fun. You don’t really want a real relationship. You want to have a good time with me. I’m jetting off to Kyoto tomorrow and you’re not going to see me again anytime soon. I rarely understand what makes teen pop idols attractive to women, but I get it here – boy do I.
Someone with enough ego to write a song like this clearly has outgrown the need for a band, so the band broke up and Harry went on to superstardom. “Perfect” did not at all indicate what his solo career was going to be like. Harry wants to be hot, I’m sure, but he much more wants to be respectable, he has constantly talked up the greats of classic rock and said he’s inspired by them, and though he has made many songs I like, there is something very middle-aged about the Harry Styles phenomenon. Harry no longer has the wild-man hair, and in my head I picture him as prematurely balding – he hit his mature phase too early. Harry was probably never going to follow Justin Timberlake’s path and he didn’t have to, he always intended to be a rock star, but there are many kinds of classic rock. He could stand to be a little trashier, listen to a little more Van Halen and a little less Steely Dan. That’d be perfect.
I am really sorry that it's been quiet around here, I intended to have the video done as much as two weeks ago but life has been kicking my ass, I can't really go into details but basically I got sucked through a wormhole into a dimension full of angry mutant alligators, who have been kicking my ass. I will get back on track. In the meantime, please vote in the Song vs. Song poll! We're doing "Paper Planes" vs. "Feel Good Inc."
The next video is coming, and it's one of my most requested. But I'll only do it if you vote in the poll. We're doing "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship vs. "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" from Dirty Dancing https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-ive-had-104301801
Have you ever actually listened to this fucking thing?
One of the movies from the last ten years I’m fascinated with is The Founder, a Social Network-style biopic about the rise of McDonald’s Corporation founder Ray Kroc. I (and the movie) use those words carefully, because Kroc did not found the restaurant, but the holding corporation that basically stole the company from the McDonald Brothers who actually founded it.No one seems super-impressed with this movie, but for me, watching it in theaters right after the Trump election, it was one of the darkest and most chilling films about America I’d ever seen, and part of the reason was that, on a literal level, it wasn’t very dark at all. On paper, it’s dark, a man losing his soul in the name of success; on screen, it’s as bright and sunshiney as the golden arches. Director John Lee Hancock doesn’t direct darkness, visually or thematically; he sees the beauty in McDonald’s, it’s as American as apple pie, both a symbol of can-do entrepreneurship and of the idealized ‘50s white-picket-fence suburbia, even as Kroc ruthlessly steals the idea, steals the money, even steals the McDonald Bros.’ very name. Seeing the director of The Blind Side making a movie like this caused profound dissonance for me as a viewer; Ray Kroc’s shady land deals aren’t the dark underbelly of American culture, it is the culture. Ray won the game of American capitalism fair and square. I heard another critic call it Frank Capra’s There Will Be Blood, and I can’t think of a better way to put it.
I had a similar feeling of dissonance the other day listening to Huey Lewis and the News’ “Hip to Be Square,” a song made immortal by another chilling movie about American businessmen. You know it. A lot of you can recite it line by line. American Psycho never quite worked for me for reasons I was never able to pinpoint (The Rules of Attraction, for me, is the definitive Bret Easton Ellis adaptation), but it sure sticks in the brain, especially if you write about music for a living. I’m hardly alone among music writers when I say that Patrick Bateman is one of my favorite critics and I would have read every single one of his reviews; I think most of us are in awe of both his depth of analysis and his prose. I’ve heard the interpretation that he’s just parroting other people’s thoughts he’s heard; I don’t buy it. Bateman’s music reviews are clearly in his voice – for example he repeatedly calls Whitney Houston a jazz singer and he thinks Genesis’s “Illegal Alien” is hi-larious – but there’s also simply the fact of his tastes – he loves Whitney Houston, Huey Lewis, Phil Collins, he hates Peter Gabriel and Elvis Costello. In 1988, Bret Easton Ellis wrote Patrick Bateman as someone who could wax rhapsodic about bullshit yuppie music as a way to show his emptiness. Who the fuck cares enough about sellout-era Genesis to dissect them in depth? Well, many people, actually; someone said – and I have repeated this insight many times – that American Psycho has aged strangely because his insane way of talking about music is just normal stan-speak now. But while you can and do see modern pop fans dissecting the genius of Phil Collins and Whitney Houston, I can’t imagine someone doing the same for Huey. Only Patrick Bateman would compliment a band for their “clear crisp sound” and “professionalism.” Only Patrick Bateman would think Huey Lewis is a better chronicler of the Vietnam vet than Bruce Springsteen. Put bluntly, a person who has serious considered opinions about Huey Lewis is a fucking serial killer, just as true now as it was in 1988.
I like Huey Lewis and the News just fine, for the record. I think “Do You Believe in Love?” and especially “The Power of Love” are genuinely great new wave songs that deserve to be listed alongside The Cars’ self-titled (though Lewis’s new wave roots are mostly forgotten by everyone except for obsessives like Bateman). I think a well-written pop song is nothing to dismiss, and Huey Lewis wrote many of them. But what turns off serious critics from Huey Lewis is what turns Bateman on to it — the complete lack of anything beneath the surface. They’re slick on top – crisp, clean, professional – and there’s just nothing else to say about it.
“Hip to Be Square” comes from Fore!, the follow-up to their commercial peak Sports. (It is very hard not to slip into Patrick Bateman-like affectation when talking about this band.) According to Bateman, “Hip to Be Square” is the best song on the record, about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. That’s one way to put it. Huey Lewis and the News, the normiest and most mainstream of normie mainstream bands, was talking about his “scene,” and specifically how the image of cool rebellion had died and its place were bands like the News. Huey Lewis claims that he was a rebel once. Now he watches his weight and wears a suit. He’s not doing it out of self-improvement, he swears, it’s just who he is now, and he’s reaped the benefits. His style is popular. All the cool kids have done the same. “Those that were the farthest out have gone the other way.” It was true! There was no functional difference between Huey Lewis and Mick Jagger by that point except Mick’s dangerous past, rapidly disappearing in the rearview.
Tons of mainstream artists have noticed that their success didn’t make them cool, and many have bristled at it. Paul McCartney wrote “Silly Love Songs” almost defiantly, standing up for the simple pleasures of corniness. Billy Joel audibly chafes with anger on “It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me,” cluelessly venting about new wave and punk (I am always happy to say that “It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me” is my second least favorite song of all time). But what is Huey Lewis saying? What does he feel about it? In the movie, Patrick Bateman says it’s not just about conformity and trends, but a “personal statement about the band itself.” This is truncated from the book, and the full line is noteworthy: “It’s also a personal statement about the band itself, although of what I’m not quite sure.”
I’m not fucking sure either, Patrick! I honestly have absolutely no goddamn idea what Huey Lewis’s point is. I sense no defiance from Huey Lewis. I sense no anger. Unlike the always thin-skinned Billy Joel, Huey sees himself as a victor, and doesn’t bristle about the critics calling him a sellout nerd. He doesn’t hear them, they don’t exist to him. But I don’t hear satisfaction or triumph in “Hip to Be Square” either. I can tell that Huey Lewis sees the success of the yuppie rock scene as something ironic, weird, a reversal of everyone’s understanding of what rock & roll is supposed to be. In the movie, Bateman says that Huey Lewis has a more biting, acerbic wit than Elvis Costello. That’s a psychotic opinion, but it does make the tiniest bit more sense in the book where he’s talking about Huey’s nervy early work, before he started having hits. Four albums later, Huey is no longer that guy. There’s nothing pointed about “Hip to Be Square,” no bite beneath the glossy exterior. My mind screams that no one could write a meta song like this without some kind of perspective, but for the life of me, I cannot tell at all why Huey wrote this. Maybe it's like how rappers rap about the drug game without judgment; it's not right or wrong, it just is. Huey didn't choose the conformist life, the conformist life chose him.
And oh my god, musically this song is so fucking lame!! I guess on purpose?? To fit the lyrics?? Or the music is just as lame as always and the lyrics finally match it? But even for the News this song is chipper and dorky – something about the chirping outro (“here there and everywhere! Hip, hip, so hip to be square!”) feels obnoxious to the point of terrifying, which is compounded by the weird music video (Patrick calls this Huey’s only bad video). For some reason it is shot is extreme close-up of all the instruments; you see the keys being pressed and the strings being strummed and you see back into Huey’s tonsils as he sings but you never get a clean shot of the band or see their faces at all except occasionally bouncing around in the background behind Huey’s head. I don’t know what the intent is there, perhaps purposely emphasizing the music at the expense of the band, but the effect is cute and a bit off-putting, like a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse bit. Maybe this is why Patrick doesn’t like it. He’s a disturbing guy but he doesn’t like disturbing things; he likes comforting slop, and the video is too weird (too arty? Like Genesis’s early work?).
“It's so catchy most people don’t listen to the lyrics. But they should!” I honestly have never listened to this song at all, not in full, until a week ago and it took me out. There’s something just screamingly wrong about it. I’m not even calling it bad exactly but it does bother me in ways I can’t articulate. I am no rebel myself, and I like mainstream music. I find Bateman inspiring, and my entire career has been trying to plumb the depths of mainstream music in much the same way he does. But “Hip to Be Square” does something to me. I once thought soundtracking a brutal slasher scene with “Hip to Be Square” was a brilliant thematic choice, but having now listened to it with my ears on, I think it’s almost too obvious, like having Tim Burton direct Alice in Wonderland. There’s no charge behind it. Just Huey’s smiling leathery face, bobbing, rocking, singing, his heart of rock and roll still beating, but what goes in his head a complete mystery.
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Twenty-three years and some weeks ago, roughly around Valentine’s Day 2001, Nicole Kidman danced her way out of Scientology’s clutches, bouncing out of her lawyer’s offices in triumph after signing the final divorce papers with Tom Cruise. Five years later, she remarried, to a fellow Aussie, country singer Keith Urban. Keith and Nicole aren’t as high-profile as Nicole’s last marriage – it’s very hard for anyone in country music to reach Tom Cruise’s level of fame – and, working in two entirely different spheres of showbiz, it’d be hard for them to connect their two careers the way Tom and Nicole did. But they’re certainly a very visible couple – at every single awards show, be it in Nashville or Hollywood, there they are on each other’s arms (and it always jarring because they make no sense to be there until you remember who they’re married to). It's been nearly twenty years since they met and they’ve been one of the most steadfastly, even boringly happy couples in celebritydom.
I don’t have a lot of strong feelings or attachments to Keith Urban, whose long career happened during a time when I was mostly not listening to country music so I can’t say I’m very familiar with his oeuvre. I associate him mostly with two songs. One of them is “You’ll Think of Me,” a breakup ballad that got a tiny amount of pop crossover and which I can only describe as “simpering.” The other is “John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16,” an absolute all-timer in literally-just-a-list-of-things country music (Nashville’s most disreputable subgenre). He reads as a Hollywood pretty boy, with his earrings and boyband blond streaks in his hair, his pretty tenor with a minor twang that doesn’t really seem natural.
So I’m not particularly interested in him as a person or an artist, but I do like celebrity gossip, and something about “The Fighter,” a single from 2017, catches my notice. Allegedly it was inspired by, of all things, “Marvin Gaye” by Charlie Puth and Meghan Trainor, the worst song ever written; Keith says it made him want to do a male-female duet, and I hope that was literally the only inspiration he got from it. Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like that. It’s… fine. Lyrically, it’s not super-interesting. But the title line makes my ears perk up: “(And if I get scared?) / I’ll hold you tighter / When they’re trying to get to you, baby, I’ll be the fighter.”
I’m sorry, but who the hell is “they”? Urban says the song is about their early courtship, and how Keith won Nicole’s heart after her painful breakup. Sure, the song is about love, not the past, and winning the heart of a divorcee is a difficult and rewarding endeavor and the kind of thing you write a song about. Nicole tries to speak about Tom as little as possible these days and I’m not sure Keith has even mentioned Tom in public ever. But the song begins “I know he hurt you,” “he didn’t deserve you” – whether intended or not, that’s a straight shot at Tom Cruise. And Urban singing that he’ll fight off anyone who tries to get to her? Knowing what I know about Scientology, and the extremely weird circumstances of Tom’s divorce to Nicole and then to Katie Holmes, it does make me wonder. What exactly was Nicole scared of, who was coming after her, sixteen years after her divorce, that made him write that?
This is probably not the first thing anyone notices about “The Fighter” – the first thing anyone notices is that it’s not a country song. I almost wouldn’t call it selling out because that implies that he’s watered down his sound; instead, it’s so radically different from his sound. But, country music eventually picks up all the discarded sounds of yesteryear, and Urban has never been the most authentic of country singers, so who better than him to pick up the gated drums and synths of ‘80s pop, right?
Actually, there are lots of people better than Urban to do this, we’ve lived through two decades of ‘80s nostalgia and it’s really not a neglected sound in music. And yet, Keith Urban does add something to this sound, something I have difficulty defining, something that’s definitely not there in the throwback works of Dua Lipa or The Weeknd. Certainly, he throws himself into it, playing his guitar in his short-sleeve tee and his duet partner Carrie Underwood (never cuter) in a Flashdance torn sweatshirt. I can’t really think of a song that sounds like this, not from today nor really from the ‘80s – “The Fighter” literally uses the same chord structure as “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and makes the same promises in the lyrics, but I wouldn’t mistake one for the other.
I think what Keith Urban adds to the equation, the thing that The Weeknd or Dua Lipa do not, is his country-star earnestness. There used to be a place for guys like that in mainstream pop, pretty po-faced white guys whose blandness only underscored their sincerity. Keith Urban wound up a country singer because that’s the only place that would accept a guy like him but in another time he could have been a Corey Hart, a John Waite, a Rick Springfield. Something about the way he carries himself and strums his guitar in this video makes me think he’s been trying to be Bryan Adams his entire career; on this track, far more pop than anything Adams ever attempted, Keith outdoes him.
What synthesizers do for Keith Urban is clarifying, but what they do for Carrie Underwood is revelatory. Despite coming right out of the gate with two or three massive crossover hits, Carrie Underwood has resolutely stayed in her lane, never once attempting to escape the safe confines of Nashville (and becoming one of the vanishingly few female singers to have sustained success doing so). That might be to protect herself from the vagaries of the vindictive country industry, or it might just be lack of interest, but “The Fighter” shows that she very easily could have been a dance diva. Carrie’s oeuvre tends toward the rock-ier end of country, stuff that lets her belt full-force (and indeed she already had an ‘80s power ballad in her catalog, Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home”, not to mention the many she sang on “Idol”) and the sweaty synth-and-guitar ‘80s could have been good for her too. But it feels like she doesn’t have enough songs in her catalog that actually tap into her essential wholesomeness. In “The Fighter,” she sounds loose and like she’s actually having fun, and in the video she is adorable, bouncing around and dancing in a way that I am just not accustomed to seeing her. The video is barebones (maybe evoking the cheapo videos they used to make for these kinds of songs) but it allows the chemistry between Keith and Carrie to shine. They look like two people who actually enjoy each other’s company.
Despite its blatant attempt at crossing over, “The Fighter” did mid numbers both on country and adult contemporary. I never once heard “The Fighter” on the radio, but I was living in New York City, a place that’s allergic to country music (and to decent radio stations, for that matter). Keith, though never the most authentic of singers, has always kept one leg in country music ever since (he did make a guest appearance on a Rita Ora song this year which I don’t recommend listening to). I don’t think this is a huge loss, since “The Fighter” falls pretty short of greatness; Urban says he wrote it quickly, and it shows. (The first verse in particular is so half-assed that calling it a first draft seems too generous, it’s more like an adlib. “Your precious heart is a precious heart”? Come on, Urban. Try harder.)
Still, there’s something about the song’s cuteness that lights it up. Urban has a little video with his wife on his YouTube page where they turn the song on and sing along. “Oh my god I love this song!” Nicole squeals with mock surprise, it’s a joke but I think she does probably genuinely love this song. Like, I get that the staging of the video is intentional, to make them seem like a relatable married couple in love and not a platinum-selling artist singing to his movie star wife, but it works on me. I hope he’s been fighting off Scientology goons for her all this time.
Anyway, I needed a decently long break after the top tens but I'm back. Let me know if you see any errors.
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If you’d asked me which Fleetwood Mac member was my favorite, I think I’d probably say Lindsey. I remember being knocked the fuck out the first time I heard “Go Your Own Way”; I’d never heard a guitar sound like it was in physical pain before. And of course Stevie Nicks was the star, the focus puller, the personality, the best songwriter. The first Fleetwood Mac song I knew and loved was the same one most of their fans knew, “Rhiannon,” the one that would define her witchy image forever. And of course, once I got into Rock Band, I learned to really appreciate a good rhythm section, and John McVie and Mick Fleetwood were one of the best. (“Go Your Own Way” doesn’t seem like it’d be so hard on drums! But it is! Very unique stuff going on in that song. “Dreams” is Stevie’s finest moment but it wouldn’t be half the song it is without that perfect groove from John and Mick.)
By contrast, I couldn’t get into Christine McVie. Didn’t really like her voice, didn’t really like her songs; “Don’t Stop,” “Say You Love Me,” “You Make Lovin’ Fun,” too corny for me, all of them. They didn’t have Lindsay’s edge or Stevie’s witchy mystery; it seemed wrong that one of the band’s three main songwriters was so… normal. Just sitting there behind her piano, singing with her AM easy listening voice… there was just something just flatly uncool about Christine McVie that I just could not vibe with.
I had two Fleetwood Mac albums, the two really beloved ones, Fleetwood Mac and Rumours. It would be a long long time before I heard Tango in the Night, the fifth and final album from Fleetwood Mac’s superstar-era lineup. Even by Fleetwood Mac standards, Tango in the Night was apparently a tortured affair; it wasn’t even supposed to be a Fleetwood Mac album, but Mick convinced Lindsay Buckingham that his planned solo album would make a lot more money with the band. It must have been meant to make a lot of money, because it certainly sounds expensive.
The late ‘80s were a ruinous time for classic rock acts. Not necessarily commercially – many of these records sold in buckets – but certainly artistically (and worse, aesthetically). By this point the old guard had begun relying on (or were forced to use) outside songwriters, and layering their songs in up-to-date production like synths and gated drums. Almost all of these records sound like shit now, and were disavowed by their artists once the ‘80s were over, and even if things turned out well, it felt wrong. Heart scored several giant hits after their mid-‘80s comeback that are still loved today, but they had to become a viscerally different act to do it – barely a band at all, singing songs they didn’t write played by musicians who were not members of Heart. Fleetwood Mac walked into that zeitgeist still carrying some semblance of integrity – lineup still intact, all writing their own songs – but the times still took a toll on them. Like so many veteran bands trying to carry on in the glam ‘80s, they sound completely disconnected; the music doesn’t sound like any of the members were in the same studio in the same time (which in this case was often the case; Stevie Nicks was in and out, preoccupied with her solo record and substance abuse treatment). Fractiousness was always part of the Fleetwood Mac story, but it hadn’t been a problem before – “The Chain,” stitched together from three different songs that didn’t pan out, is their most cohesive song. Here, you can very much hear studio razzle-dazzle before you hear anything human.
So it’s some kind of miracle that Tango in the Night sounds fucking amazing. Lindsay Buckingham put everything into it as a producer; where so many of the synths of that era sound gloopy and tacky now, they sound absolutely perfect here. Even more impressively, they don’t sound like anything else going on – not the new wave that launched these sounds nor the adult contemporary that shitted up the charts at the time. But the biggest revelation, for me at least, was Christine. Christine fucking owns that record. The album’s two biggest hits from it, “Little Lies” and “Everywhere,” were both Christine’s (and for my money “Little Lies” is Christine’s finest moment period). “Isn’t It Midnight?”, meanwhile, was the forgotten sixth and final single, the last glimpse of the classic band before they started shedding members and headed into their flop-and-reunion-tours legacy years. It should have been a bigger song. “Isn’t It Midnight?” cooks.
The music video, as per a late single for a big album, is just live concert footage. It fits here though; “Isn’t It Midnight?” is the closest that Fleetwood Mac ’87 sounds to a real band. The guitar riff drives, the drums lock in a groove with it rather than booming over top. This is surely the hardest song in Christine’s catalog. Then the synths kick in. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” sings Christine, and then a male voice (Lindsey?) repeats it, speaking rather than singing. It’s faintly ridiculous but in the good way. The fact that they don’t sound like a physical band works in their favor, turning the sound into a magical unreality; it evokes a specific brand of ‘80s fantasy heavy on orbs and unicorns and pink fog. Stevie had always been the mystical one, but something about Buckingham’s production unlocks Christine, makes her voice smoky and dreamlike. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” doesn’t sound like a forgotten lover’s lament; it sounds like the key to unlocking a magic spell of some kind. Or maybe it’s the fact that this is the one song of her that remains in a minor key; “Isn’t It Midnight?” finally makes me understand why Christine is a member of this band, delivers all of the things I love about Fleetwood Mac, the passion, the mystique, the drama.
The song finishes with a minute and a half of shredding from Lindsey. Lindsey was the first to leave. Fleetwood Mac would soldier on with various lineups, do reunion tours, have a revival after Bill Clinton used “Don’t Stop” as a campaign theme. People don’t remember this (including me; I was shocked to discover this) but in the ‘90s Fleetwood Mac were actually pretty uncool, a dinosaur act not particularly loved by critics, a mega-seller pop act like ABBA and the Bee Gees, still well-remembered but not necessarily well-respected. The Simpsons listed them alongside “Disco Duck” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo” as dated kitsch from Homer and Marge’s youth. Somewhere along the way, around the late ‘90s, their reputation went from something similar to The Eagles – soft-rockers begrudgingly admitted by critics into the rock canon – to the coolest band that ever existed. That glamour mostly applies to their ‘70s output and Stevie’s solo hits, but when Christine died in 2022, Tango in the Night is the record I reached for instinctively. At the time “Everywhere” was everywhere, thanks to a persistent car commercial, but “Isn’t It Midnight?” still leaps out to me as the standout, and it hit me harder as a eulogy for Christine. Do you remember the face of a pretty girl? I do now.
/edit ugh sorry, didn't realize it was private, it's fixed now
/2nd edit made some alterations based on your feedback
I'm so exhausted. It's done. I'm never working again. I'm going to start working on my retirement video. No, I'm going to retire before I can even make a retirement video. God.
Anyway, if you see any errors, let me know.
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Yvette Nicole Brown, to me, seemed like the odd cast member out in Community – a character actress given the chance to shine, and who didn’t really seem steeped in the world of oddball comedy like Donald Glover or Chevy Chase or much of the Dan Harmon-verse. I guess that was true of all the women on the show, but Gillian Jacobs and Alison Brie were at least hot up-and-coming actresses, whereas Yvette’s character Shirley was also an odd one out, a middle-aged churchgoing mom who was alternately sweet and stern but much more grounded than the wacky other cast members. I wondered where she came from, and started looking. I found a lot of one-off guest spots on more traditional sitcoms – her recurring role on Drake & Josh, a supporting role on a short-lived vehicle for pre-superstardom Kevin Hart. What had she done before that? I looked harder. I found this.
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In 1992, Michael Bivins was riding high. Not necessarily because of his music, not at that moment in time. The band he had made his name with, New Edition, was broken up. He and two other ex-members reformed as Bell Biv Devoe and scored some big hits, but they were between albums at the moment – and when they finally did follow it up, they wouldn’t be nearly as successful. Much like Wilson Phillips, Nelson and Vanilla Ice, BBD would end up a phenomenon strictly confined to the year of 1990.
But Bivins had visions far beyond singing and dancing for a living. If New Jack Swing can be considered part of hip-hop, Bivins is maybe the first of hip-hop’s specific breed of entrepreneur – one who was making money at all ends in every avenue, in talent management, in fashion, in production. He started scouting out talent, and he unearthed a major find for Motown Records with Another Bad Creation, a group of preteen singers who had a big year in 1991. His biggest success would hit shortly after. A four-man vocal group, named "Boyz II Men" after a New Edition song, sought him out at one of his concerts, and Bivins, seeing potential, adopted them as his first clients and molded them into a prep-chic commercial powerhouse. Boyz II Men’s sales records are basically unfathomable now; they would soon have all the Philly steaks they could eat. Their first single, “Motownphilly,” had references to Bell Biv Devoe and Another Bad Creation, but the Boyz would blast so far past them in fame that those shoutouts seem almostcondescending now. 1992 also started out well for Bivins, with his next act MC Brains landing just outside the top 20 with “Oochie Coochie” (no mean feat considering that this song is terrible). Bivins was the man behind all their success, and with his three-artist development deal with Motown fulfilled, he was now cashing in that clout. Motown gave him the green light; soon, Bivins had signed a major partnership between Motown and his brand new label, Biv 10 Records.
The first thing Bivins’s new label released was a single and video called “1-4-All-4-1,” and judging by it, he built up a gigantic roster very quickly. “1-4-All-4-1” is basically a sampler platter showcasing the entire Biv 10 lineup, and by the end of the video, the first thing you will think is that there is way too goddamn many of them. How could a label spread this thin hope to make any of these people successful? That is of course me extrapolating from hindsight, because basically no one from Biv 10 (minus Yvette Nicole Brown) were ever seen again.
The thrill of finding an artifact like the East Coast Family isn’t exactly that it’s embarrassing. The early ‘90s was a time of rapid sudden change in the music industry, but New Jack Swing isn’t necessarily embarrassing the way that hair metal or pop rap was; it’s actually a key stage in the evolution of r&b, and people never stopped jamming to “Poison” or “Motownphilly.” So I wouldn’t say that it’s aged badly – but it has certainly aged. You can pinpoint the exact moment it was made by one act that actually is quite embarrassing: an act called "1010" consisting of two squeaky-voiced preteen rappers wearing their clothes the wrong way. Kriss Kross-mania didn’t last very long, so the existence of Kriss Kross ripoffs means this was made by February 1993 at the very latest. That’s only the most specific example of a vast array of period signifiers – others are the clown-colored fashions, the vests with no shirt underneath, the fact that all the rappers use the diggity-iggity rhyme pattern, the fact that it’s a New Jack Swing song at all.
So it's a glorified commercial for the label, but does it work as a song? Can it be enjoyed unironically? A big impediment to that is that posse cuts are for rappers, not r&b singers who make up the majority of the stable. A rapper can impress with eight bars, an r&b singer usually needs a full song to do their showing off. (The small handful of group acts in the mix are especially hamstrung here, having to share time with not only their labels but their own bandmates.)
None of the performers are really given a chance to shine, but if I had to pick some highlights – there is one obvious standout and that is Hayden, a round-faced Midwesterner who looks like an O-lineman, or Donkey Lips from Salute Your Shorts, a guy so absurdly wrong for the role that he somehow becomes right. Hayden sings his short verse, he dances, he’s awkwardly holding a suit jacket so that he can finish by casually slinging it over his shoulder – a setup so contrived that you couldn’t possibly fake it. Beautiful.
A Caucasian act also provides the lowlight. This pack of dudes had previously made a brief, contextless cameo in the “Motownphilly” video under the name “Sudden Impact”; they appear here again, bafflingly renamed “Whytgize.” They’re wearing sharp suits that immediately mark them as swagless New Kids on the Block wannabes (joining 1010 in making their inspirations too obvious). The track slams too hard to give their harmonies any breathing room, and they don’t have the attitude. No one else really makes much of an impact either, although I do like the one guy who provides a house piano solo while not singing.
That’s the major problem that makes this a campy relic rather than an unearthed hidden gem -- the fact that this is a random collection of never-wases gives the entire enterprise an air of failure. Ooh, it's Tomboyy, Lady V, MarkFinesse and Fruit Punch -- who? Each and every name looks silly. (Young Money may have had to give time to Jae Millz and Gudda Gudda but at least they had Drake and Nicki in between.) The only famous people on this track are the previously mentioned Boyz II Men, ABC and MC Brains, who lend some cred but none of whom were actually on Biv 10.
In fact, Biv 10 Records never wound up doing much of anything – their one major success was the girl group 702 (Where my girls at, from the front to back! You remember it), and they signed on well after “1-4-All-4-1” was recorded. Bivins claims that he was sabotaged by the record industry – Motown’s partnership terms were too generous, and the industry sabotaged his success to make sure such deals didn’t become commonplace. It’s easy to call bullshit, and just assume that it failed because he was an immature 22-year-old juggling too much responsibility and too many artists. And yet, a brash 22-year-old hip-hop entrepreneur at an upstart label did become a wild success and upend r&b that year. That would be Sean “Puffy” Combs, and he became the model of what Bivins was trying to achieve; that year, he launched Jodeci and Mary J. Blige and started a new era he called “hip-hop soul.” Two years later, his label Uptown Records fired him, so he started his own, Bad Boy, and the rest is history. I’m not sure whether Puff Daddy’s success is evidence for or against Bivins’s record cartel conspiracy theory; is he proof that Bivins could have succeeded, or is it just evidence that Bivins wasn't as good a businessman as Puffy? Hard to say, but Puffy’s impact shows where Biv 10 failed. Mary J. and Jodeci made sure that New Jack Swing would be, while important, a thing of the past. Bivins only followed trends; Diddy started them.
Two years after I first found this video in 2019, former MTV host Dave Holmes released a passion project 10-part podcast called "Waiting for Impact," dedicated to finding out what happened to Sudden Impact/Whytgize. I listened to it over the holidays to fact-check this article, I'd say it's only partially successful – it’s interesting to examine the travails of the music industry through one of its many luckless dreamers, but unfortunately there’s just not that much to say about Whytgize. But a number of other East Coast Family members are interviewed, including Yvette and Hayden, and the most interesting thing to me about the podcast is that all of Holmes’s interviewees seem to have fond memories of Bivins, even though he sold them the moon and didn’t deliver. (Yvette, who played Bivins’s mom in the TV biopic he produced, is especially fond of him.) “1-4-All-4-1” promises a tight, united crew of friends in Biv 10. A black singer, Calé, sings “damn it’s gettin’ it right whether it’s black or it’s white” and gives Hayden a big high-five. I love this moment, and I love that Yvette still tweets at Hayden as old friends. The thesis of the podcast is that lack of success isn’t failing; yeah, maybe. But there’s pathos in failure – look at this happy group of people, united, about to catch their big break or so they all think. The East Coast Family actually looks like a family. The more I think about it, the more I think that vibe would have been harshed if any of them had made it. They all got nothing, so they could all share it; they truly are one for all and all for one.
/edit Okay, I got up from my nap and apparently I had a broken matte layer error that I've fixed now. Sorry about that. I'm still very tired. Also sorry about the random double post.
First off, guys, before I say anything, I need you to do to something for me. I need you to go to the Song vs. Song Patreon and go vote on our Christmas episode, where we’re doing “Santa Tell Me” vs. “Underneath the Tree.” Thank you. https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-poll-santa-93464774
Anyway. So you guys may or may not know by now, but I just released my most successful video ever. I hadn't yet put it up in here, because it’s so out of my wheelhouse. (I am working on the worst list, for the record.) You guys have been pretty understanding in general, and I did a lot of work on that video so I’m going to go ahead and charge for it. I didn’t give you guys 24 hours exclusive access like I do for my normal episodes, so if you guys think that’s out of line or you don’t feel like a video like this is something you want to pay for, I understand – please message me, and I’ll make sure you don’t get charged. To give you guys something worth your buck, though, I thought I’d share some thoughts about where my head has been at these past 12 months. I’m not sure where to start with this one, so I may as well bring it around back to where it all started: Anakin Skywalker.
Anakin Skywalker doesn’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. Also, he is haunted by the kiss that you should never have given him. His heart is beating, hoping that kiss will not become a scar. You are in his very soul, tormenting him. I have watched these scenes over and over and just laughed and laughed my ass off, but I feel like this is mostly the fault of George Lucas, an infamously bad writer of dialogue and director of actors. I don’t blame Hayden Christensen, who I think is a good actor who got ruined by Lucas and never got his real shot. I know he’s a good actor because he gave one of my favorite performances ever, as the sniveling fraud in 2003’s Shattered Glass.
I don’t think Shattered Glass was what made me want to be a reporter. I got into journalism because I had to major in something, and that was the only real path for someone who could write, but couldn’t write fiction. I can say, though, that Shattered Glass left a huge mark on my psyche. I loved that movie. I’ve watched it many times over the course of my life, including the past couple weeks. In college, and afterwards, I ended up reading all I could about Stephen Glass, the real guy it’s about, and I did my senior thesis about him. It’s one of my favorite movies – favorite stories – ever.
If you don’t know, Stephen Glass was a star reporter in the late ‘90s for venerable political mag The New Republic. (In my journalism classes I learned to write phrases like “venerable political mag.”) Glass wrote wild, offbeat articles, about topics like political novelty conventions that sold Monica Lewinsky condoms, or Wall Street workers who revered Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan like he was Springsteen. It turns out that these stories were all fake; he invented them, completely. Adam Penenberg, a writer for Forbes's online magazine, pulled the thread on just a single story of his and it all came crashing down.
Anyway, they made a movie about it, and it’s fantastic (if you like dry films about serious people talking seriously in office buildings, at least). For some reason it inspired me more than All the President’s Men or, later, Spotlight, movies where our heroic newspapermen uncover great horrible crimes. I guess you could call Shattered Glass an underdog story – the highly respected institution The New Republic, “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” KO’d by an Internet reporter back when online news was a joke – but embarrassing a snobby periodical is hardly toppling governments or changing the world. Penenberg himself largely disappears from the movie around the halfway point. And yet, there was something to it, something primal – not a story of reporter vs. power, but reporter vs. reporter. Mirror match, Link vs. Dark Link. The good journalist vs. the bad journalist. Truth vs. lies. Why, this was a story about the importance of journalism itself. At one point Penenberg exhaustively lists all the sources he researched trying to get to the truth, and it made me proud to be a reporter. This was a real job; this was hard, honest work I was doing.
Eventually I realized that reporting pays dick, and I wound up making jokes about Justin Bieber’s haircut on the Internet for a living instead (for a lot more money than I did when I was serving the public interest). I’m a successful critic but I’ve never considered myself a very good one – it’s never come easy to me, it’s just a job I fell into. As I write this, I’ve been trying to finish this one Nickelback episode for three months and I can’t seem to get it done (addendum: I finally finished it a couple weeks ago and I think it came out well). Focusing on work just seems harder and harder these days, and it doesn’t help that around this time last year, I had less time to focus on work, because I met someone. His name was James.
In December 2022, two of my friends (Princess Weekes and Maggie Mae Fish), got into a minor argument on Twitter with someone over the hiring practices of our sponsor/platform Nebula. That person was James Somerton, a YouTuber who had been trying to join. Both of them were very angry about his baseless accusations; I was talking about it with them, and as I go through my texts now, I see that I wrote “oh is this the plagiarist guy.” So I must have already heard about him, and the fact that there were some free-floating plagiarism accusations against him; I don’t remember when or for what though, I didn’t know anything about him and I instinctively tune out YouTuber drama. Not my business.
Other people do care about YouTuber drama though. I think it was this little flare-up that brought Somerton, and his minor controversies, to the attention of Harry “HBomberguy” Brewis. I also don’t remember when or from who I heard that HBomberguy was planning to make them his next video (I’ve met and spoken to Harry a few times but we’re not close). But I do remember thinking it was a bad look, and not a good idea. My guiding principle is that drama is bad; I’ve seen so many people caught up in an Internet firestorm who were bombarded with harassment and trolls, and the thought made me ill, even when it happened to genuinely awful people. So I didn’t think exposing other YouTubers to that was a good idea, especially when it’s a giant like Harry vs. some loser I’d never heard of. But it wasn’t really my business.
But I’m skipping ahead (maybe). One event I can definitively place in the timeline happened in January, when I heard some murmurings on Twitter about Somerton again. Somerton, who had complained that Nebula had no queer content (extremely not true), had made a video called “Why Bad Gays Are Good” that was making people upset. Curiosity got the better of me, so for the first time I watched one of his videos. It was dogshit – incoherent, thesis-less rambling, just rancid stuff – but towards the end of the video he made a truly shocking argument: all the cool gays had died during the AIDS crisis, and the unfuckable losers who remained had led the gay rights movement towards sellout assimilationist goals like marriage and military service. This was both wildly offensive and completely historically inaccurate, and I was so shocked that I broke my usual no-drama reserve and subtweeted about it. I mean, this was the guy who was arguing that Nebula should hire him so that he could make “exclusively queer content” for them! Imagine the firestorm if Nebula had hyped up their “queer content” and then published this! But I got some pushback. In response to my tweet, some of his fans got on me, and they were clearly twisting what he had very clearly said to make it sound okay. What had he done to deserve this devotion? I got curious again.
I vaguely remembered hearing someone complain about one of his other videos, that it had lacked historical rigor or something like that. I found it and left it on in the background while I websurfed; it was called “The Gay Image Body Crisis.” I didn’t necessarily like it, I was only half-paying attention to it, but it was clearly a lot better written and structured, and it included some heartbreaking personal stuff about growing up a fat kid in a world (especially a gay world) that looked down on fat people. I could see now why he had an audience; he knew how to dress and light a set, he could structure an argument, most importantly he knew how to deliver lines into a mic in an authoritative tone. I did have some issues with it, like a rambling segment about the definition of fascism that seemed unnecessary, plus there was a lot of historical stuff that didn’t have citation or seem backed up by anything, especially a part about how Nazis had invented our current standards of body fitness. By this point, talk amongst my colleagues about Somerton’s plagiarism was starting to come up more frequently, and I was curious if this one had any allegations against it, so I did some Googling about what people had said about this one video. I found a single comment on Reddit that called the entire thing bad history, which backed up my suspicion that Somerton’s conclusions were a little stretched. But it didn’t strike me as outrageously so… not until I read the part about how, counter to the claims in the video, Ernst Rohm’s murder had nothing to do with him being fat. That troubled me. I’m not up on my Nazi history, I had never even heard of Ernst Rohm, but doing just some cursory reading, I realized there was no way that Rohm was killed for being fat. The rest of the video may have had “truthiness” vibes, yeah, some unsourced analysis, sure, but this… this was something else. It was even worse than his dumb claim about who died of AIDS, which was just a wrong conclusion extrapolated from a snarky Fran Lebowitz quote. Here, Somerton had shared a fun factoid that was completely fabricated. I went back and thought harder about what I’d just watched. Did he really say poor people got fat during the Great Depression? Did he say that the Soviets weren’t attractive because they were always wearing heavy coats? What? Come to think of it, his personal stories about his weight problems also seemed wildly exaggerated for sympathy; he claimed he couldn’t even buy XXXL button-up shirts. He didn’t at all look that fat. Who the hell was this guy?
This was all concerning, but it wasn’t half as concerning as the next thing I discovered. I mentioned this story to a friend, and she told me she had spotted a different fact in one of his videos that seemed made up. In his video about the history of gay adult film, Somerton claimed that gay porn studio BelAmi had invented Skype. I thought I was hearing things. Surely, he just meant that pornography in general had influenced streaming technology in general, or maybe that’s what he had meant to say and misremembered it or fudged a detail or something. But no, it wasn’t a misspeak. He was very clear and detailed about this: He had a whole full segment that porn – specifically gay porn– had literally invented dozens of web innovations, climaxing with how this specific porn studio had created this specific branded technology. “What a weird thing to say!” I texted back. “What an incredibly weird thing to say!!!” Who just says something like that??
At that point I was off to the races. Something about the sheer inanity of “Gay porn invented Skype” set something off in my brain. I wanted to watch everything he had ever made. In February, I watched another video, and he claimed that England had had a homophobic propaganda campaign against Italian tourism. What? When?? I clicked another random video and he said China was faking its box office and announcing it only in English to taunt the West. What? What?? (I was saying “What?” a lot at this point.) I wouldn’t have caught either of these shady claims if I wasn’t looking for them (in both cases, my brain didn’t flag them until long after I’d finished watching). Where were these supposed facts coming from?? My brain went into “Gotta catch ‘em all” mode with his weird facts; I had to get 100% completion. This wasn’t me being offended, or crusading for truth or anything; it was me laughing about what a bald-faced liar he was. What insane thing might he say next???
My amusement with the situation didn’t override my objections to attacking another YouTuber, though, and the other YouTubers I talked to about it can attest that I was pretty conflicted about what Harry was planning to do – and for that matter, conflicted about what I was doing, hate-watching all his videos. Sure, I was beyond amused by the buckwild things this guy would say, but I didn’t enjoy how much I enjoyed it, it felt trollish. He was just some YouTuber, a nobody, not a real writer or anything. Even though at this point all I was doing was laughing at him in private, I felt mean-spirited, like I was a bully punching down on him (never mind that he made more than me on Patreon and he had 300,000 subscribers, a lot more than some of my friends). On the other hand, this certainly wasn’t wasted time; I was learning so much, both from the stuff he had stolen and stuff I had researched just to debunk him. I can legitimately say that my understanding of homosexuality and culture was expanded and deepened by watching James Somerton’s videos, even though by this point I was aware that he had plagiarized much more than I’d realized. After a point you began to spot it very easily. You could Google random phrases you liked and they’d come up. If he ever quoted anybody, that was a good sign that that segment was plagiarized -- he was too lazy to find his own quotes, he just stole from people who had found quotes. As I recall, the initial accusation against him was that he’d plagiarized the documentary The Celluloid Closet, but he’d deleted that one, and then, while I was browsing his back catalog, he released a new version of it that promised to be longer and more detailed. I found a copy of the original book version of The Celluloid Closet online, and boy oh boy, in the twist of the fucking century, he had just read the first forty pages or so into the camera and passed it off as his own. It was garbage.
But I wasn’t really looking for plagiarism, which honestly I didn’t really care about, certainly not to the extent that Harry did. Harry’s personal bugbear was plagiarism; mine was misinformation. I quietly started asking people on Reddit how the Chinese box office worked and if there could be any fraud involved. I kept looking for more bullshit. Not all his videos turned up anything and I wasn’t expecting much when I clicked on a video about the Scarlet Witch’s children, which I assumed would be just a dull comic book recap. I had become able to pick out Somerton Originals very easily by that point, and oh, how I perked the fuck up when I saw him spin a very dubious story about Marvel writer Allan Heinberg doing a PR campaign against his bosses because they wouldn’t let him write gay characters. I eventually amassed a bulletproof case debunking it, a process that took me weeks. By this point, my amusement at his bullshit had started to turn back into genuine offense and anger. He was actively defaming people at this point, and it thrilled me to find proof that he was lying. I had found my Stephen Glass. And yet, I was still resistant to thinking about this guy as fair game. So then what was I going to do with all this information I was acquiring?
I don’t know why I did this much worrying. In Shattered Glass (which I revisited about two or three more times over the course of last year), Penenberg doesn’t worry about the ugliness of calling out a fellow reporter. He doesn’t fret with guilt over the harm he’ll do Glass’s career; it’s not like Glass is owed his job, especially after ethical lapses this severe. Penenberg isn’t even outraged at Glass’s crimes against The Truth™; he just found a juicy story and he was excited to share it. So why should I be worried about Somerton’s well-being? Besides, I didn’t have any control over Harry, who was going to be doing all the heavy lifting here anyway, not me. By that point, a lot of people knew about Harry’s impending video and behind-the-scenes chatter about Somerton was starting to really simmer. In April, Somerton started crying on a livestream that his Patreon income had suddenly plummeted to about half of his usual and he might have to quit making videos; my colleague Dan Olson publicly accused him of lying (and privately, so did I – I know how Patreon works, there’s no way this could be true). Over the course of the next year, I would find out that many YouTubers, including some I didn’t even know, had beef with him. If nothing else, Somerton was a way into being part of the YouTube community again; I had stopped feeling like a part of it a long time ago.
Around May or June, I decided that I would probably say something when Harry released his video, in a Twitter thread, or something. The Marvel thing was keeping me up at night, and I knew that Harry was probably not going to cover it, and I figured someone had to tell everyone it wasn't true. And honestly, I had to write something about it, for the simple reason that I was burnt out as hell. In 2022 I had made some of my finest work (if I may say so), and I felt like I’d peaked. I found it harder and harder to keep up the pace, and I felt hemmed in by talking about just music for as long as I have. In between episodes, most of my productive energy was spent researching Somerton, not music. I wanted to try something new. I’m making enough money now that I can follow my fancies where they take me, and I needed inspiration; if I had enthusiasm for something, I had to follow it. (This also led me to compile a playlist of songs that “Stop” on the word stop to listen to on a roadtrip later that summer. I got so engrossed in it that I drove for 14 hours one day, and when I got home I spent the next week compiling it into a half-hour long supercut. I had to follow my muse. I swear, I Really Wanted To Make A “Trainwreckord " But This Is Literally The Way The Wind Blew Me This Time.)
Eventually, I just decided to fight past my aversion to drama. I wanted to cover this if Harry wasn't going to. I asked HBomberguy if if he was going to cover Somerton’s… imaginative inventions (and, honestly, to see if he objected to me horning in on his idea – who’s the real plagiarist here, Todd?) He seemed okay with it (though part of me still fears that I ripped him off). I started speed-racing through Somerton’s episodes, trying to watch them all before Harry released his video in July (which is what I had been told was the target date – lol). By the end of July I realized that I had way more information than would fit in a Twitter thread, and I started considering releasing it as a podcast or something. Maybe even a video. In August, I sat down, wrote out everything I had found, recorded it. I spent two and editing it, and then I put it up privately on my YouTube. And then I saw Taylor Swift at Sofi Stadium that night. Then I went on summer vacation the next day. The video would sit there unseen for the next six months. I wasn’t sure I was going to publish it, but I figured that once Harry finished his video (which I believed would probably be within the next couple weeks or so – again, lol), I could see what he had made and decide if I wanted to show mine.
In the final video you see above, I say that I had it 95% done in August, but that’s not really true. As Harry continued to not put out his video for the next five months (look, I get it, the man’s a perfectionist), I continued to make rewrites, tweaks, edits. I asked a historian about pirates and rewrote that section based on what he told me, I consulted with actual lawyers to confirm some things, I made my line deliveries stronger. I still didn’t feel good about releasing it until I thought about it harder and wrote what I thought was a really strong conclusion. In hindsight, I could have made it less dry, or done it on camera, if I’d known I had plenty of time, but in truth, I wanted to be Mr. Just the Facts on this. It made me feel better about doing a callout, which I still had misgivings about – even though by that point, having watched all Somerton’s videos, I had really started to loathe the man.
James Somerton wasn’t just a thief and a liar; he was a fucking idiot. He’d make screamingly insulting arguments, like how the current gay leadership were a bunch of complacent pussies and that’s why homophobia and transphobia were on the rise – never mind that it was actually a backlash to the growing visibility and power of trans people, what an insulting thing to say to anyone brave enough to be trans right now. He was a truly terrible media analyst: He thought the emcee in Cabaret was a Nazi (he’s not), he thought Glass Onion was “camp” (it isn’t – and don’t fucking argue with me on this), he disliked Forrest Gump because of its “seeming refusal to acknowledge how much luck Forrest has for being in the right place in the right time” (what the fuck do you think the movie is about, you dipshit? The central metaphor is a feather floating in the wind. The most famous quote is that life is a box of chocolates because you never what you’re gonna get. You fucking shit-for-brains.) He had a whole thing (in more than one video) about how Janelle Monae came out of the closet because everyone was too stupid to know that “Pynk” was a queer anthem and Janelle felt compelled to clarify it for the dumb straights. Bullshit, there was tons of coverage about how gay it was, and Janelle had rumors about her sexuality as early as her first album – her coming-out article mentioned those rumors explicitly, and certainly didn’t mention anything about dense heteros not getting it. He argued that Dua Lipa had stolen credit for the disco revival from Janelle, as if the two of them sound anything alike or that disco hadn’t already been an ever-present undercurrent in music long before Janelle. I decided against including these in my video, since misinterpreting media is not a crime (although the Janelle thing was bad enough that I eventually re-added it). But it sure made me despise him.
Worst of all was that while I was fact-checking him, I’d find comments from people just straightforwardly repeating his fictions as facts. That did a lot to get me past my instinctual fear of drama. How dare you. How fucking dare you. You lied to your fans and now they’re repeating you. Look what you did, you little jerk. In October, I had a nagging feeling I’d missed something big in the whole Nazis-invented-abs claim so I did another search, and I found his bullshit claims being repeated on Deray McKesson’s fucking podcast just the previous week. I hit the roof. This dumbass was Inception-ing his stupid terrible ideas into the world, using the credibility he got by stealing the work of honest writers. I rewrote the entire intro of my video to include it. I also continued to hate-watch his videos as he released them and add new bullshit. Literally the day before it went live, my friend and resident vampire expert Elisa got back to me that she finally had time to watch that vampire video he'd just made, and I was just stunned at how much she found that I'd missed; I added one last entry at the last second. Those newer segments, the ones I wrote and recorded after August, sound much more agitated and angry than the ones I wrote before.
Still, I knew the consequences for him would probably be dire. His channel would die. He would effectively lose his job, not an easy thing to do to a person. Plus, there was a strong undercurrent of loneliness and sadness in his videos – sometimes outright text rather than subtext – and I couldn’t help but feel for him. I myself am also a weird loner isolated by this terrible career, so I sympathized. I started to get nervous again. I had mentioned my little side (?) project to everyone I knew on the East Coast while I was on vacation; many of them were surprised that I’d want to wade into drama, which isn’t like me.
D-day approached. Kat (Harry’s producer) told me the video was almost done. In the late morning hours of December 3, 2023, they sent me a link; I was only halfway through it when it went live. I saw why Harry had taken so long. I think that he too was worried about the optics of a beatdown by someone of his stature, so he had covered all his bases proving that Somerton was truly one of the lowest of the low, one of the scummiest and worst YouTubers who had ever existed on the platform. I am probably the second-foremost expert on James Somerton at this point, but there was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know about James preparing to throw his cowriter under the bus. The plagiarism was genuinely so much worse than I had realized (and I had realized quite a lot). I didn’t know that shit about his beef with the “Love, Simon” writer. I’d been worried about this guy’s well-being? I couldn’t wait for this motherfucker to be destroyed, and from what I could tell watching Harry’s video, he absolutely would be. This was a fucking homicide. Somerton’s career would be laid waste by the end of the day. He also mentioned a Discord server, which I actually had known about but not used as a resource for my video – I was curious about the fallout of Harry's video so I snuck in there to observe; but I also started digging around in the backlogs and I found the part where Nick admitted the fat Nazis claim was based on “raw observation.” I’ve never been angrier. I had read so much trying to be sure that I wasn’t wrong about it, trying to be sure that I wasn’t falsely accusing them, and this motherfucker was just straight up admitting that he had made it up. No, I’m sorry, he had “observed” it as if you can just look at changing beauty standards and decide that the Nazis must have done it. My fucking God, fuck you.
Harry and Kat had asked me to wait a couple days before I published my video; they were concerned it would look like I had set this up with him, or that we were teaming up to bully him. After 24 hours, I asked them again how long it would be before they were comfortable and I wasn’t stepping on his toes; Harry and Kat said you know what, go for it. I dropped the second nuke.
I had promised myself I wouldn’t gloat about this, that I would remain professional so as not to feel scummy. I did not keep that promise. This was the funniest goddamn thing that had ever happened. HBomb’s video had so thoroughly destroyed Somerton’s reputation overnight that there was now a massive market for James Somerton content, and the views for my video skyrocketed. This was the biggest video I had ever made in my life. It’s a shame I don’t do drama content, because it turns out I’m very good at it. My video isn’t as slick or as sharp as Harry’s but I did do more work than it might seem. I deliberately started with “Gay porn invented Skype” to start off with something fucking ridiculous, and I dropped his most offensive lie – that the SS was dominated by gay men – early, around twenty minutes in. It’s like a roller coaster; you start with the biggest drop early so that the momentum carries you through the rest of the ride (with more drops later, like a lie that the Nazis invented abs, to keep the thrills coming). It clearly worked; for the next three hours, my mentions were flooded with the same three jokes: "Todd with the steel chair!!," "A second video essay has hit the James Somerton," and "Stop Stop He's Already Dead!!" The most anit-callout friend I have texted me to tell me that I had done a good and necessary job, which put my mind at ease a lot. Obviously this wouldn't have happened if Harry hadn't opened this lane for me to walk through, but I had been convinced that my basic, barebones video would pale compare to Harry’s. I joked with a friend that it would get maybe ten views. As I write this, it just hit a million.
And that brings me to right now, typing this to you. What happens now? I guess I go back to working on the worst list. I’ve been able to be successful for as long as I have been on YouTube by staying in my lane – not for the audience’s sake, but for my own sake. Structure helps me focus. Will I ever do a video about this again? Almost certainly not. For one thing, I still can’t help but feel guilty; Somerton as a person is too pitiful to feel good about his downfall, and even though I regard Nick as a willful dolt and a pathetic Renfield of a human being, I worry that I was too harsh on him. I do believe James probably did more of the lying than Nick. I’ve gotten a lot of comments from people who were shocked that I did this, since I’m so averse to drama. (I am in fact so averse to drama that it bothers me that people know my business well enough to know that I am averse to drama.)
But also, here’s the thing: Where on Earth are you gonna find another James Somerton? He fell in my lap, Harry found him first, and there is almost no one who is going to either 1) plagiarize that fucking much or 2) present such insane whoppers as facts. Here’s the thing about Somerton; he’s wildly entertaining. What gets me is that there are probably dozens or hundreds more guys like him, who are systematic plagiarists but not so much so that it would be worth the effort of exposing them, or people who spread as much or (most likely) more misinformation but not misinformation so wildly, hilariously afield from reality – in other words, people you wouldn’t watch a four-hour video about.
I asked a movie critic friend to review Shattered Glass some 15 years ago (the review, like so many things, is also gone from the Internet). My friend liked it a lot, but he said that to him the conflict in the movie wasn’t between truth and lies, but between journalism and entertainment. He thought journalism hadn’t done enough philosophically to confront the fact that journalism basically is entertainment, that so many of the things that make good news are the same as the things that make good advertising. If I found another guy like Somerton who wasn’t as funny, would it even be worth it to me to expose him? My critic friend also said that Shattered Glass was good but couldn’t quite be great, because Stephen Glass’s victims were all abstract concepts, not real people. His crimes were against The Truth – Glass made up a fake story about misbehaving Young Republicans, and he didn’t smear anybody because they weren’t real. He didn’t hurt the reputation of any young Republicans, but he did hurt the reputation of Young Republicanism, just like when he made up a fake story about a teenage hacker holding a software company’s data for ransom, no one’s reputation got hurt, except the Internet’s reputation for safety. That’s just hard to turn into a movie that really hits. It’s hard to get people to care about abstract concepts like The Truth being damaged. I did my best. Now I can move on my life. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
So, here’s my question for anyone watching: What do you think “How the World Works” is about? Who is Bo Burnham sympathizing with in this sketch?
For those who haven’t watched it, Bo Burnham’s brilliant and occasionally insufferable comedy special INSIDE was immediately hailed as the defining artwork of the pandemic. Written as a way for Burnham to expend some kind of creativity during the lockdowns, Burnham presents a bunch of sketches and songs about loneliness, boredom and the phoniness and isolation of the Internet. Early on in it – for my money, the first really impressive moment of the special – he sings a bright upbeat children’s song about how society works by everyone working together – cooperation makes the world go round, just like all the animals in the forest make the ecosystem thrive, that’s the way the world works. Then he pulls out a sock puppet – literally just an unadorned gym sock – who bitterly tells him that his smiley-time understanding of society is all wrong. Society is nothing but misery and degradation, the strong exploiting the weak, the 1% of our capitalist hellscape consuming the poor like vampires, etc.
Bo reacts with surprise, a little disillusioned but moreso curious, and asks to know how he can help. Socko bitterly responds, “Read a book or something, I don’t know. Just don’t burden me with the responsibility of educating you. It’s incredibly exhausting.” The conversation devolves. The sock complains that Bo is trying to make this about himself and his own self-actualization rather than actually helping anyone. Bo, starting to get angry, threatens to remove the sock, sending him back to the horrifying unreal limbo Socko existed in before Bo put him on his hand. Socko cowers, and Bo, having established his dominance over the judgy annoying sock, sings happily, the status quo restored. Then Bo tears the screaming sock off his hand anyway.
I’m always curious how people interpret this sketch. Who’s the bad guy here? For me, the first thing that always strikes me is that the sock is a dick. Just, a giant dick. I can’t know for sure Bo’s intentions, I don’t think he’s trying to downplay the effects of hierarchical exploitation, but I still think Bo thinks of this sock as an unlikable asshole. “The FBI killed Martin Luther King,” says Socko, repeating a common but largely baseless conspiracy theory. A dig at the “pedophilic corporate elite” veers dangerously close to QAnon rhetoric. Bear in mind that Bo Burnham wrote this, and Bo Burnham does not exactly make bomb-throwing revolutionary comedy or anything. I’d doubt he thinks that “neoliberal fascists are destroying the left” or that private property is theft by definition. On some level he’s mocking people who think in those terms; Socko is the one who escalates the conversation into pointless, unnecessary hostility. I think Bo naturally sympathizes with his own character rather than the militant leftist sock, and on some level I think Bo the writer enjoys reminding Socko who’s boss.
On the other hand, self-criticism is a common theme in Bo Burnham’s comedy. Bo writes himself as childishly naïve, completely oblivious to even the possibility of injustice in the world, so he must think Socko has a point at least. Bo responds to Socko’s harsh comments by saying that he’s just trying to be a better person, and Socko yells at him again for making social issues about his own self-actualization; essentially this is Bo not only criticizing himself, but criticizing his own self-criticism (something he also does in the defining sketch of the special, his self-criticism becoming self-self-self-self-criticism until it becomes unbearable). When Bo (the character) has his privilege pushed upon, he happily uses it to inflict unjustifiable cruelties on Socko, again pushing the sympathy away from Bo. So what if Socko is snappish and overheated? He’s the one suffering in a way that Bo will never understand. So whose perspective is this sketch really from?
If you go to discussion forums like Reddit or more explicitly communist forums, you can see people dissecting this from every which way, which I think is fair: Yes it’s a mock-children’s song in a silly comedy, but how often do you see a mainstream entertainment like this saying “private property’s inherently theft”? From what I can tell, leftists mostly like it; they think Burnham is criticizing the sock’s tone but endorsing its ideas. I don’t think that’s wrong, but it’s not exactly my interpretation of it. Whenever I share my thoughts on its perspective, though, I get shouted down (much like Socko!). Well, I have my own privileges, like a Patreon full of people ready to kiss my ass, so I’m going to share my interpretation here. Here’s what I think, when you drill deep down on it, is the perspective of “How the World Wants”:
The perspective is, Bo Burnham is going insane talking to a fucking sock on his hand.
Inside is a special about being trapped indoors with no one to talk to except the Internet; everything about it has to be understood by that perspective, and by the fact that Bo Burnham’s first instinct has always been to tear himself apart. There are elements of social satire in there, yeah, but what I mostly see is a rich white guy reading too much overheated Internet rhetoric, getting annoyed by it and then grappling with his own reaction to it. I might be projecting; I relate to Bo Burnham a little much, as both a piano-playing content creator and a helpless Twitter addict. Let us not forget that the lockdowns were also when the George Floyd protests broke out, after three years of a Trump presidency. When he got elected, I wanted to do nothing but be politically engaged; by the midterms I was so miserable and exhausted that I could barely think about it. That’s why for me “How the World Works” is not, to me, about two opposing worldviews and the mechanics of privilege; it’s about being too online. This is basically all Burnham has (at least as portrayed in this special); he has FaceTime with his mom, and he has the Internet – “everything, all of the time,” as he puts it, but also simultaneously nothing. This is what I remember of the lockdowns: having no company except the voices on social media, formless blobs with no faces but loud mouths being unproductively hostile, and ultimately feeling like you’re just talking to yourself.
There are points in Inside where I am repulsed by Burnham’s self-indulgence. I don’t care about Bo fretting about his problematic jokes. I don’t need to see him crying. Every second he self-flagellates about self-flagellating I get embarrassed for him, and then the embarrassment turns inward on every second I’ve spent thinking about myself. Social media is often called an echo chamber, but the echo chamber on display in “How the World Works” is in one’s own brain. Did you know social media use is way down? Not just because all of the social media sites have gotten shittier, but also people just spend more time in Discord, in group chats, in online spaces where you are not encouraged to be as anti-social and phony as possible. It feels a billion times more productive, though there’s still that anti-social disconnect. In the wake of the war in Israel/Palestine, Twitter has yet again become a sewer of pointless arguing, horrific opinions and misinformation. I’ve curtailed my social media use as much as I can and I can still feel my brain rotting from seeing it; I can’t help but feel like I’m not doing my part if I disengage. There’s gotta be something more productive than this, right? I guess. Read a book or something, I don’t know.
