She's got rhythm.
She's got blues.
What she doesn't have is long legs and blonde hair.
Like a certain country pop crossover super-it girl.
That'd be Taylor Swift . . . if you already didn't know.
Nikki . . . god bless her . . . took to the Twitter sphere with hurt feelings and a thinly veiled barb at the statuesque Swift, which launched a whole Twitter buzz around who supports who and the unfairness of life when it comes to nominating rich/pretty/wealthy/semi-talented people for faux gold statues.
Swift was saccharine about the whole thing.
Makes me wonder how dark and dirty her private soul might be since her public persona is as cloying as a packet of Splenda.
It occured to me . . . as I write this . . . that if you were born in a year that started with a '1' there's a good chance that you have no idea what I'm talking about and are getting a little angry, but don't worry . I'll bring it home soon. There will even be a Mozart reference at some point . . . so hang in there.
The reason it caught my eye with enough attention to write about is several fold. One . . . I really miss MTV. The late eighties, early nineties, I'm not saying the music was all that good, but there were music videos on all day . . .
Lots of noise has been made about that from my generation. We miss when Music Television played MUSIC.
And I could take you through it from Thriller to Smells Like Teen Spirit.
1992 was the year MTV launched "Real World" . . . the first ever reality TV show. You''ll hear some notables say that "Survivor" was the first, or even give that moniker to "American Idol", but they're a whole decade off.
Never trust a notable.
Anyway, I also could go into the whole "Reality TV has killed civilization!" debate of which there are many fervent proponents. They will always quote Andy Warhol's bit about being famous for being famous.
And now I have too.
But I think what reality TV brought to us, wasn't necessarily the end of times. They didn't solidify the notion that trainwrecks make good TV. Watch 'I Love Lucy' or the 'Three Stooges'
Modern trainwrecks like the Kardashians and Honey-Boo-Boo are just spins on the same theme, just without heart.
And there in lays the difference.
I don't think bad/ridiculous behavior has ever not been part of the entertainment lexicon. What's new to me . . . and I think what leaves such a bad taste in our mouths is that reality TV has replaced slapstick with bratty indulgent behavior. Removed irony and replaced it unjustified bravado.
Petulance.
That's the word.
Petulance.
We usually reserve that word for toddlers who refuse to eat their vegetables.
But it's the right word for the era. These kids aren't fully realized entertainers . . . they're petulant ninnies.
I was trying to think of a historical parallel, like, was there a time when the Stones and the Beatles took to the airwaves and publically whined about the other?
Eric Clapton stole George Harrison's wife, but he never had anything but nice things to say about the man.
Bob Fosse made fun of Hal Prince in the movie 'All that Jazz', but in order to get the joke you had to be familiar with their NY rivalry, and he also poked fun at Cander and Ebb, Stephen Schwartz, Ben Vereen, himself, and he actually had his mistress Anne Reinking play, of all people, herself.
But there might be a thousand people who knew any of that.
Not 27,000,000 Twitter followers.
In the MTV era, there was that time when Jethro Tull beat out Metalica for "Best Metal Album"
The drummer for Metalica sniped a bit about that, but it wasn't at Jethro Tull so much as the Grammy Voters not knowing the difference between Metal and ProgRock.
In the mid-nineties there was a whole clash between East Coast and West Coast Hip-Hop which got extreme enough to leave a trail of bodies.
I can't even go into detail. I could tell you the difference between a Gibson Les Paul and a Gibson SG just by the sound of two notes, but hip-hop all sounds the same to me.
Not tonally . . . just under the category of uninteresting.
There's rivalry of every sort everywhere. But it's weird in subjective mediums.
Like who's the better impressionist? Monet or Van Gogh? And if we wanna go like super classical we could point to the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, but in all honesty, I don't know if that was even true or it was just used to manufacture a plot for Amadeus.
So I really couldn't point to a historical parallel (setting politics and sports and science aside) where petulance has become so prevalent.
And poor Taylor Swift seems to get the lion's share of inhospitable tantrums from her R&B cohorts.
If I was her, I'd stop putting my stuff in the running. She's won them all twice over already. The next one ain't gonna make a damn bit a of difference to album sales.
And if I was Nikki Menaj, well I might ask myself if her video Anaconda, a three and a half minute dick joke, is even worth watching, let alone worth praise.
But her bratty little petulance got her on the front page of BBC News . . . so maybe, she, unlike me,knows what she's doing.
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