TUCKED INTO THE CURL

One of the comments in yesterday's item struck me as particularly relevant to the death of arts criticism in general: "Mass marketing requires a reductive concept of the human. The aesthetic values of global capitalism by necessity esteem baseness."

Anyone with the slightest cognizance of pop culture knows this by now. But back in 2000, when Steve Dollar wrote a piece called "Cracker-rap losers" in Salon, it was not so commonly recognized. Go read the piece. It's a great (and entertaining) example of criticism that captures the reductive core of the culture. The writing is like a surfer tucked into a 50-foot curl. Here are a couple of sample paragraphs:

Sometimes it's hard to know whether Fred Durst really is the angriest dog in the world or just another high school loser getting the last laugh. His lyrics may be dumb, but the joker knows that commodified rage is the surest route to rock star success -- if not a spot on the permanent guest list at the Playboy Mansion. The frontman for Limp Bizkit has become one of pop's most public icons, instantly flagged by his backward, red Yankees baseball cap, his chinful of goat scruff and his ever-present arm candy (today Carmen Electra, tomorrow the world).

And:

Though Durst seems convinced that everyone hates him -- everyone but the fans, man, and the dudes at Napster -- he deserves some kind of due, if only for having the brains or moves to make the music industry work overtime to accommodate one more mediocre blowhard. And he has gotten it: Along with Eminem and Kid Rock, he's part of the wigga holy trinity, even though his straight-outta-the-sandbox raps make Slim Shady sound as eloquent as Shakespeare, and his streak of Puritan misogyny makes Rock's early-morning stoned pimpin' seem like a feminist conspiracy. Like his fellow Caucasian rappers, who each have made bank emulating hip-hop style, Durst belongs to a neo-cracker elite, contributing to a national trailer-park zeitgeist whose prime movers include Howard Stern, a bunch of those bone crushers in the World Wrestling Federation and Wisconsin truck driver Susan Hawk from "Survivor." There's probably no better time to proudly call yourself "a redneck fucker from Jacksonville."

Postscript: My staff of thousands tells me the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the AP story about the folding of the National Arts Journalism Program, which the staff thinks AP picked up from yesterday's item. This thrills the staffers because it makes them feel useful.

May 24, 2005 11:44 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
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This page contains a single entry by published on May 24, 2005 11:44 AM.

IS ARTS CRITICISM DEAD? PROGRAM DIES AT COLUMBIA was the previous entry in this blog.

SCHICKEL & CORLISS: RATING THE BEST FLICKS is the next entry in this blog.

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